Behind the Scenes at Wealth Orb #1 | Red in the Ledger

Wealth Orb is a blog about elevated personal finance, financial independence, and entrepreneurship.

Welcome. I’m thrilled to share my first behind-the-scenes blog post where I detail my business details and what I’m doing to create Wealth Orb. In an effort of transparency and to help you with your own side hustle, this series is geared toward any readers who are interested in building their own blogs or businesses.

I hope to use this series to share my successes, my failures, and the exact financial details of my business expenses and income (though I’m primarily focused on creating a great brand, high-quality content, and a delightful reader experience right now.)

It takes a TREMENDOUS amount of energy to get a blog like this off the ground. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, and I’m happy to share it with you!

I’m learning Ghost CMS (an incredible content management system), making improvements and coding the website and customizing my theme, putting together a content map & calendar, and writing more blog posts and key pages. I’m also working on various site service integrations like Disqus for a comments section and a contact form so my readers can more easily get in touch with me.

I’m not a web developer. During the day, I work as a technical project manager and business analyst at an IT consulting firm and I know just enough about coding to be extremely dangerous. GPT and Bing AI chat have drastically improved the ease at which someone with my web development skill (or lack thereof) can cobble together a decent-looking website with code snippets.

All of the work on Wealth Orb is happening while I’m also working a demanding full-time job, investing time in improving my health by eating better and exercising daily, reading books and listening to podcasts, and helping care for my beautiful two-month-old daughter. It’s a juggling act to say the least. But we’re all busy, aren’t we?

This isn’t my first blogging rodeo. Far from it.

I’ve been blogging/writing articles for over a decade for other business owners, for myself on my own WordPress websites, and on Medium. If you haven’t already, check out my story on my About page!

While it would be a lot easier to start with a simpler platform that doesn’t look as clean or beautiful as Ghost–one of my business objectives is to have an incredible user experience from day one. That takes extra time and money, but I’m certain the effort will be worth it.

Again, my expense numbers are higher because of the investment I’m choosing to make in my platform and brand. If you aren’t sure you want to blog or just want to start for cheap and upgrade later down the line, you can get a blog started for less than $20 upfront with web hosting for $5 or less per month. There are also free platforms like Blogger, Blogspot, and Medium that let you blog without your own custom domain.

Now, let’s break down the numbers from month one of operating the blog. I have procured all of the services I expect to need or use in Wealth Orb’s first month of existence.

Income — May 2023

$0

The first dollar earned from the blog is going to feel AMAZING. I believe it’s 5–10x more satisfying to earn a dollar from your own business than it is to earn one from working for someone else.

Unfortunately, my first dollar of income will almost certainly be digital so I’ll have to frame a screenshot of the payment hitting my bank account instead of framing an actual dollar like ye olden days. For now though, we are Red in the Ledger with all the expenses incurred so far.

I’m almost certain income will remain zero through the first month, that’s why I’m comfortable publishing this blog post ahead of the month’s close. Going forward, I’ll aim to publish a monthly recap of the Wealth Orb business at the start of the month to cover the previous one.

With a blog, monetization is a lot easier once you’ve built up traffic and a loyal reader base. I’m highly focused on that instead of earning any short-term income. The income will fall into place later after the hard work has been put in and has a chance to compound.

Expenses — May 2023

Ghost.org Managed Hosting: $300 paid for a yearly managed hosting agreement. For accounting purposes, this will be amortized over 12 months at $25 per month.

Sure, I could self-host my Ghost installation on a Digital Ocean Droplet for $10–15 per month, but I don’t want to have to configure email servers, SSL certificates, and all the other stuff that falls within the scope of my current managed hosting agreement. I have a two-month-old newborn and need to save all the time I can. I’m more than happy to pay a little extra on my website infrastructure for a solution that just works right now.

ThemeForest: $85.81 Premium website theme for the blog. I’m doing the customization work myself, but the base theme did cost a lot more than the free options offered from Ghost. But, I also believe it looks better and meets my needs so I’m happy with the decision. This is a one-time fixed expense that represents just under 70% of the first month’s total expenses.

NameCheap domain + basic email account: $2.06/month. a .com domain + a basic email account ([email protected]) for contact forms + email marketing.

Midjourney AI: $10.81/month. I love this AI tool for art generation on the website. I can create beautiful, custom graphics specific to my prompts for use on my blog. I’m using it for my art and featured blog post images.

