Big Guy on Experiment X: Update 1

It’s been eleven days since the Big Guys started pumping content into the Internets. As I promised in my first post, I want this site to serve as a learning tool for others, so I want to be as transparent as possible with how this is working as an income stream which will include any costs and earnings that we see. Some of you may have already noticed the Experiments X Stats page up top. This is where I will keep the running tally of everything. I’ll also be posting these update blogs explaining the break down of costs and earnings in a little more detail. I don’t know what the cadence of these posts will be yet, but I’ll aim for at least once a month unless something changes dramatically enough to talk about it.

Costs

I’ve heard on several podcasts that I listen to not to be afraid to invest in yourself. I’ve tried to have that mentality going into this, but the initial startup costs of Big Guy on Stuff were very minimal. First I’ll talk a little about hosting costs, then I’ll mention costs of the supplemental content generation, and finally we’ll look at the small amount of advertising I have done.

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I moved all of my personal domains to Namecheap  a few years ago after getting fed up with Godaddy. Namecheap has a very intuitive interface for managing your domains and hosting services, and it also has very reasonable prices. I purchased the bigguyonstuff.com domain name and a Word Press as a service bundle all for $8.88 for the first year. After the ICANN fee, it was $9.06. After the first year, it is $48.88/year if I decide to keep using it. I figured a year was long enough to see if I liked it and to know if this blogging thing is generating enough to warrant me investing more in it at that point.

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Let There Be Content

The other Big Guys and I have been hard at work, and enjoying, pumping out unique content for this site since day one. We all have day jobs though, and in case our pace isn’t sustainable, we started looking around for some other methods of generating content until we can pick up some other Big Guys (let me know if you’re interested by the way!) So far, I have been searching around through Fiverr for folks that offer blog writing.

If you haven’t heard of Fiverr, it is a platform that anyone can use to setup a gig and charge money for that gig, and Fiverr gets a small cut of any sales. It’s also a quick place for someone looking to get some work done that they either don’t have the time or the knowledge to complete themselves. I found one lady on there who helped us out with a post that will be posted in the future. This costed us a total of 26 dollars. I also currently have one more gig queued up with a guy who has a 29 day backlog. He is going to give us 5, 500 word articles for $25. Stay tuned to the Big Guys to find out how those turn out.

Google Adwords

I’m still trying to wrap my head around Google Adwords. We don’t have what I feel is enough content to justify spending tons on marketing, but I wanted to see what a five dollar a day budget would get for us. The concept is that you setup ad campaigns, set a daily budget, and then you let google figure out the best time to show your ads and to whom to show them based on keywords that you setup. These ads are showed as promoted ads in search results. As I mentioned, I setup a five dollar a day budget. I also setup a few individual keywords to have varying ranges per click — anywhere from $1 to $4.70.

At this point, we have seen about 856 impressions and 10 clicks. Impressions are when your ad actually shows up for someone. So I have a little over a one percent click through rate so far. Out of the ten clicks, from the best I can tell, none of them actually generated any ad or affiliate clicks or purchases. So far my total Adwords spend is sitting at $15.64.

Income

After my initial post where I discussed “making it rain”, this is the part where you want to hear that the blog has really taken off and is generating TONS of money, right? Well, not exactly. The featured picture may be a little closer to the one below.

More of a drizzle…

None of us expected this thing to blow up overnight, so that’s not a problem. I know I’ve had fun just going through the process so far. As far as income goes, we currently only have 1 source, Google Adsense. These are the little, hopefully very limited ads that you will see throughout the site, like this one:

Click Me

Just as I get charged for my Adwords, we make money off of Impressions (views) and clicks. Currently, with the mixture of about 4 clicks and 238 impressions, we have made about $6.79 in total. This isn’t outstanding, but I was actually pretty amazed with that for a first week with little content.

For those keeping track, below is what our Costs vs Income look like here at bigguyonstuff.com.

That’s it folks. It’s moving along and we actually have quite a few people viewing our content. We just need to get better at the money generating piece of it. If you check out the Experiment X Stats page, we have laid out a few more details that may be interesting to some.

As always, we would love any comments. You may know something that will help us out, or we may be able to help you out. Please reach out. I plan on writing more about how to actually start with building a website or a blog in the future. See you next time!

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