How Do You Invest Your Blogging Income

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Have you given much thought to how you might invest your blogging income?  Some of you may already have a plan for your extra money, but many times the income is a welcome surprise that arrives after months of hard work.  You might start earning more than you anticipated.  Perhaps you started blogging with no idea whether you’d even make money or not.

When you start to earn some money from your blogging endeavors you should come up with a plan for how you might reinvest your blogging income.

In the beginning, you plan might be as simple as investing it into better web hosting.  Or perhaps just saving the extra money for your children’s college fund.  Whatever you do, it’s a good idea to figure out how to make the extra money work for you.

Personally, I find that if I don’t have a plan for the extra money, it’s easy to start spending it on frivolous things and then get caught up in overspending.  In that sense, a little bit of extra cash can be a dangerous thing.  At least for me.  So, I always need to have a plan to either save the money or put it to good use.

Part of the planning process also has to do with setting goals.  If you have some goals for your earnings, you can segue that into a plan for your money.

For example, one of the simplest goals that I had when I started blogging was to earn enough each month to pay for my self hosting with Hostgator.  That’s a really simple goal.  I signed up for a month to month contract with Hostgator, which is $8.95 per month (It’s much cheaper to get a longer contract, but I didn’t want to pay out of pocket the bigger lump sum).  Also, it was a bit of motivation for me to earn at least $8.95 a month.  With that in mind, as a brand new blogger, I had a simple goal of earning roughly $10 a month.

The other idea that I had in mind was that I wanted this new hobby to be entirely self sustaining, which meant that I wanted it to sustain itself.  I did not want my expenses to get ahead of itself.  So, I did not spend extra money on advertising, adwords, seo packages etc…  I wanted to put in the work and do it the old fashioned way.  This made it a great learning experience, as well as ensured that I had a well defined goal that I could achieve even in the first month of blogging.

Over time, my blog grew and started earning more.  I started earning $20 a month, $50 a month, then over $100 a month.  These days, I’m earning well over $500 a month and hope to be hitting the $1000 mark soon.

As my earnings have increase, so have my goals.  Some of these goals were specific to blogging expenses, some were to expenses to increase my productivity, some are investments, and some for savings.  In any event, I made sure to set some goals and had a plan for the money.

In the last year, my goals included:

• Covering my hosting expenses ($8.95)
• Covering my wife’s hosting expenses for her new ecommerce site ($8.95)
• Covering my internet costs ($60 a month)
• Saving up and purchasing and iPad ($500)
• Investing extra money in Lending Club (Peer to Peer Lending.  Right now it’s my best performing investment)

In each of these cases, I was pleased to be able to meet all these goals.

As you can see, in this first year, many of my goals did not go towards my blog expansion.  Mainly these goals covered the expenses of running the blog, with the exception of the iPad, which is the one thing I set my sights on as a productivity tool.  Ensuring that I was earning towards these expenses pushed me to make sure I would stay persistent with the blog.  As well, it also kept me aware of the tax situation for any money that I was earning.

I had to concentrate on meeting my startup expenses and going from there.  In the beginning, I mainly wanted to cover my hosting and internet costs.  As you can see, that’s already close to $80 a month.  Then I was setting aside extra money for the ipad as well as investing a little in Lending Club.  Lending Club is a small investment as I can put money in in $25 amounts.  So that really didn’t divert a lot of money away from my blogging business.  All in all, these were good blogging goals for me in that first year.

Now that I’m starting to earn a bit more and the blog is getting a bit busier, my goals have expanded.  I’m nearing that point where it may be a good idea to hire on a VA for managing some of the blogging activities.  Also, my family has another one on the way, so I have some income goals related to baby care expenses.  I’m looking into investing money back into the growth of the blog as well as other business ventures.

In any event, there is a plan for the blogging income.  As long as I continue planning and setting goals, my blog continues growing.  Without a plan, I feel it would all go stagnant.  I would end up spinning my wheels with no direction to head.

What is your plan for your blogging income?

About Richard  (300 Posts)

Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.