March 2009 earnings, my new site, and my new venture

My earnings this month weren’t bad. But for once, I think I’m actually onto something good. I started a new site a couple of months ago – let’s call it Project Grassfed – at the urging of a friend (whose instincts turned out to be wicked smart). The site started out okay, then my friend suggested submitting it to a sort of “cool site of the day” site, and then it suddenly wound up on the front page of Digg. This did not immediately insure that I would get a million visitors a month or anything, but I did have well over 300,000 the first month, and a Diggless March still ended with a very healthy number of over 75,000. Even better, it looks like if I just keep doing what I’m doing, that number will stay steady or improve. And that’s not a bad number.

I had been monetizing it with AdSense, but midway through the month I switched to ValueClick. I earned about $150 on the site altogether. That’s not much for 75,000 visitors and nearly 120,000 pageviews, is it? I think I’ll actually do a little better than that with ValueClick for the entire month. And it’s a new site, so it has pagerank of zero and isn’t scoring too highly with Alexa yet. Hopefully the earnings will improve. But I would think an established site with that kind of traffic should make more than $150/month. Or am I wrong?

This site isn’t hard to keep up with, thank goodness. No constant posting, and a lot of what I do with it, I’m actually enjoying. But it’s been a bit of a distraction from my new business venture. Then again, so has offline life. I’ve been deeply overwhelmed with stuff to do lately. And at least the new site is rewarding. This week, I’m slowly getting back into writing up the business plan for my new venture. Once that’s written, I’ll have a better idea what comes next.

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