Neville's Financial Blog

My streak of not monetizing this blog has ended. Interest.com (Owned by BankRate, Inc.) is now the official sponsor of NevBlog. This means I get paid to do what I already do….update this website.

Of course in return they want something: Advertisements. This works out perfectly because I hate managing advertisements, and they love it.

They pay is pretty good, but I could easily make more by handling my own advertisements (Doing the whole Adsense, text link and affiliate stuff)….however, BankRate and Interest.com bring something else to the table: Giving me exposure.

NevBlog is part personal journal, part fun, part SEO tool and mainly a NETWORKING TOOL. Believe it or not I’ve met some of the most influential people in my life through this blog. Sounds stupid, but very true.

It’s rather obvious there are now ads all over the place, including two visible above the fold:

I get paid $????.?? per month for allowing these advertisements to be placed on my site, plus I get the additional exposure. Since I’ve already met some very influential people solely through this site, I figured additional exposure couldn’t hurt. The money brought in through this arrangement will be divided up into different accounts just like any other income I make.

Thanks to Interest.com and BankRate.com for the arrangement!

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Current Asset Update (11-01-2006)

General Account – $ 4,631
Spending Account – $ 293
Spending Account 2 – $ 363
Investment Account – $ 2,741
Bill Account – $ 1,039
Permanent Savings – $ 4,770
Charity Account – $ 318
Stock Portfolio Value – $ 11,107
Roth IRA – $ 6,912
Emigrant Direct – $ 5,020
Total Liquid Assets – $ 37,194

Credit Card Balance – $ 0
Business Holding – $ 13,651
Total On Hand – $ 50,845

Perusing websites, I see ads all over the place. They usually don’t bother me if done tastefully, and provide the site owner with a source of income. Nothing wrong with that.

If free television stations didn’t interrupt their programming with advertisements, they wouldn’t be around. So it’s a bit of a trade off.

Taking a look at some personal finance websites, I noticed everyone has all sorts of cash-generating items on their site, which are relatively un-intrusive. I’m just curious of the average total amount everyone makes from their sites. For example, I was looking at Consumersim Commentary and took a good look around his site to see where cash comes from.

Just looking above the fold (meaning not having to scroll down), I noticed SIX different pieces of cash-generating website real estate.

At the very bottom of the page, I noticed FOUR different cash generating avenues including lots of text links for PageRank purposes. Based on the requests I turn down everyday for these, I’m guessing these go for between $50 and $100 a month.

I won’t even mention if there’s anything in the middle, as there is unlimited potential for that, especially on long blog pages.

Based on the Adsense Experiment I did a little while back, I could probably make about $500/month from a simple banner above the fold on the left side of the page. Not bad.

NevBlog originated late one night whilst working at the easiest job in the world as a way to track financial progress…not as a tool to make money. Now I am more open to the idea of it bringing in money….sort of.

I’m not going to slap a bunch of advertisements up immediately, but I’m stroking my chin thinking about it. A far cry from my previous anti-Adsense stance!

The hard drive crashed on my tablet pc two days ago, stuff happens.

Bought a new hard drive from ebay which after shipping cost me about $100. Now I need to find a proprietary Toshiba external CD drive so I can load the operating system to the new drive. Till then, I am using the University of Texas computers for everything….like back in the day! It reminds me of high school how I started House Of Rave from the school computers because my home computer was too slow.

I haven’t backed up the computer for about a month, so I’ve lost all my work/pictures since then……grrr…..but I’ll live.

LESSON TO LEARN: Backup more often.

On a fun scale of one to ten, this rates about a two. Tinkering with hard drives and electronics is always fun, but not as much when you just lost all your work.

Since almost everything I do is internet based, I thought if my laptop crashed it would be the same as my office burning down….but it really hasn’t been. I can still use the UT computers which have all the necessary software I need (Thanks R) and thankfully I do monthly backups, which I should increase to bi-monthly.

The main thing I miss is my email on Outlook. I’m currently back to using webmail to check all my email accounts.

Luckily, the total cost of this hard drive failure after I get everything fully repaired should be under $150.

-Nev

It’s been a full month since the last entry, and I feel like I should have tracked it better. I kind of wish this blog was private so I could actually write everything that goes on, but it’s still nice to share.

Anyhow, I was in California for 2 1/2 weeks for business/fun, and the trip was very successful. I spent a total of $2,100 which was slightly over budget, and rings in an average of $123/day. I still feel that’s a lot, because I didn’t pay a cent the entire trip for housing (Thanks to awesome friends).

During the trip I spent over $600 on rental cars. I had to make sure I got full insurance coverage on all the cars since I recently got in a wreck, plus I’m under 25, generally meaning an extra $25 per day….plus you have to fill up your own gas.

My rental car for 21 days after the wreck was taken care of by the insurance company, but I had to pay $315 for the extra insurance ($15/day). I made sure to take this, because if I wrecked the rental WITHOUT insurance, I’d be doubly screwed.

