like previous blogiversaries, we’re gonna use this week as an excuse to take a look at the business side of blogging (at least as we know it). As you’ve probably gathered by now, we never intended to start a business when we wrote our first post back in Sept 2007, nor did we ever construct a formal business plan. So this whole adventure has been a learn as we go / roll with the punches / adjust along the way / insert more cliches here kind of deal. and just like we don’t claim to be diy experts or trained interior designers (we’re just two people with a chihuahua and a baby), we’re not about to pretend that we’re the savviest business people out there either. but like everything else we do, we’re just gonna share our experiences in an effort to help someone out there who might be trying to grow their blog… or is just curious about what we do all day.
We’ve lightly touched on some of this info in past blogiversary posts, but this year we’ve added a lot more details along with some new visuals: PIE CHARTS. Oh yeah, you read that right. Sherry’s math-teacher dad is about to do the happy dance. So get your fork out and prepare to dig in.
Let’s start with a look at how we spend our time… a slice (har-har) of which was somewhat encapsulated in yesterday’s day in the life post. but this is a more global look at all the things we do instead of the somewhat random and always-changing things that we do in a day. Oh and to be clear, this is a look at when goes into running young house love (so it excludes things like parenting a sixteen month old and other general I’m-an-adult duties like cooking and cleaning). Behold, a very simplified / approximated breakdown (all the pie charts in this post are very general guesses, btw):
Our favorite Videos
The main thing that might surprise you here is that we actually spend a very pretty small sliver of our time actually doing projects (aka “DIYing”). In fact, some weeks it feels like we barely have any more time to tackle our to-do list than we did back when we both had full-time jobs in advertising (that was pre-Clara too, so we might have had more energy, haha). Our weekends (along with weeknights after 7:30 when Clara’s in bed) are still our most productive days in terms of making house progress because the blog is “quieter” (as we say around here). So we can focus more on tasks and less on answering comments and proofing & posting posts. but that pie chart isn’t complicated enough, so…
Here’s a even more breakdown of the breakdown above (yup, we broke down a breakdown) to give you a better sense of what we really do within those general categories:
INTERACTING:
Comments: Our philosophy is that if you take the time to read what we write, the least we can do is return the favor. So we manually moderate all comments so that one of us – usually Sherry – can read it before it risks getting lost in the count and so that we can answer any questions that come up (the only exception to this is giveaway entries, which get approved in bulk since they routinely top 3K and actually topped 10K yesterday, and stopped loading, so we had to start a second giveaway post). Yes, it’s time consuming. and no, it’s probably not the most efficient system. but being part of the conversation on our blog is very important to us and we hate leaving any question unanswered. Farming that duty out to someone like an intern just feels too “answering service” to us, so we’re happy to stay grass roots and hands on.
Twitter, Facebook & Email: Similarly, we try to be as responsive as possible on other social media. We don’t hover on our Facebook page as much as we used to, but we still try to poke in to respond where needed. and Hootsuite helps us track @mentions on Twitter so we can do our best not to let a tweet question or comment flutter by unnoticed.
WRITING:
Posts: Well duh, a blog has to have posts right? We’re wordy and we know it (clap your hands!), so this is another major chunk of blogging. and we write around 35 a month, so it keeps us busy. but we’re not sure how you can be a good blogger without spending a good portion of time on your posts. plus it’s our first love, along with DIY. writing posts is what we used to do on nights and weekends after long days of working in advertising just for fun. and we still feel that way – it’s a good time.
BabyCenter & Do It yourself Magazine: We’ve been lucky enough that writing our blog has spawned other writing gigs, like our weekly post on BabyCenter’s Momformation blog and a regular column in BHG’s Do It yourself Magazine. So between coordinating those with our bosses over there, coming up with ideas, writing them, taking photos (or briefing an illustrator or photographer in the case of DIY), and answering comments (on BabyCenter), they’re sort of a part time job on their own.
Book: We’re writing a 260+ page book (due out in fall of 2012) full of hundreds of projects and photos (more on that here). Some weeks this slice of pie should be muuuch bigger, and some a little smaller. now that we have 90% of our manuscript turned in (whew!), this slice may actually get permanently larger since it’s time to actually do all of the projects that we talked about and have them photographed at our house by a pro before Christmas (yes, hundreds of them). should be interesting…
DIY-ING:
Projects: This is the actual doing of stuff to our house, which we then blog about. most of these projects might have gotten done even if we didn’t have a blog (DIY is just something we love)… but we definitely take on projects sooner, faster, more thoroughly, and with more gusto than we may have if we didn’t have an audience. The fact that you men are viewing adds pressure, but it’s the good kind that keeps us going. Promise. You men = momentum.
Gathering Supplies: This is the part that makes us best friends with the employees at our local thrift stores, home improvement stores, craft stores, fabric stores, lighting outlets, etc. sometimes running errands (aka: gathering supplies) can take less than an hour. Sweet. and sometimes it can take more than a day to track down something we need. hunting stuff is always kind of a wild card item on the to-do list. but you know what they say about the thrill of the chase…
PHOTOGRAPHING:
Photo Taking: sometimes this is just taking a few moments during each step of a project to snap a few shots. sometimes it’s cleaning up and styling rooms for “after shots” or “house tour” pictures (Hurricane Clara can leave quite a mess before we swoop in and straighten up so you men don’t have to stare at a giant stack of books in front of the new desk that we built). This also includes the technical aspects of photography that still take us more time than we’d like (using the tripod, adjusting the aperture, waiting for different times of day to see which light is better, etc), which is why we have…
Photo Editing: These are things like adjusting the color, exposure, size, and the way that our photos are cropped (sometimes even after thinking we’ve mastered the camera things are too blue or too yellow or too wide or off-center, so we try to adjust them so they look as true to life as possible). This also includes submitting and sorting through the hundreds of pics that we take each week. wish I were kidding about the “hundreds” part, but we usually average 50-200 photos per post (which can tip the scales at 1,200 photos snapped each week). We then boil them down to under 20 per post and size & submit ’em).
