The idea of a financial blog, which should revolve around long-term retirement planning and deal with more speculative forms of investment, had been floating around in our heads for quite some time . In January, we finally registered the necessary business and gradually implemented the ideas. The biggest obstacle was the bureaucratic effort, because the authorities sometimes needed several weeks for their feedback and sometimes even made us wait months – no problem, after all we were in the middle of the peak phase of the Corona pandemic at that time. The first basic articles then went online at the end of July, and we celebrated the official blog launch on August 15, 2021 with a multi-part series of articles on the German pension system.
Positive development of reader numbers
Since then, reader numbers have risen steadily. We are very proud of the first blog month! Over the entire month of August, TradingForFuture.de was visited over 5,500 times, of which about 3,600 were different visitors. They provided not quite 185,000 hits and about 40,124 page views, resulting in a total traffic of 4.71 GB. With the previous months and half of September, we count about 8,400 visitors on average and about 85,000 page views. The strongest day of the week is Saturday, even though no new articles go online on that day. Currently, we have established the publication of new articles for Wednesday and Sunday.
More than half of the readers already find us via Google. The rest are certainly supporters from friends and acquaintances, for whose support we thank you very much! Overall, however, there is still some upward potential and we already have a few ideas to increase the reach. The journey has just begun!
Issues so far
Until this point was reached, first of all the working basis had to be created and a website had to be developed. This was done almost completely on our own with a lot of research. Nevertheless, some costs were incurred, which forced us to pay in advance. First we subsidized the 35 euro expensive trade with a private contribution at a value of 250 euro, which is nearly used up in the meantime. Alone for the conversion the data security basic regulation (DSGVO) ran up costs at a value of 64,18 euro. The website design cost 41 Euros, the logo, which was created by an artist friend of ours, cost 119 Euros. For the domain we pay 11,80 Euro per year, the hosting at Hetzner amounts to 1,90 Euro per month. In total, therefore, total costs of 280.48 euros have accrued.
For us, TradingForFuture.de is a heartfelt project with which we want to motivate more people to invest money in the stock market – whether in the long term for retirement provision or in short-term futures trading. We see the project as a kind of diary and are happy if others can take something from the content for themselves. If not, then we have simply dealt with the topics again in detail and internalized them for ourselves. A win-win situation. However, a monetary success of the blog is not necessary.
Monetization
This blog is all about money and so we started thinking early on how we could amortize the project or at least make a little money from it. Already in the first weeks we used numerous possibilities. The biggest source of income so far is Amazon’s affiliate program*. Through the banners on the side of the website we lead our readers directly to Amazon. If they order something there, we get a small commission of usually 1.5% of the gross value of the goods credited. There are no additional costs for them. So far, this has generated 56 cents in revenue, although we still need a third order to avoid being kicked out of the program.
The second mainstay is the cooperation with financeAds. Among other things, the service provider makes the various comparison calculators available and gives us a share of any contract revenue. For every contract concluded by our readers via the links, a small commission is paid. So far, however, no income has flowed from this.
But we also use affiliate links in the articles themselves. But we guarantee: We only recommend what we have found to be good and use ourselves. We are enthusiastic users of Crypto.com, have a large sum of money at Bondora Gow & Grow and use Zinspilot for our nest egg to get at least a little interest on our overnight deposit. This will remain the case in the future when we will report on our brokers and their offers.
Also already implemented is the VG Wort. Here, with the appropriate range and text length, there is once a year from the collecting society an additional payment for all articles. In the long term, the Amazon banners are to be replaced by Google AdSense, in order to be remunerated for simple advertisements without having to be dependent on clicks or even the conclusion of contracts. Our goal: To break even by the end of the year!
