Around Christmas of 2020, I decided to start my own personal finance blog Finance Throttle. My objective with this blog was to help people accelerate their net worth and learn more about personal finance along the way. Within a week, I created the blog and website through a Bluehost referral link and published the site on December 31st, 2020 for a January 1st, 2021 reveal. I started off publishing a new blog post EVERY DAY. This wasn’t easy since I had a full time job and a family. After a few weeks, I felt that the quality of my posts were suffering from the daily post schedule. I decided to change up my blog post schedule to three times a week. I posted on Monday’s, Wednesdays, and Friday’s. Half way through March of 2021, I decided to reduce my weekly posts again with a new post every Monday and Thursday.
The Long Road Ahead
Going into this, I knew that it could take years of consistent blog posts to start making an income. Some of the most popular blogs in the personal finance space started to make $1000 per month after 7 years while others reached $10,000 per month in the same amount of time. It takes determination to keep a blog going with no income. I estimate that it will take at least one more year before I start earning enough to pay for the hosting fees. As Finance Throttle grows, I hope to offer more services and bring more contributors/authors to the site.
Advertising and Page Views
Pinterest and Facebook are my main sources of traffic and advertising. I consistently post on certain days of the week because Pinterest’s algorithm prefers a consistent posting schedule. After 3 months, my Pinterest monthly views reached 4500 per month. For comparison sake, I reached 200 views in my first month. That is a 2,250% increase from Month 1 to Month 3. As for my blog traffic, I use both Monster Insights and Google Analytics. Both of these companies give me different results so I am not sure which one is more accurate.
Google Analytics tells me that most of my users live in the United States followed by Canada. To date, my blog has had visits from over 20 countries. More than 88% of my readers view my site through their cell phone and more than 85% of my readers are referred to my blog from Pinterest. Due to some of the photos and tables I use, my site is best viewed through the desktop. I will need to continue working on improving the mobile experience since most of my readers use their phones to visit my blog.
The advertising you see on my site comes from Google Adsense set to the minimum level of ads. Even though the ad frequency is set to its lowest setting, I feel that my site has too many ads. When I reach an average of 10,000 page views per month, I will qualify for a better ad agency. In the last 30 days of blogging, I made $1.80 with Google Adsense.
My Blog
Including this post, I have published a total of 58 blog posts in 3 months. My post popular blog post by far is Top 10 DoorDash Driver Hacks. My second most popular post was on Wallstreetbets and GameStop Explained. As you will see throughout my posts, my wealth building strategy revolves around paying off debt with velocity banking and long term investing in retirement and real estate. Visit my Recommendations Page to learn about some of my favorite Fin-tech apps and companies.
One of the things I am most excited about is Full Throttle. This is net worth growth strategy that I developed mixing elements from F.I.R.E. Financial Independence Retire Early and Velocity Banking. Soon, I will be creating a blog post around the Full Throttle strategy and I will be updating my progress and experience using the strategy in a new page coming soon.
If you are new to the blog, you probably did not notice that I just updated my WordPress blog theme. This new theme changed the look of my site and allowed me to add more features for a better reader experience. My favorite new feature is the estimated read time for each post. I post short and to-the-point content, making it easy to read multiple posts in under 10 minutes. If you only have 2 or 3 minutes of free time, you can select posts that are 2 to 3 minutes long. I also intend to change up the web site’s navigation menus based on the most popular blog categories.
If anything new comes up, I will be sure to blog about it. Stay Tuned and please consider subscribing to my monthly newsletter. The next 40 subscribers will get a free copy of a loan amortization table in Excel or Google Sheets.
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