How much more would I have to write? …

592 followers

4 years ago

… to get to 100% ?

I guess that isn’t possible. It also tells me that 22 of my posts are indexed on Google and actually only 31 of the 37 are what you would call real posts. That’s not bad.

Anyway, WA friends, this is one of those – my progress so far kinds of posts and a projection of where it is going.

Perhaps I should start this with an alphabet soup keyword search, or maybe use Google to see what -

People also ask.

Here’s what I came up with:

How much to writers write a day?

How often should students write?

How much writing is expected in college?

How long does it take to write 1000 words?

Let’s look at what Google says.

Firstly, unpublished and lesser known authors claim anywhere from 500 to 3000 words a day with 1000 a day being average. And then it says some writers claim to write between 4000 and 10000 a day. Does that sound reasonable? I think the 1000 a day sounds more realistic. I don’t think we should count all the mechanical writing that many of us have to do day in and out, especially those of us still working a job. I mean that would be a 1000 words a day that you could publish, grocery lists, rambling emails and vacation plans don’t count.

Next two – the advice is 30 minutes a day for Kindergarten, and in college students should produce about 100 pages a year. And that 100 pages is about 50,000 words.

And lastly Google wisdom has it that a 1000 word essay takes around 3 hours 20 minutes to write. That sounds about right to me and would assume that you have already done all the research.

So doing arithmetic on my WA 56,886 word count means I spent about 190 hours creating that content. I think I must also have spent roughly another 190 hours as well doing research and then another 190 hours doing support activities, paying forward comments, related social media and other site technical stuff.

If you haven’t worked this out yet – and I didn’t know where this was going until now - I have an idea.

Since the niche of my site is personal finance, with a twist, let’s see if I can project a return on investment for my site.

Projected Return on Investment of my Niche Website

Assumptions:

I will continue cranking out content at roughly the same pace as I have established since I started seriously, which was the end of February this year.
My site will need to get to 100 posts to be stable, though I will continue adding and modifying content once I hit that target.
At that point my site should be generating a modest income, let’s say $5000 a month.
I would need to maintain the site adding new content and updating existing content, but at say half the rate.

Back to the calculations. So 200 hours of writing and 200 hours of research and 200 hours of support activities got me about one third of the way. So all in all I would need to invest 1800 hours to get to 100 posts.

Now to plug some money into this.

I would say that my time right now is worth about $50 an hour. Not exactly lawyer or consultant level fees but something like that sounds right. So after 1800 hours I would have invested the equivalent of $90,000 in my site and it would take me about a year to reach that level.

So once I reach the steady state, I would still need to spend about $45,000 of my time a year maintaining the site that should be generating around $60,000 in returns. At that point it would take 8 years to pay back my $90,000 investment.

Of course things will be different. I will find other ways to generate income. I could be generous with myself and donate my time for free. Or I could be mean and charge double. We could have done a more complex calculation discounting for inflation and calculating net present values. But all that is academic when the other uncertainties of the situation are considered.

All in all, all things considered, IM everso HO it looks like a reasonable business proposition.

My sincere thanks and well wishes to all who have helped me get this far.

Comments welcome!