Soon as I got back to Austin, I realized my lease on my summer apartment had expired! I got back to Austin at 1:00am on a Sunday night, and the apartment management had threatened to move my stuff out of the apartment by THAT NIGHT. Obviously I haggled here and there and eventually got them to slightly extend my stay for free, but I needed an apartment FAST.

Craigslist came to the rescue. I now have a larger room in a nearby apartment for only $270/month…and I paid out the entire lease up front, so all the way until December I don’t have to pay a monthly rent. Total was $945 till December 1st, 2006.

Unfortunately I had to move IMMEDIATELY when I got back to Austin, but the Camry was gone, so fortunately my parents gave me their spare van to use for the move. Also with a temporary car to use, I don’t have to go car shopping immediately. Plus I also have my scooter and bicycle to use….and legs….and the buses.

The van actually came in handy because I needed to move quick in one trip, I don’t think the Camry would have fit all my stuff (even though I have very little). It’s not the most fun thing to drive, but it does get me around having to buy a new car immediately! Here’s my new pickup line:

On February 1st 2006 I for the first time put Google Adsense on NevBlog. I begrudgingly did this to fund my charity account, but the ads annoy me more than anything, so I will take them down for a little while.

Selling Pixels made me over $2,000 with just a little work and was more fun/unique than AdSense. However, I do see why people use Adsense. Here are the revenues from my first few days using AdSense:

After the 5th day, revenues were usually pretty low, somewhere in the $1 – $2 range or lower….sporadically jumping to over $10 on some days. The big money days were when I actually wrote about the ads, naturally drawing more attention to them.

Something really going against the ads is they were “below the fold” which means people must first scroll down to see them. I like extremely simple usability, and putting an ad where a navigation menu should go is a no-no to me.

If utilized correctly, people can actually make a decent amount of extra money with AdSense. This would mean positioning the ads correctly and writing about high pay-per-click topics, neither of which I did (or plan to). However, the ads tend to clutter pages and skew what content topics are written about.

This was a nice little experiment with Google Adsense for me. I learned something and came away with a total of $138 for the 28 days of February…..roughly $5/day.

An article written by Elizabeth Harris in today’s New York Times mentions me and some other financial bloggers: Psst: Want to Know My Net Worth?

It even has a picture of my………nose, hand and tablet PC.

The main interview was done by Elizabeth Harris about a month ago, and there was a photo shoot done two weeks ago.

Here is a scanned version of the article:

Feel free to copy, steal and use the image.

• Bottled Water Experiment
• Bottled Water Experiment Part Deux
• Tablet PC Writing
• Lamborghini Gallardo
• Selling Class Notes
• Crashing Corporate Governance Conference
• Herb Kelleher
• Meeting Sir Elton John and Andy Roddick
• Meeting Dave Liniger – Founder RE/MAX
• Katrina Cards

• …been able to keep myself fully occupied with business ventures
• …met a powerful current business partner
• …have had at least 7 in-person meetings with strangers who found my site
• …become the #1 and #2 search result for “Starbucks Liquor“
• …become the #1 search result for “Financial Blog” (Shameless plug)
• …have been mentioned in: Yahoo Finance, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Business Week
• …had several business articles published in a newspaper
• Much, Much More

Thank you Blog. Sorry I can’t tell you everything right now, all my current ventures are confidential for the time being.

Sincerely,

-Nev

According to Yahoo Finance, these are the Top Ten Money Blogs Everyone Should Read.

Hmm..Yahoo Finance thinks everyone should read us. Looks like we’ve tipped an iceburg with the Personal Finance Blog!

I’m a big fan of blogs which I can take some information away from, but one thing I’ve noticed is the very annoying presence of Google Adwords. They look disgusting, clutter the page and make it known the author wants some money for their blog.

That may be a harsh review, but I’d like to ask anyone who uses Adwords: How much money do you make off them per month? Also, how many clicks equate to what amount of money? Leave comments please, I am very curious.

Unless they generate hundreds of dollars per month, I refuse to put them on my site. I did a bit of research, and could find no reports of personal finance bloggers reporting their profits from Adwords.

I have a friend who runs a popular skiing website which makes a pretty comfortable living off Adwords, but his site gets a massive amount of traffic and draws people actively looking to make reservations, find new ski lodges etc.

Help me solve this question! Anyone with Adwords on their blog, let me know what you net!

The portfolio was up $105 today for a total of $9,234, bolstered mainly by some action in Dynegy (DYN). Their quarterly earnings will be coming soon, hopefully the reaction will be positive this time around!

I had another article published today in the Daily Texan newspaper, this time on young entrepreneurs. The article focuses on two entrepeneurial students at UT, the organization Texas Entrepreneurs, an entrepreneurial band and the founded of Alamo Drafthouse.