BUSINESS RUNNING:
Sponsors: This is where most of our money comes from (more on that later) so it involves a lot of fielding advertising requests, notifying sponsors about renewals, sending invoices, and submitting ads to our sidebar. (FYI, we use Google AdManager to serve our sponsors’ ads to our site, which takes a bit of “supervision” but not too much beyond the whole client-relations thing that we do via email).
Giveaways: We make no money doing this, but it’s our way of “giving back” to our readers (and a way to deflect the free products that we’re offered but no longer accept). Coordinating each week’s giveaway involves a bunch of emails to confirm the prize details, notify the winners, and facilitate the prize delivery. There’s also the task of being the bearer of bad news to folks since we just don’t have room for every prize that we’re emailed about (and sometimes they don’t feel like the right fit for you guys). Which leads me to our next point…
Saying “No thank You”: We’re people pleasers, so this is a hard one for us, but we get so many requests each week that we 1) just don’t have enough hours in the day for (i.e. attending a local – or not so local – event), 2) don’t really blog about (i.e. “could you pretty please write about my dog walking service?”) or 3) have a policy against doing (i.e. evaluating a product, adding paid text link ads to posts) that we find ourselves having to decline a lot. Sorry if you’ve been on the receiving end of this. We’ve learned that saying no is difficult, but sometimes it’s necessary for reasons of principle and/or sanity.
Bookkeeping: Ugh, this bores me too much to talk about. just pretend I said something interesting about paying bills, filing quarterly taxes, renewing our business license, paying for our own health insurance, managing our site-hosting fees, and organizing receipts. wish it was less yawn inducing, but it’s a necessary evil when it comes to running your own business (more on that here).
Technical Stuff: On a good week this slice could all but disappear, but on a busy week we may be installing updates, handling server glitches, craaaaaashing entirely (which gives us approximately 50 gray hairs each time), or even doing a whole blog redesign like the one we did a few weeks back (we probably spent 40 hours total on that over the course of about four weeks). since we’re not technically trained I’m sure all of this takes longer than it should.
So now that we’ve taken a general look at the time aspect of running our blog, let’s talk money. before you get your hopes up, we’re not gonna detail how much we earn. call us old fashioned, but we feel like “how much do you make?” joins “who’d you vote for?” and “are those real???” in a our list of conversations not to be had with the entire planet (anything we don’t talk about with friends at dinner usually = off limits here in blog world). In a general sense, we like to say that we make a modest living (we’re not rolling in cheddar, especially after we pay our business-related expenses like hosting fees – which we outline at the end of this post). but we actually think is a good thing because we blog about living modestly, so it all goes hand in hand. but we’re happy to talk about where our money comes from and how that has changed over the last four years. Let’s do it.
Waaay back in 2009 we spoke on a local panel about making money blogging. At the time we sung the praises of a “multi-channel” approach to earning income from your blog. Because, at the time, we (though mainly Sherry, since she was the only full timer then) got money something like this (again, this is a very general guestimate):
We’ll breakdown some of those terms even more under the next pie chart, but let’s talk generally for a second. A few years back, despite our best efforts, money from advertising just wasn’t cutting it. So Sherry branched out and started selling inexpensive art prints that she had printed locally and shipped herself (she’s got a fine arts degree). It was sort of like being an Etsy vendor (but she created a shop page on our site to vend them instead). at that time Sherry also began offering custom mood boards to help readers with their “Design Dilemmas” (and briefly even offered smaller services like paint color advice and even short phone consultations).
When it concerned pricing those mood boards out, Sherry did some for free first, just to get interest up and a few under her belt. then she slowly raised her rate using supply & demand as the guide. After being free for a while they were $30, then $60, then $100, and slowly built up to $250 when supply/demand increased over the years (Sherry refused to sell them for more than that, even when the two per week that she would offer up would sell out within two minutes). Oh, we were also writing for Do It yourself magazine and our local R home design magazine, so that’s where we got the whole multi-channel method thing from. We were doing lots of stuff to make a small income. Which was necessary because ad income alone just wasn’t cutting it (I should discussed here that Sherry took a huge pay cut to go from advertising to blogging, but she just wanted to see it through, and looking back it was a risk that we’re so glad we took).
But now let’s look at a new pie chart. Times have changed, and fortunately for the better. As our traffic grew, so did our ad revenue, which meant that we were able to spend less time on services and selling prints (both of which we discontinued after Clara’s birth in may 2010 out of sheer no-time-at-all necessity). The elimination of these services allowed for more time that we could spend focusing on blogging. In fact, while baking making these pie charts I discovered that our currently weekly Google ad income is larger than what we pulled in our entire first year via Google. This is not to indicate that we’re making an enormous amount now, but rather that what we started at was so laughably small. hopefully this encourages anyone who is currently earning a few cents a day to stick with it for four years and 2,000+ posts (if you love it I guess, haha, don’t stick with it for the uncertain years-down-the-line dividends). So now our income sources look more like this