2011 Annual Report

Here is the blog you have been waiting for: My first annual report. How much money I lost on this blog so far!  I prepared this to show you how I use accounting information in my business.  These are real numbers.

My income statement shows that so far I’m running a $414.66 net loss, without any revenues*:

Here is my balance sheet.  So far, I’ve invested $414.66 in capital, all of which was absorbed by my net loss:

I’ll be the first one to admit that the accounting information shown above is not terribly useful, and might even be discouraging.  However, it is still very important to keep track of my expenses to date.  


In addition to standard accounting information, I collect information that is useful for determining how well I am implementing my strategy (to build quality content), and for predicting future profits and cash flows:

Here are my Google Analytics for 2011:

The number of unique visitors (139) is not so encouraging.  However, my strategy right now is to prepare quality content that will later attract site traffic.  Therefore I’m not yet worried about site traffic.  Judging from the number of pages/visit (4.51) and the absurd bounce rate (1.59%), people who find my site seem quite happy.  These numbers could be a fluke because of the low site traffic.**  Nonetheless, I’ll take this as a good sign.

• My Klout score has increased from 32 to 36 this month
• There are now 79 posts on the Accountinator blog.
• I’m up to Day 14 in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.
• My first guest post appeared in Technorati.  
• I have 152 followers in Twitter.
• 481 pageviews in December, 1,182 pageviews total.
• Most popular post (26 hits): Social Media is Complicated 2 and a guest post, http://www.accountinator.com/2011/12/save-money-by-consolidating-your-debts.html (also 26 hits).

For January, I plan to continue to focus on producing quality content.  I’m going to continue to experiment with finding ways to increasing traffic.

• Reactivate my CPA license.  I bought the training materials.  I need to complete them and then paying a fee to New York State.  I think that the New York State fee is about $250.  
• Continue to prepare a post-a-day.
• Experiment with AdSense.  I got some free AdSense money, and I’d like to fool around with it to see what happens.

*I actually earned $3.68 in AdSense revenues.  However, I am not recording these revenues yet because I use something called the “cash basis.”  This means that I record revenue when received, rather than when earned.  So far, no revenues earned or received from Amazon Associates.

**Why would low site traffic distort my number of pages/visit and bounce rate?  Consider that my 139 uniques might just include my wife, my mother, a few ambitious students, and other relatives and friends.  I should hope that they would take at least enough time to look at a few posts and search for personal references to them, and hence, the low pages/visit and bounce rate.