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I had been planning to post these on my first year anniversary but somebody asked for them early so here they are. Same disclaimers as normally: these were prepared for a blog post, not the IRS, and I did not exactly go to the extra mile to ensure their accuracy. (They understate my July to December expenses as reported to the IRS by about $80, which I think is an artifact of cash accounting for the IRS and accrual accounting for the blog posts I grabbed most of this info from. For example, when I pay for 12 months of service in advance to the IRS that all gets expensed in that tax year but in my blog posts I break it out on a per-month basis.)
Keep in mind that the Google tracking, despite being mechanized, still depends on me not borking the tracking code, which I used to do on a semi-regular basis. That is the main reason I’m not showing conversions on the graphs here.
Actual totals:
Sales: $6,333
Expenses: $1,720
Profits: $4,613
Visits: 63,429
OK, pretty picture time:
Visitors:
Both Slashdot and the Joel on Software mentions were of my blog, not of my product site, but they resulted in a few clickthroughs to the main site. (Incidentally: the blog gets about twice as many hits as the product site.) You’ll note that the dog that didn’t bark is “Why is Patrick not seeing a trough of visitors (and sales!) now that school is out for summer, much like he saw troughs at Christmas, Easter, and every single US public holiday?” Thats a good question, and I’m mulling some potential answers, but we’ll know more about them in about 2 weeks.
Notes on December: I don’t have a blog post for stats in December so I guesstimated my expenses by hand with a cursory glance at my credit card statement and Paypal account. The sales stats are accurate — thanks, e-junkie. Again, you’re not the IRS, so please don’t audit me. It is in the right ballpark if I take the number claimed on my schedule C and subtract out the months I do have exact numbers for, remembering that my quixotic accounting standard screws up that comparison a bit.
Notes on June: Its the 14th of June as I posted this, and I did the uberscientific “multiply sales and expenses by two” to estimate income for the month. That was probably overly aggressive for both numbers. Ask me in two weeks.
