Costs: $30
Time to celebrate again! SBI is finally paying for itself.
To tell the truth, AdFly and Adsense helped a little, but most of the money came from SBI. If you don't know what SBI (SiteBuildIt) is, take a look at my Resources page.
I'm laughing at the 60 cents I earned, but at the same time I'm pretty proud of it.
The best thing about this SBI income is that it shows me a hint of the site's potential. I've got just a fraction of the possible traffic, but it is enough to see that my conversion rate is better than I hoped for.
The only monetization option I'm using is affiliate marketing. I still haven't studied the days 8-10 of SBI so I don't have, for example, mailing lists in my use yet. I see potential in this site if I can get back my motivation to work on it again. The site would definitely benefit from getting more back-links, a mailing list and a couple of more articles.
I also really enjoy the fact that I've just let it be for couple of months already and it's still doing just fine and getting more traffic every month.
To Move Or Not To Move
I have been pondering if I want to move my SBI! site to external hosting. If I would move my site away from SBI!, I could save on the hosting costs. But I have finally decided against it.
Last month I learned about the real expenses for making business online. That made me realise I'm still a cheapskate, trying to save in a wrong place. I understand the concept of needing to spend money to earn money, it's just hard to actually implement it.
If I think only about the hosting, yes, I could pinch some pennies. But hosting (with unlimited traffic!) is not the only thing SBI offers. I get free mailing lists, pretty nice statistics, forum etc. The value I get is well over $30, even if the tools are a bit outdated and clumsy. Plus, I'd need to waste time to actually move the site.
So, I got reasonable and decided to keep my SBI! site where it is. I rather try to inspire myself to work for it again to get couple of more sales in per month in order to make it continue to pay for itself.
