TypeOfNaN

As you may have noticed, I listed my revenue at $3/month. Not very impressive!

Well the truth is that my blog has always been a hobby project, and the notion of monetizing it and treating it as a product is somewhat recent. My minimal revenue is from a new donation link on the blog and I'm exploring a lot of different ways to start making some money... which is where IndieHackers comes in! I have quite a few monetization ideas that I'm trying to validate here and am hoping to find even more ideas.

I received my first $3 coffee donation! I know it doesn't seem like much, but this is actually the first money I made off of my blog! This means someone appreciated my content enough to throw three hard-earned dollars my way.

To me, that's a big deal.

Because I'm not big on programming blogs with advertisements, I decided to add a donation link to my blog. Here is my ko-fi page!

I added a hopefully-not-intrusive link to donate at the bottom of each post on my blog and in the "About" section.

Woohoo!

This was really cool. My blog traffic has really been growing:

Since hitting 1K organic visitors per day, I have really been thinking about how to monetize the blog. I think there's a good chance the blog keeps growing and growing as I add more content.

This was a super exciting day. I had been watching my search traffic steadily increasing over time. Initially I thought nothing of it: going from 5 to 10 organic search results in a day didn't seem like a huge deal.

But when I hit 100 visitors in a day I thought "hmm, I might have something here."

I grew my newsletter quite a bit by plugging it in posts I made at https://dev.to. It's a lot harder to get views on that site these days (a lot more fluff posts, in my opinion), so my subscriber velocity has dropped off greatly. I sit around 1,400 subscribers to date. My newsletter is still not monetized!

In January 2020, I launched a newsletter. As you can probably tell, I don't quite have all my branding in order! Oh well.

I write quite a few blog posts, so I have been selectively choosing what I think are the most interesting ones to send out as emails.

This was the official start date of the TypeOfNaN blog! I blogged about React and Git Hooks.

At that time, there was no intent to monetize the blog, it was simply a place to record things I learned.

I created the site using the Gatsby Starter Blog template because I wanted to do minimal work to get up and running, I enjoy writing my posts in Markdown, and it scored really well on the SEO and Google Lighthouse front.