Explorer Plan | Fat Wallet Refugee

See the previous post in this series.

Earlier this year I made the decision to upgrade my WordPress account from a free to a paid plan. A big part of my decision was being able to monetize the site. I have tried my hand at affiliate marketing but have not had any success so far.

In the previous post, I detailed the costs of the upgrade and the discounts that I was able to apply to my purchase. My average cost per year is about 66 USD and so that has been my goal as far as revenues from the advertising on the site.

Divided by 9 (I started in March) it brings my monthly goal to 7.33 USD for ad revenue.

As you can see, my earnings have not yet reached that goal. April marked my first full month of advertising on the site. The FAQ page in the WordPress help files said that it would take up to 3 months for advertisers to fine-tune their presence on the site.

You can see there was a small drop in ads served after April, but this went up noticeably once June was finished.

Above you can see that I only published 3 posts for the period of June 17th through June 23rd. My visitor traffic was only 975 with total views of 1,720 pages.

The CPM was 0.26 USD which yielded revenues of 1.78 USD for that period. This was a large portion of the earnings for June.

I think the increased ads served came from completing the Daily Writing prompts.

These writing questions will often get a lot of traffic in the WordPress Reader and posts can garner Likes and Reblogs. On days when I complete a writing prompt, I will see my visitor traffic swell.

I still need 53.63 USD to break even this year on the cost of the upgrade. I am still hopeful that my site traffic will increase over time. My gaming guides continue to be the main source of site traffic.

I have tinkered with the idea of migrating over content from my other blog which gets more traffic, but I am concerned that it may not fall under the “family-friendly” guidelines for WordAds. This site received 15k views from April to June while the other site gets 17k+ each month.

Anyway, I will continue to track my progress and post another update for quarter three in October. Thanks for reading and have a great day!

See the next post in the series.

See the previous post in this series.

Last month I decided to upgrade my WordPress plan to the premium Explorer plan with the intent to begin monetizing my site through ad placements using the WordAds service.

The Cost

I purchased my upgrade on March 16th. The final price tag of the plan was $222 for three years of service. When I went to make the upgrade there was a discount being offered for a full three-year registration.

The domain was free for the first year, included in all plans, and then $12 annually afterward.

I certainly wasn’t going to pass up such a good deal.

This brought my annual hosting cost down to $74. So this is the magic number that I will need to reach in advertising dollars to break even each year.

The Wait

I had some initial difficulties getting up and running with WordAds. After submitting an application for inclusion in the program I did not receive any responses other than a canned email.

After waiting four days (March 20), I returned to the application page. I was surprised to find a notice saying that my site was ineligible for WordAds. I contacted support right away.

I was a bit befuddled by the message, so I tried to get support using the Live Chat feature included in my upgrade.

Instead of a human, I was greeted by an AI.

I did eventually manage to get connected to a live representative, they call themselves “Happiness Engineers.” The conversation was quite long but I eventually was told that they could not tell me what the problem was and that someone would contact me.

I made sure to ask them about cancellation and a refund just in case I would not be able to utilize WordAds on my site.

The Problem

After 3 days of waiting I sent a follow-up email asking if they were close to finding an answer. I was worried because the 14-day time limit on cancellations was close approaching. All I got was silence.

After another six days (March 29), I received a response to my follow-up. A whole 13 days since I purchased the upgrade and applied for WordAds, and just 1 day left to be able to get a refund on the purchase.

The Answer

So it seems the bot that crawls the pages had made a mistake and flagged my site as not being family-friendly. The Happiness Engineer directed me to reapply to the program with a supplied link.

Following their advice, I returned to the application page and tried to reapply. But I got a different error message this time.

I returned to the email exchange with support staff and requested further assistance. The staff member eventually had to manually add me into the program.

The Conclusion

On March 29th, I was finally accepted into the WordAds program.

For March I had three days (29, 30, and 31) of advertising on my site before the ledger rolled over to April.

I have read that it usually takes around three months to get a clear idea of the revenues a site will generate as the advertisers get a feel for your site’s content and the types of visitors who frequent it.

I can see a direct correlation between the days where I have high traffic and the greater CPM levels. This is still the early testing phase but I did see some $0.50 and higher CPM levels on the more busy days.

I now need to refocus my energies on producing quality content and guides to further drive the growth of this site.