This is the sixth in a series of monthly income reports detailing the revenue and expenses from building my blogging business (originally at myDustExplosionResearch.com but now at DustSafetyScience.com).
In the first four months of 2017 (January, February, March and April), I had $131.92 in expenses.
It had been a full 12 months since I purchased the myDustExplosionResearch.com domain in June 2016. (See June to December 2016 income report here and note that I did not actually launch my blog until August 2016!) At 12 months in, the blog was getting 711 visitors and 1268 views per month, my LinkedIn connections grew to 617, and the combustible dust newsletter had 153 members.
In this post, I talk about how the blogging expenses are started to build up, my strategy for content creation, and some thoughts on initial monetization of my blog.
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May 2017 Summary
As I mentioned in the last income report, I was a bit surprised to find that my hosting provider added two charges to start my second year of blogging: one for domain registration and one for hosting the website. Furthermore, the hosting fee was quite a bit more expensive ($8.99 USD/month) than the introductory rate ($2.95 USD/month), resulting in a $107.88 USD charge in May.
Once this charge came in, I took a look back and realized that my blog expenses had started building up! With those most recent charges, I was now at $315.64 CAD in expenses since the start of 2017 and $362.64 CAD since starting the blog 12 months prior.
Seeing the expenses adding up reinforced the need for my blog to make money over the long term. I started brainstorming ways to make that happen (see below) and I also got more serious about creating interesting and useful content to get people back to my website.
Content Creation in Mid 2017
As I mentioned in January, a big push on generating content when I started my blog (see How to Write 40 Academic Blog Posts in 56 Days) left me pretty burnt out on writing at the start of 2017. Besides my combustible dust expert round-up post in March, I had only published three posts this year (yikes)!
However, I was seeing a pretty good conversion between the number of people coming to my website and joining my newsletter (4-6%, with many coming through my industry report lead magnet). I was also seeing success in sharing my content on LinkedIn and having people come back to the website, but I was running out of things to share!
In May, I started focusing on creating more valuable material. This included “Review Posts”, “How-To Posts”, and “Current News Posts” (See Lesson #5 on Blog Content Strategies in the GradBlogger Getting Started Mini-Course for more on these types of posts!):
- Book Review: Principles of Combustion, by Kenneth K. Kuo
- Case Study: US Ink Explosion – Illustrating the Potential Dangers of Hybrid Mixtures
- Combustible Dust Equivalence Ratio: How to Calculate from Stoichiometry?
- 6 Years in Review: The US Chemical Safety Board
These articles were all between 1300 and 2500 words. They were designed to rank for specific keywords: Combustion, US Ink Explosion, Combustible Dust, and Chemical Safety Board. More importantly at the time, they had “catchy” titles, and the substance underneath, to encourage sharing on LinkedIn and to drive people back to my blog.
My newsletter increased from 119 to 153 people in May from 711 visitors to the website (4.8%).
