First Time Blogger Year 1: The Cost, The Time, The Takeaways

BLUF: I learned a tremendous amount about blogging, internet businesses, social media and myself in my first year with ManagingFI. It reinforced the idea that there is no better way to learn than to just start and do it. The lessons you learn along the way are by far the most valuable.

Why Did I Start A Blog?

Around this time last year (November 2020, to be exact) I finally decided to take some action and give this blogging thing a try. I had been interested in personal finance and investing for many years but had never blogged. Ever. It was also hard to ignore influential FI sites like Mr. Money Mustache that exploded making big money.

Why try a blog? Honestly, I was interested in building skills around online businesses where you could make money and be location independent. That’s a long term goal for Mrs. MFI and I since we love travel. I stumbled across websites like Empire Flippers where you can buy cash flowing web businesses and that was intriguing. But how on earth can I expect to run an online business successfully when I have no experience building or managing websites or online businesses?

Clearly, I needed to build skills and I’m a big fan of finding low cost and low risk ways to do that. Blogging seemed like a logical place to start.

My Experience When Starting

As mentioned in my about me page, I hadn’t done anything related to websites since the early internet days and I did the really basic stuff like make a personal web page. I’m a computer engineer, yes, so I know my way around a computer and have programming experience in my past.

However, there’s a big difference between that and starting up a website and learning a completely new space like blogging. I’m trying to drive home the fact that I was very much a rookie when I started. I didn’t know anything about wordpress. I had never purchased a domain.

I should probably also mention that I never wrote anything creatively! Before I started blogging I would have told you that I’m “not really a creative person”. I would have said I was a left brain person.

I thought of myself as a fairly good communicator from my professional experience presenting and e-mailing a lot. I’ve done some mentoring and teaching informally along the way but I had never written an article on a topic.

My First Year In Review

Lets dive into the details of what happened in that first year. How much did it cost, how much money did I make, what kind of traffic did I have and what did I learn from the experience.

What Did It Cost?

This is highly variable depending on who you host with, the quality of service and the wide range of services and plugins that people will try to sell you. You can spend a LOT of money if you really want to.

Domain Registration & Hosting – $169.83

Like many first time bloggers I went with a low cost hosting option and used BlueHost. You get price breaks for multi-year hosting so some of these costs are for 3 years and some are for 1 year.

Some added details:

• Basic Web Hosting – BlueHost providing you server space on a shared server and e-mail. This is very basic hosting and their lowest tier of server speed.
• Domain Name Registration – Cost of registering ManagingFI.com for 1 year.
• Codeguard basic – a backup option for restoring your site should it get hacked or corrupted.
• Domain privacy – This lets you hide your personal information from a general WhoIs domain lookup.

Blog Logo – Fivrrr – $40.75

At some point, you need a logo. Not the most critical thing in the world but I decided to get one. Fivrrr is an amazing resource to connect you with independent contractors that offer various services.

I had no concept of what I wanted. The graphic designer looked at my site and I told him a little about the content and in a few days I had a whole about 10 different options. A steal for $40 in my book and far better than I could have ever done.

USPS PO Box – $134

Why does one need a PO Box for a blog? Well, only if you want to build a mailing list and don’t want to put your home address. You’re required to have an address on your e-mails and since I use a low cost MailChimp service they don’t provide an address. Some higher end mail list services will provide an address for you but I didn’t want to pay for that.

Canva Subscription – $145.95

I am not a graphic designer. I’m an engineer with no background in Illustrator and can only do the very basics in a program like photoshop. Honestly, I don’t have the motivation to learn either.

However, I wanted to be able to make nice looking diagrams, charts and cover photos. Canva really has a great selection of photos for me to pull from and it makes it super easy to create professional looking graphics. It’s money well spent in my opinion.

I tried the monthly subscription at first to make sure that I was going to use it regularly and then purchased the $120 annual subscription.

If you like what you see and want to support the blog, consider using my referral link to check out Canva.

FaceBook Ads – $117.38

Somewhere along the way I took a small course on FaceBook ads and started to play around with them to see how effective they were at driving traffic to my blog. I didn’t put a ton of energy or money into it but I did experiment with them to see how well they worked to drive views, clicks and engagement.

The thing is, when your website doesn’t have a product to sell or generate revenue from traffic, there’s really no point in paying for ads. In the top ad below ($50 spent) it linked to my article on making $265/year buying groceries. If anyone signed up for that card with my affiliate link I’d get $75 in rewards (per card open).

I figured, I just need one signup to cover the cost! I went big with $50 in ads. 409 link clicks and 0 signups later it just became another payment towards my online education.

Podcast Mic – $57.23

You’re probably wondering why I’m listing a podcast mic with my blog costs when I don’t have a podcast. Well you see, there’s a story to tell here.

I connected with another content creator along my journey during a creator webinar conference and they were interested to interview me on their podcast and talk about my happiness dividends article. Me, trying to be professional, decided to buy something better than a webcam mic to use for the event.

Long story short, I got ghosted. That creator pushed the interview date due to getting Covid and then they went completely radio silent to my repeated messages. It really disappointed me because I was excited to both be on a podcast and talk about one of my favorite articles. On the plus side, that creator did introduce me to Canva which I’ve been happily using ever since.

Total Cost: $665.14

If I really wanted to go bare bones I could do without the PO box, ads and Canva subscription and do the first year for about $360. Going forward I don’t plan to do ads so annual cost should be about $350/yr on average unless I decide to upgrade my hosting service or pay for plugins.

