When I first started this site in January 2006, I wasn’t sure how long my little experiment would last, so I’m amused (and a bit surprised) to be able to say that I wrote my first finance-related post this week last year. The post was a bit academic and formal, so I think I’ve come a long way since then!

My initial reasons for starting a blog were to practice my foreign language skills through my writing and getting feedback from readers. (You can see that here and here, for example, and I even briefly had a site in Mandarin.) Well, that experiment didn’t last long after I realized I didn’t have enough interesting material, time, or strong enough language abilities to create blogs in three different languages.

After realizing that idea was just way to ambitious for me to execute, I took a few days to think about what sort of topic I could create an entire blog around, and I realized that might be in personal and corporate finance, because I manage our household’s finances and work in that functional area. Looking back, I had some other reasons I wanted to start a site, too. Short term, I figured blogging would be:

1. a fun thing to try: I liked the idea of having a structure that encouraged me to write, and I liked playing with site designs
2. a glimpse into how the Internet works these days: My first e-mail account was created back in 1991, and I worked for an e-commerce company in the 90s, but those were eons ago in Internet years and a lot has changed.

Long term, I had the following in mind when I created this site:

1. It would be a way for me to learn about value investing, and investing in general, by interacting with others
2. I’d use it as a way to maintain my finance skills and while also improving my communication skills by creating useful, jargon-less finance and Excel tutorials

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Happy New Year, everyone! I’m spending most of tomorrow traveling back home after visiting family. More updates soon.

I’ll be getting back to posting regularly this week. Only finally getting over this seemingly interminable cold, believe it or not. Must be something going around, because our neighbors, coworkers, friends, family…everyone seems to have it. Anyway, enjoy the festivities, time spent with families, and have a safe break, everyone!

If you’ve been patiently awaiting more posts on investing…sorry for the delay! It’s just that it takes me a good long time to write something I consider “publishable” when it comes to investing.

Anyway, Steve over at Adventure Money has tagged me, along with four other personal finance bloggers, with the following meme. It’s Friday, my posts are lighter on these days anyway, so I’ll oblige here:

Five things you might not know about me

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November was a record month for Experiments in Finance. Earnings (defined as revenues – expenses) was $188.19. This month’s blogging expense was only my $9.95 monthly hosting fee. Revenue came from the following sources:

Adsense: $102.56
Linkworth: $54.61
BlogHerAds: $19.59
BlogAds: $21.43

The month-over-month doubling of earnings was driven by a 50% increase in traffic since October. I’m now averaging around 400 visitors a day, which is shocking to see, but certainly much appreciated. I did tweak the layout of this site in late October and last week so that things are more aligned and easier to read. (I think the site looks much tidier now.)

In case it’s useful to others, according to Google Analytics, I consistently have about an 80/20 split between new/returning visitors each month. I’m not sure how the split of traffic sources on other personal finance blogs compare, but about 50% of traffic to my site is through Google, so my guess is that this search engine traffic is really the biggest driver of ad revenue.

Here’s how my earnings and traffic has trended since I started this site (click to enlarge):

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