Making money blogging: diaries of a beginner blogger entry 2–should I give up?

Back in September 10 I posted an entry entitled Diaries from a beginner blogger entry 1. In that post I explained why I started this blog and, in summary, what I wanted to achieve.
Just to recap, I made the following points:

1. I started this blog to learn about personal finances management.
   
2. Another reason that motivated me to start this blog was to learn about starting a micro online business.
   
3. To make some money on the side.

I guess I am naive enough to keep on reading successful stories about people that are making money online. I say I am naive because I am probably at this point loosing motivation because of the low page hits and virtually no income at all produced by this blog. When compared to effort devoted into this site, this is a colossal waste of my time.
Let’s review each point I made in the first diary entry against how I am going:

1. Learning about personal finances management – I must say that each day when I post a new entry and each week when I post the personal finances compilations I learn a lot about personal finances. From this perspective researching and posting has helped me to learn and to take control of my finances.
   
2. To learn about starting a micro online business - This has also been very interesting. I must say that I have read a lot about online businesses, traffic generation, SEO optimisation and all the rest.
   
   With regards to optimising the business, I am still using blogger to host the site which means no expenses at all. Nevertheless I am certainly missing an opportunity to optimise the site to attract more traffic and generate more money because blogger does not give me many options to fully optimise the site.
   
   I often think about registering my own domain and moving my site to an independent host where I will have more control and will probably be able to increase page hits and to generate more traffic.
   
   Having said all of that I am pretty determined not to use any of my money on it so when I have cash coming from it I will use it to pay for the domain registration and hosting costs.
   
   I am probably making a mistake, because if I do go ahead with a separate host and my own domain name I will probably make some money and get more traffic but I will try to make money from it in order to cover for those costs.
   
   I am interested in your thoughts about this. Should I cover the expenses to register the domain and the hosting because of the potential to generate more traffic and in turn more money? I would appreciate your views on this point.
   
   With regards to traffic, following are my monthly page views:
   
   - July: 616
   - August: 1514
   - September: 1022
   - October: 1655
   - November: 2532
   
   You can probably understand my frustration as the numbers above are quite depressing.
   
3. Make some money on the site. I have only a couple of monetisation strategies on this site. AdSense and Amazon.
   
   With regards to Adsense, there are a few adds on the site. the total income from it for the past 5 months has been about  $30. Again not much at all.
   
   On the amazon front I started an online shop and I often place adds on the posts. The income from them has been about $6.

So the conclusion, in my opinion, is that this blog is a colossal waste of my time. Although traffic is constantly increasing, it is very low overall and I virtually make no money whatsoever from it.

I have been thinking that I can continue to research and learn about personal finances without spending the time to publish posts on this blog and to continually think of ways to improve its layout and how the information is published.

With regards to making money, I can certainly find a second job to boost my income in a more effective and efficient way.

Considering that I have made about $36 in 5 months, If I spent about 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, then I have made about $0.03 per hour worked. That is embarrassing.

Having said that  I still think that if I push on with this, the potential of generating long term income is far greater than what I can get by finding a temporary second job to boost my income.

In conclusion, I have learned a lot about personal finances and starting micro online business. The traffic and income produced by this blog have been depressing and as a consequence I am thinking of dedicating my time to producing income from more effective and efficient ways (I can certainly make more than 3 cents per hour if I have another job or search for other income generating sources). Nevertheless I am pretty determined to continue with this blog for a few months to see where I get to.

Regardless of all of the above, I can’t help thinking that this is a colossal waste of my time and effort.

Would love to know your thoughts about it! 

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