In an attempt to keep me motivated, honest, and accountable, I will be writing up a break down of each month. This will keep me going and make me sit down and actually see what’s working and what’s not.
I am also going to list out my goals for the short and long term. In my experience, the universe provides an answer to the questions you ask, but you have to put them out there.
If you are interested in building a website yourself and want to help support my efforts here, I will be posting affiliate links for website building and support in this section. It’s a small, effortless way to help us out while doing something you were planning on doing anyway. WIN/WIN!
Review of Expenses
- Domain Name Purchase: $27.88. I purchased Dadfeedsthefam.com for 2 years of ownership. Namecheap some of the lowest rates I have found for purchasing a domain name and their rates do not skyrocket after you own it.
- Hosting Purchase: $155. I cannot remember if I had to purchase more hosting for this new website or not. Either way, my costs for hosting this website was $155. I recommend Bluehost for hosting your website. Their simple platform and 24/7 customer service have already been amazingly useful for me. Check it out here! They also have domain names for sale, so if you want a one-stop experience I suggest it.
- Daily Dish Purchase: $99.95. This is the one time purchase of the theme framework for the look and feel of the website. This purchase saved hours and hours of website building and greatly streamlined my efforts into generating edible content.
Total Costs: Starting this website from scratch cost $282.83. This is entirely an investment in myself and a gamble in my ability to stick with this for the long haul. 🙂
Income
In August DadfeedstheFam.com produced no income for itself. So far it was not an asset but a liability, as most investments are in the starting stages. Many income streams are not available for new websites until they have a reasonable amount of content for users to enjoy. As I keep writing, more income streams should become available. The income streams I would like to implement soon are as follows:
- Website tools: Bluehost was the first company to approve DadfeedstheFam.com as an affiliate for their hosting tools. I hope to also become an affiliate for Namecheap and StudioPress for their domain name and Theme products, but I have not reached their quota for website quality as of August.
- Amazon affiliate: Amazon has a trial period for their affiliate program, which I am hesitant to try for right now until I get a good amount of content to support some reliable site traffic. Hopefully, in a few months, I can try it out. For now, all of my links to products through amazon direct through my smile.amazon, which should support the St. Louis Zoo
- Google AdSense: Like some of the website tools, google has a bar for website quality which they like to see before they will approve their ads for a website. I hope to get to that level of quality sometime this year. I promise to minimize the ads to keep the quality of the website experience intact.
Progress
It took a couple of weeks to get everything up and running and I am still figuring out where all the buttons are. I have published 3 recipes and a couple of blurbs like this one. The reception has been amazing from friends and family and the Choose FI Recipe group. Thanks for all your support. Please feel free to reach out with thoughts, ideas, or recommendations.
As of writing there have been 344 visitors to the website, which is amazing. I hope the trend keeps going up from there.
Goals
Short term goals:
- Traffic: 100 visitors a day, which would be 3000 per month. We are 12% to my goal on this. I need a nice graphic for this next month.
- Any income: So far income is zero. This box gets checked when at least $0.01 is made from the website.
- Affiliate approval: I have Bluehost as my first affiliate link, my goal is 1 more in September.
- Publishing: I want to publish 2X a week, hopefully on Monday and Friday. In August I was able to achieve this once everything was set up.
Long Term goals: I will work on these for next time.
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