My brother, Will Cordell, is an INCREDIBLE illustrator, and one of my long term goals on the blog is to earn enough revenue to pay him to illustrate featured blog images for all of my posts. For now, I’m having him work on my primary blog banner image + logo (these will replace my current AI art that’s being used at the time of writing 05/2023). I’ll log these expenses in a future post in the series once he is able to finish my projects.

Additional Tax Deductions — May 2023

One of the best parts about running a business is the additional tax deductions you have access to that reduce your taxable income (potentially even from your W2 job). This month, I have two line items to deduct.

Since I am running my blogging business as a sole proprietorship at the moment, I will claim some additional eligible business deductions on my own tax return for 2023.

Please note, I am not a tax professional and this is not tax advice. I validate all my planned deductions and business expenses with my accountant come tax time.

Internet + Phone Plan (15–20%): $37.48/month. One of the great things about running a business from home is that I can deduct a portion of my internet + cell phone plan as an eligible business expenses on my Schedule C itemizations come tax time. My phone plan has three lines on it, but I’m only able to deduct the percentage of my own phone line used for business since my wife and mother in law (the other phone line holders on the account) are not my employees.

Business use of a portion of my home: $1265/year = $105.42/month I am using my home office SPECIFICALLY for working on Wealth Orb. This allows me to take a deduction for business use of home.

I’m opting for the simplified safe harbor method which allows for an annual $5/square foot up to 300 square feet. My home office is 15 by 15 feet and includes a 7 by 4 closet which I can use to store business artifacts and the physical equipment I use to run my blog. I’m currently using 253 square feet to run my business out of my home.

With the simple approach, I can’t deduct a portion of my electric + water + gas for my home, or depreciate the home office itself, but it makes the admin burden easier come tax time and still helps the bottom line.

My blog will need to earn enough gross income to qualify for this deduction though as the deduction itself may not be more than gross income from the business itself after being reduced by other qualified deductions. More simply put, the home business use can’t be used to reduce my W2 income if I don’t make any money from the blog.

I’ll need to make at least $1,265 in gross income from my blog after deducting other expenses to be able to deduct my home office. You can read the IRS documentation for eligible home business deductions here.

Free services & Integrations

MailerLite (for email marketing): free up to 1,000 subscribers. As the blog grows, I will incur some cost here, but MailerLite has very reasonable pricing and powerful features. I’ve been using it for personal projects and at work since 2017.

Ghost CMS does have some powerful email capabilities that I will likely leverage in the future, but if I go above 1,000 subscribers directly through Ghost memberships, my managed hosting cost will increase. For now, I am not using the Ghost CMS email functionality.

Canva Pro: Free trial for one month then $12.99/month which I will gladly pay. Great for social media and blog graphics, email marketing media creation, and general graphic design for the business. Synergizes very well with Midjourney and doesn’t require any advanced know-how of cumbersome graphic design tools. Canva is graphic design that just works. Canva also houses my content planner & calendar and helps me plan my post schedule.

Various other free tools and inclusions

Chat GPT, Bing AI Chat, Markdown Tables generator, Google Analytics, Google AdWord Planner, Google Docs + Sheets suite, Twitter, plus various other tools. There is a lot out there that can be used to improve the small tasks and recurring work that comes with building a business in the niche.

As I build out my initial catalog of blog content, I will explore more automation tools that can help me with my social media and marketing for easier growth. Growing a blog from scratch takes a lot of time–there’s a lot that goes into ranking well and link-building.

Remaining Wealth Orb strategy plans for the month

For the rest of the month, I will focus on finalizing my service integrations that are needed in this point of the business’s growth journey. I will aim to write 2–3 blog posts per week, continue to refine the Wealth Orb brand, and work on building out my social media presence on Twitter before potentially expanding to other platforms. LinkedIn could be a natural next step, I have a decent network and the platform is under-tapped in many content niches.

Truthfully, I have no experience in platforms like Pinterest or Instagram, and video production is not my strong suit. I have grown much more comfortable on podcasts, however, and have guest-starred on a few over the years. Video may make sense later down the line, but for now I’m just trying to throw more words on the page.

Overall, my goal is to continue to invest time building Wealth Orb, creating great content, and growing the blog. I hope you will join me on the journey!

Stay tuned for more articles in this series where I share my progress and this behind-the-scenes view into the creation and operation of the business that is Wealth Orb!