Easy Route to Calculating your ROI for your BLOG with examples
Today I am going to show you the easy route to calculating your ROI -Return on your Investment for your blogging efforts using my own blogs as examples.
What is your Return on Investment anyway?
When you first start blogging you will find its difficult to calculate your ROI for your blog if you aren’t earning any money.
If you focus on your Return on Investment will let you quickly increase your income with the least amount of effort this is especially important if you are time poor!
If you haven’t started your blog yet or are just starting then check out my FREE how to start a blog email series
(If this post contains affiliate links please see our full disclosure policy although i have to warn you it is quite boring, but if you really must read it you can find it Here)
Why should you calculate your ROI
Calculating your Return on Investment will allow you to focus on tasks which will increase your income and ditch tasks that will not be benefiting you.
When you first start calculating your ROI isn’t an easy thing to do as you are not sure which tasks will be bringing in the most income as you may not be making income yet.
You should concentrate on projects which are greater than your hourly rate in order to increase your income.
If you do this calculation weekly it will allow you to see where your money is coming from immediately and allow you to set goals for your monthly income and determine your projected monthly income.
How do you calculate your ROI ?
Top calculations you should know
Return on Investment =
Income – Expenses – ( hourly rate x hours worked)
Hourly rate = Income/ hours worked
How to determine your projected Monthly income =
Current income/ day of the month eg. 5th dec would be 5 x total days in the month eg. 31
Obvious issue here is that you need track how many hours you work each week using either a time tracker or having set hours.
If you want a great overview of all this then this video from Rosemary Groner Busybudgeter.com goes through all this in Chasing your ROI.
How to Calculate your ROI- Return on Investment using examples
OK, I am not great complicated Maths and understanding concepts like this without examples so I thought you might like it if I go over calculating my own Return on Investment for this website.
There are two reasons for me to do this:
- To give you an example if you haven’t started earning or are just earning pennies
- To force me to actually start calculating my weekly Return on Investment
New blog – Smartpennieslife.com
Month Calculation- November 2018
- Two posts published
- Number of hours to write each post – three hours per post
Hourly rate = Income/ hours worked
Hourly rate = 0/ 6 hours which equals 0 obviously I haven’t earned anything from the blog yet but as my traffic increases, I expect to earn money as both these posts have been monetized with Affiliate links.
For Affiliate Marketing on my two Blog posts:
Return on Investment =
Income – Expenses – ( hourly rate x hours worked )
Expenses £289 for my hosting for one year so monthly this would be £24
( Siteground hosting Grow big plan ) I don’t have any other expense for the blog at the moment.
ROI = 0 – £24 – ( 0 x 6) = – £24
Yes, this is a minus number as you start earning income this will become a positive value because if you look at my 11th-month-old blog this will be a different figure.
If I want to increase my income IE. change that minus to a plus then I need to add more blog posts that are monetized with the potential to earn money and include things like opt-ins to build my email list.
ONE thing to think about is TRAFFIC none of the above will increase unless you focus on TRAFFIC too.
Rounding this all up for my new blog to increase my ROI I need to do THREE things:
- Training to get me to where I want to be quickly this will increase my Return on Investment so for instance if I was to invest in DARETOCONQUER at $500 lifetime membership ( Paul does have payment plans but if you want to go with one of those you need to sign up asap as he is only allowing 90 people to have payment plans at the moment).
For me, DARETOCONQUER is the ultimate blogging foundational training in Pinterest, SEO, Affiliate marketing, Content creation and Email list building.
As well as all this good stuff you also have Journeys/ Challenges to complete for instance making your first $1000 or getting your first 1000 subscribers.
My most favorite thing along with all this is the Slack community you can post questions which either Paul ( Course creator ) or Marybeth ( Admin for Slack) will answer ( yes they will answer).
Invest $500 and this will help you increase your ROI quicker but only if you implement what is being taught!
- Traffic- if you want to win with Traffic then see how I improved my Pinterest account in just one month
Related post
The Exact Pinterest Strategy I used to get 600k monthly views ( in ONE-month case study)
- Content – monetization
Related post
How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners : quick guide
I have added a fourth thing to this list as I will be also trying to do this too if you are time poor I suggest sticking with content creation ( make sure you monetize this and also Traffic using Pinterest and SEO.
- Email list building – I am going to focus on this too as your list is yours and you can eventually sell things to your list so the ROI on list building is great. I use MAILERLITE because it’s FREE up to 1000 subscribers.
11th-month-old blog – Smartpennies.com
Month Calculation – November 2018
Four posts published
Number of hours to write each post and promote it – three hours per post = 12 hours
Emails written – 4 Emails time taken to write them One hour per post = 4 hours
Income EMAIL -£6.57 one Email converted income
Income Content – £51.63
Hourly rate = Income/ hours worked
Hourly rate is £3.63 = £58.2/ 16
Hourly rate = £3.63 hours and I had two sources of income one from Affiliate marketing and one from my Email list.
Affiliate Marketing
Return on Investment =
51.63 income – (£24+£10.10 expenses ) – ( £3.63 x 12) = -£26.03
When you see it like this it can be disheartening but you need to remember that I have invested in courses and hosting with Siteground so my ROI isn’t going to break even for a while.
Expenses £289 for my hosting for one year so monthly this would be £24 ( Siteground hosting Grow big plan )
Return on Investment =
£6.57 income – (Email service provider is FREE ) – ( £3.63 x 1)= £2.94
I know that my one email which was an hours work generated £2.94 ROI so for me at the moment focus should be on Email list building as that has the highest ROI for my business.
So in practice what does it mean for this blog
- Make my emails even better than my current posts! Because it has the highest ROI
- Continue adding Monetised content
- Rewrite high traffic posts and optimize them for SEO my go to course for this is Adventures in SEO
- Continue generating traffic to my site using both Pinterest and SEO
How to determine your projected Monthly income =
Current income/ day of the month eg. 5th dec would be 5 x total days in the month eg. 31
£58.2/ 5 x 31 = £360.84 by the end of the month
If I continue what I am doing which is writing posts and email subscribers plus creating Opt-in’s to encourage sign-ups.
I hope you Guy’s stayed with me!
As a beginner blogger after calculating my ROI for my websites its clear I need to continue doing the following things:
- Create monetized content
- Increase my Traffic
- Review my courses and continue to Implement what is taught in them
- Related post on 11 best blogging courses
- Improve my email list building / start it for my new blog
- Improve my emails to my subscribers
If you enjoyed this post please share it and also leave me a comment below.
Excellent share. Calculating ROI as a beginner blogger is very important as it can help you make better decisions after you’ve started to make some money.
Keep sharing 🙂