May 2008 Site and Net Worth Review (+3.75%)

Net Worth Review

I have been so busy in May working on the launch of PF Buzz that I didn’t keep up with the market news at all. In the end, the S&P 500 index went up +1.07% from 1385.59 to 1400.38, and according to NetworthIQ, my net worth went up +0.97%. The really good news is my net investable assets (without the house, car, and mortgage) went up +3.75%, or from 23.47% to 24.34% of $1 million goal — overall, another excellent month.

Highlights

Well, we are no long a single income family since my wife returned to work at the beginning of May. This is evident in our stronger cash flow in May.
My alternative income from blogging stayed flat this month due to some extra expenses for upgraded hosting service which is now costing me $50 a month — yikes.
There’s not much change for my peer-to-peer investments:
- Prosper grew from $425.55 to $460.52
- Lending Club went down slightly from $492.64 to $482.27 due to withdrawal (I cannot make a new loan and there’s no interest for idle fund).
My house value, based on Zillow dropped by another -0.5%
The biggest boost this month was my $1,500 economic stimulus check

Blog Review

May was another strong month for Moolanomy. One of the major contributors this month was Karen at MSN Smart Spending with her post, Frugal or just downright cheap: Take the test that sent of 11,000 visitors!

As always, I owe the success of this blog to the support from my readers and fellow bloggers. As a way of saying thank you to everyone, I have created Personal Finance Buzz so that bloggers can promote their articles and readers can find the best articles and discover new blogs.

Performance

Last month, I didn’t meet my goal to grow these numbers by 10% each month, but I am definitely made up for it this month.

Subscribers grew +16% from 1,317 to 1,534
Search traffic grew +52% from 6,303 to 9,577
Visitors grew +69% from 26,080 to 44,071
Page views grew +58% from 43,384 to 68,754

Top 10 Referrers

I wish I could list everyone that sent visitors, but it would be an impossibly long list (922 entries). I do appreciate everyone’s help, regardless of how big or small. Here are the top 10 referrers this month:

MSN Smart Spending (11,258)*
Being Frugal (885)*
I’ve Paid For This Twice Already… (517)*
The Simple Dollar (471)*
Cash Money Life (317)
ParentDish (302)
The Dough Roller (247)*
Gather Little By Little (243)
Five Cent Nickel (222)
LifeHacker.com (206)

* Indicates the winner of 125×125 banner ad spot.

Again, thank you to my readers and fellow bloggers for your support.

10 Comments

Patrick
June 4, 2008, 6:32

Congrats on your continued success! Your site is doing great!
mymoneyadventure
June 4, 2008, 7:40

50 a month for webhosting? Just curious, because I run another site and it only costs 30 per 6 months plus 10 a year for the domain. Do you have a high bandwidth or high storage?
Pinyo
June 4, 2008, 7:44

@Patrick — I wish I could be half as successful as you in some areas.
@MyMoneyAdventure — It’s a virtual private server. 20GB storage and 1TB bandwidth. I doubt I’ll reach it. Just want it for greater reliability and speed.
Vered
June 4, 2008, 7:45

I love these monthly updates. It makes you so CREDIBLE.
David Carter
June 4, 2008, 12:22

Surprised that your blogging income didn’t really go up with all the new traffic you have been getting. I like the comment you made “I do appreciate everyone’s help, regardless of how big or small. Here are the top 10 referrers this month:”. That wouldn’t have anything to do with my complaint from yesterday would it? hehehe
PT
June 4, 2008, 14:51

glad the hard work paid off. keep it up Pinyo. congrats
AndyS
June 5, 2008, 11:06

Congrats Pinyo – Enjoy these reports and watching your blog grow. Great inspiration for us up and coming pf bloggers. One topic I had on a recent post was ” RSS readership correlation with blog revenue “, which looked at if a blogs revenue (from all sources) is proportional to the number of readers. Your correlation ratio is very high at $1.58 per reader, based on a suggested value of $0.14.
It would be great to get your thoughts on this as you were referenced as an example on one the comments.
Cheers,
Andy.
Pinyo
June 5, 2008, 11:31

@Vered – Just trying to keep myself on track. Never thought of credibility. Good point!
@David – I really do appreciate everyone help
As far as revenue going up with traffic, I had a lucky run in May so the income was disproportionately higher than average, and May was below average…oh well.
@PT – Thank you buddy.
@AndyS – Thank you. I checked out your post and left a comment. RSS is a poor indicator of blog revenue. 99% of monetization methods are independent of RSS. Traffic would be a better indicator, but it’s not 100% correlation either.
My Dollar Plan
June 6, 2008, 12:37

Congrats on the portfolio moving up. I fell off your top referrers list…. I’m going to have to work harder this month to send over my readers!
Mark @ TheLocoMono
June 6, 2008, 18:43

Dang, 11,000 visitors. That’s a terrific boost. Keep up the good work and I am sure you will get more of these boost in the future, Pinyo!