In a few hours, we will be able to welcome the new year. For many, this is the time to review the events of the past twelve months. For us, too, the year 2021 was a very special one. Not only because of the still ongoing Corona pandemic, but also because in January we finally put our ideas into action with this blog. After the initial hurdles, a certain routine set in during the last months. The work is now mostly limited to the editorial and thus to the creation of new content.
Bureaucratic hurdles
Immediately after the turn of the year, we filled out our business application and sent it to the authorities on the same day. The notice of fees arrived just a few days later and we paid it almost on the same day and followed up on the request to fill out the questionnaire for tax registration. Then we heard nothing more for months, until in June we suddenly received a second reminder to finally clarify the tax issues. After a short phone call with the responsible tax office, it finally turned out to be a big misunderstanding and a little later we had taken care of all the bureaucratic work for the foundation.
We could finally start with the actual work. An artist friend designed the logo, the website was created entirely by ourselves and finally went online in July with the first basic articles. We celebrated the official launch on August 15 with a multi-part series of articles on the German pension system.
Over 50 publications
Since then, two new articles per week have appeared, mainly dealing with long-term wealth accumulation, some of which became a bit political or covered speculative trading content.Every Sunday and Wednesday at 09:00 a new blog post went online. In total, that’s just under 50 articles. We want to keep this rhythm next year.
Although we initially kept our distance from Google Analytics in view of the DSGVO and cookie guidelines and initially relied on internal server statistics, we decided at the beginning of November to use the statistics tool after all, which allows us more meaningful statistics.
According to the figures, exactly 2,236 visitors visited us from November 15 to December 16, generating 33,954 page views. On average, they stayed on our pages for just over three minutes. Since the beginning we have delivered a traffic of 21.18 GB. At the beginning of September we counted about 30 visitors a day on average. After a peak of 161 visitors on November 18, the daily traffic doubled to almost 55 visitors. Since the beginning of September we are almost daily in the triple digits. We are very happy about that!
The most read articles since recording Google Analytics:
Further monetization
After the first big increase in visitors, we finally submitted our application to Google and became an official AdSense partner a few days later. Since then, we have been delivering individual ads and have been able to generate revenue with them. We had banners from our second service provider FinanceAds on offer since the start of the blog, but remuneration only took place if users opened a deposit or an account through them. So far, only one has done so. With Google AdSense we can generate revenue with each banner delivery. On average, this is usually about 0.50 euros a day, at the peak we had even almost 5 euros on a single day earned. In addition, there are small amounts of money from Amazon’s affiliate program.
This more than covers our monthly fixed costs for hosting with Hetzner. They amount to 1.90 Euro per month, plus the annual fee for the domain. The remaining expenses have hardly changed since August. Only one more paid plugin for just under 40 euros has been added, bringing our total expenses for the blog to date to 298.90 euros.
This compares with income of not quite 70 euros, which means we will close 2021 with a small loss. However, we are reliable to be able to balance this out next year and cover our fixed costs month by month. Time will tell whether the workload will also pay off. For us, TradingForFuture.de is a hobby project.
Misconfiguration and attack
But not everything went smoothly: After a random check of the VG Wort counters, we discovered that we blocked the counting pixel due to a configuration error thanks to the cookie requirements for each reader and our articles could not be counted at all until mid-November. For us, this means that we will probably not receive any royalties from VG Wort for 2021.
In addition, a first attacker kept us busy in December. Overnight, a copycat probably tried to log into the backend of TradingForFuture.de. Over 140 different login attempts via different IPs were made in vain. Simple usernames such as “Trading For Future”, “Andreas Stegmüller” or “Startseite” were used.
In order to be able to detect and prevent such attacks at an early stage, we took additional measures, which entailed further research efforts. For tactical reasons, however, we do not want to go into further details on this.
Happy New Year!
With all these ups and downs we wish as our readers and supporters a happy new year and thank you for your support. All the time good returns!
