Blogging Income | Dorm Room Biz

Nov

October Blog Earnings and Updates

Written by Chris on November 6, 2008 – 9:19 am -

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First, let me say I had this written up and ready to go on the 30th, but wanted to polish it off, and now here we are a full week into November and its just getting posted. Oh well, sometimes you just have to say screw it!

I’m starting to get better at putting these monthly reports out on time and not a week or more delayed! Anyway, it is that time of the month when we take a look at the activity for the previous month including blogging income, popular posts, and other random updates! WooHoo! Get excited, I sure am as October was a pretty good month for Dorm Room Biz!!!!!

First, lets take a look at the blogging income.

Private Ads - $100
Sponsored Reviews - $32.50
CashCrate - $8.43
InboxDollars - $7.00
Google AdSense - $8.68
CJ.com - $135.84
Text Link Ads - $25.52
Blogrolled - $3.50
TOTAL: $321.47

This month was a good month for my blog income! The amount of $321 is accurate…to an extent, but I will talk about a little bit later.

So, obviously the major winner for the month was my CJ.com affiliate earnings of $135.84 which came all from the costume sales. This number is somewhat inflated because this is not the actual profit from the venture and sales. The cost of running the auctions, and having to refund over 10 purchases, came to about $60.00. This was then covered by the amount made from CJ.com, which means that I walk away with a PROFIT of around $75 on this experiment. Will I do it again? You bet. Will I plan better for it? You bet! I sold such a large quantity so quickly that I was not able to keep up with the orders and neither were the suppliers. I’ll also start and stop selling costumes earlier next year so that everything can have an adequate amount of time to arrive for the Halloween holiday.

The next major thing that happened this month was a few new sponsors to come aboard as well as some paid reviews of their websites. Two new sponsors pre-ordered links or buttons for 2 and 3 months in advance. However, in this report, I counted only each months earnings from those purchases.

Then we have the normal amounts which seem to be standard earners each month for me coming from SponsoredReviews.com, Text Link Ads, AdSense, and a few others.

Welcome To Our New Sponsors!
Like I mentioned, Dorm Room Biz is sporting a couple new sponsors this month and next month. A major thanks for Motive Interactive for selecting us as a blog that they want to advertise on. Motive just released a new version of their affiliate platform called Advent 2.0. Look for a review of the service coming within the next week!

Another new sponsor for this month and December as well as January is Regus office rentals. Regus is a company that provides low cost office rentals, meeting rooms, and virtual offices to small business and entrepreneurs. If you are in the UK and looking for a local cost option for your business, I strongly encourage you to check out Regus. Also, if you are in any other country and want to set up a virtual office in the United Kingdom, check out their list of services.

New Contest Launching This Weekend!
I’ve got a new contest that is going to be launching this weekend sponsored by the great people over at UPrinting.com. It will be nice and simple like the last one, and the prize should be very helpful young entrepreneurs and small business owners, so be on the look out!

Popular Posts and Keywords
This past month, October, saw 14 posts, or about one every other day. The more popular ones included “The ‘Trophy Kids’ got to work“, “10 Great Halloween Costumes for College Students“, and “Any Luck With Finding A Job?” We also saw 44 comments on the site which is continuing to grow month after month.

The keyword/search phrase that brought in the most traffic from Google was actually “Sophie Marston” who is one of the part time bloggers here at Dorm Room Biz! It’s funny how that happens. Besides that, and because of the Halloween costume post, we got a bit of traffic from searches for “the shocker costume” and “rock out with your cock out costume”. Google Images also sent a lot of traffic to the site around the time that I posted the Halloween costume images. This goes to show that hosting the images on your own domain will help with your traffic numbers!

Send Me Your Shwag!
I’ve been thinking about building up a small collection of shwag from different companies and sharing it on Dorm Room Biz. Whether it be added giveaways for contests, featured posts about the products that companies are giving away, or t-shirts. If you’d like to spread your companies shwag around, drop me a message.

On a final note, I’m looking for a Wordpress designer/programmer that would be interested in some work putting together custom themes. Get at me if you’re looking for some work!

May

Talking to an Accountant tomorrow, what should I ask?

Written by Chris on May 18, 2008 – 10:34 pm -

So, I know I have talked a bunch before about starting a business, different types of businesses to start, etc, but now it is time for me to actually do it. Tomorrow I will be going and sitting down with my parents Accountant and Financial Planner in search of some advice as to what to do relating to my web design business income and my ebay income - ie start a business to funnel it into or not.

However, I want to make sure that I am well prepared with a list of questions - so I am looking for more ideas as to what else to ask or look into. Here is what I am thinking so far:

What is the best type of entity to launch in order to run ventures under different names (doing business as [DBA] names) and funnel all profits and expenses into the parent company.
What kind of protection does a parent company offer when operating under a DBA? Does everything fall onto the parent company?
If operating with a DBA, does a new company (say a LLC) need to be launched in order for the parent company to have ownership of it or can multiple DBA’s be filled for the same parent company?
What can be written off as a business expenses and where should the line be drawn (as far as deciding what to submit and what not to)?
How should internet income be reported (individually from each company [like google, cashcrate, etc] or just as one lump sum)?
What is the best way to report blogging income which would break down into the following categories: advertising (google, private ad sales, paid reviews, etc), networks/affiliates, miscellaneous.
Can meals and other items be written of as a tax deductible/business expense if they are written about and reviewed? Such as restaurant reviews or camping equipment reviews?

That is about all I have for now, any one have other suggestions or questions they may like to try to get answered? I am already there, so I’d be happy to try and ask any question you may have! Leave a comment! My meeting is at 3 PM tomorrow.