How Much Money Did It Make?

This is a short section, $0! Well, technically I earned a Marcus referral bonus of an extra 0.2% APY for 3 months. On the $7k that I had in there at the time that was $3.50! Guess I shouldn’t quit my day job just yet.

To be fair though, a blog doesn’t just magically make money. You need to put effort into driving traffic to it and then add advertising, get sponsored, get affiliate income or sell a product. I didn’t pursue any of these in year 1 so I can’t expect to make income.

How Much Time Do I Spend?

It’s basically a part time job to run a blog if you put the effort into it. Many of my articles require research, running calculations, making graphics and creating examples.

On average I say it’s 6-8 Hours on a typical article. 10-12+ Hours on really detailed articles with lots of visuals, calculations, references or research.

For example, this article on downsizing was a 6-8 hour one since it was more storytelling about our experiences and what has happened.

While this article on HSA’s was a LOT of research in the IRS documentation to ensure that I had my information right. That was definitely a 12+ hour article.

Outside of this is the time to do any kind of website changes or fixes. For example, when WordPress last updated it broke my pop-up e-mail list signup. On average I spend 5-10 hours per week writing content and doing work on the website to publish content every 2 weeks. I created 30 articles in my first year.

Blog Traffic

The big question – how much traffic did the site get? About 22,000 page views and 16,000 visitors in the first year. I honestly have no idea if that’s “good” or not. About 60 views a day on average.

As you can see though, it’s very inconsistent. Early on the blog had very few visitors. During my best month of August it had over 4,000 views or 132 a day on average. During that month I happened to post some articles that really resonated and I was picked up by some FI e-mail newsletters.

Where does the traffic come from? For the most part, a lot of hustling and sharing on Facebook. I post my content in about 6 different FI / personal finance groups that allow it. I also reference my articles when helping answer other peoples questions.

As you can see, FB dominates my referrers. Search engines are slowly starting to pick up my content and funnel visitors but that takes a long time. It took a solid 7 months before I hit 50 search engine referrals in a MONTH. I’m sure there is more I could be doing for search engine optimization (SEO) but that hasn’t been a big focus.

Monevator, Apex Money and the Montley Fool picked up articles in their newsletters causing some small traffic spikes.

E-mail Lists

They say that an e-mail list is important because no matter what you own it and have that as an audience. I use MailChimp combined with a pop-up form to get signups. It took 4 months to get my first subscriber and since then 1-2 a week on average.

What Did I Learn?

1. “If you build it, they will come”…is bullshit.

The internet is a big place with a lot of content. You don’t just make content and hope that people will find it. You have to make good content that people find useful and want to read first and foremost. The won’t just magically find it on their own. Search engines take a long time to find your content. You need to get the content in front of people.

FB FI groups has been the main method is me spending a LOT of time answering peoples questions and supplementing my written answers with an article. It takes a long time and really good content before other people start sharing your content for you. Even a year in this doesn’t happen very often for me.

2. Perfect is the enemy of done.

You can ALWAYS spend more time proof reading, polishing, adding more details or adding another example. I really struggled early on with worrying about putting content out there with typo’s and other mistakes. It actually used to stress me out and then I realized nobody really cares. Get it 80-90% and hit publish. You aren’t writing for the NY Times. It’s good enough.

3. Don’t report on pending legislation

This article on the backdoor Roth possibly going away has been a major source of stress. I really believe in putting out accurate, well researched content. Well, in a rush to be “early” to report something I learned that I didn’t know as much as I thought about the US legislative process.

I had to keep adding updates since it’s still an ongoing situation and I was stressed because I didn’t want to mislead people. I updated various parts of the article as things developed but needless to say I’ll never be doing that one again.

3. Keep Going. When One Door Closes, Another One Will Open

Remember how I got ghosted on that podcast? Well, I kept creating and opportunities continue to present themselves. I’ll be talking about that same happiness dividends article next month at this live FI event in Irelend in January. Just note that it is starting at 5PM GMT (Ireland time).

Click here if you’d like to buy a ticket for either the live event or the replay.

4. I’m more creative than I thought.

You have no idea if you’re actually creative or not unless you put real effort into actually trying to create something. There are many different mediums out there so don’t have that self limiting belief.

5. Blogging is not get rich quick. It takes a long time to build momentum so make sure you love what you’re writing about.

I didn’t have this illusion of get rich quick. However, it’s a lot of time invested and some people may rip your content apart. Just like a diet or physical training you need to be consistent and “put in the reps”. It’s going to take a long time to make money and you need to focus on actually monetizing.

6. You can get addicted to website views just like social media.

This was a big surprise but it makes sense in hindsight. The same dopamine inducing behaviors that happen on social media carry forward to content creation. It’s exciting when something you wrote takes off and goes viral. It’s hard to not want to sit there and look at the views.

It’s also hard to not let that views data skew what you write about. This article on FU money really resonated and had my most views ever in any one day. It’s easy to think about why people liked that article and consider writing more things that might cause a similar response. That’s a slippery slope to me as the blog could quickly become another job that you don’t enjoy if you’re writing it for the approval of others.

In Conclusion

Quite a year it was. It reinforced that there’s a lot to learn by doing so keep doing new and challenging things. I’ll keep writing but I’ll also keep experimenting with different ideas.

If you are new to blogging or interested in starting and have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out at contact@managingFI.com. I’d be happy to help where I can.

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