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Every month I make a public blog post about my online earnings for that month. Let me start off by saying that these income posts are not meant to be bragging in anyway. The purpose of them is so that I can be completely transparent and help you make money blogging. My goal is to show you that there is a lot of money to be made indirectly from your blog, whether it is from career offers, consulting jobs, marketing your other websites through your blog, or using your blog as a launch platform for your startup websites. Something I did not learn until I started blogging for awhile (but I wish I had learned far earlier), is that being an authority about a topic that you enjoy will earn you money from sources outside of your blog. Blogging has helped me network with hundreds of webmasters, and has landed me my highest paying jobs. Before I started blogging, I did lots of search engine optimization, link building, and viral marketing for my own sites, but had no idea that I could do that for other people and make a living from it. If I had not started this blog and shared my secret link building strategies with my readers, my current clients would have never known I was an authority at viral marketing/link building. All in all, lets move onto what everyone is waiting for — my online income report!
Blog Statistics
Parenthesis are stats from last month.Â
- Google Pagerank 4
- Seomoz PageStrength 4
- Alexa Rank 48,496 (58,481)
- Technorati Rank14,061 (20,986)
- Technorati Authority 343 (252)
- Total Visitors 7,999 (85,152 from Digg post)
- RSS Subscribers 416 (325)
In conclusion, the blog has had a healthy growth. While the visitor numbers are far lower, the overall daily readers has improved. Last month’s numbers were a bit inflated because of my really popular post that hit the frontpage of Digg and sent tens of thousands of visitors. If my blog grows at this rate every month, I would be happy.
Total February Online Income - $2,987.81
Online Income Per Day - $103.02
Advertising
- Adsense - $39.87
- Adtoll - $22.23
- Paid Reviews - $120
- Kontera - $5.71
Consulting Clients
- Link Building - $1000
- Viral Marketing & Link Building - $1500
Other Sales
- Sold the code to an old site of mine - $300
In conclusion, this month wasn’t even close to last months $13,585, but I expected that from day one. Selling my sites for a large sum of money was a one time sale, but I have since been replacing it with new recurring clients and increasing income. The income is not a lot, but it is becoming a lot more stable and growing. I know a lot of people who would die to make over $100/day from home.
Adtoll Experiment Case Study
While Adtoll did make over $22, I have to say I am very disappointed with the outcome. I managed to get 26 new clients signed up under me, and yet out of those 26 I had only made 15 cents! Even when Adtoll gave away $20 in free advertising I have yet to see any affiliate income. Another sad fact is that the network ads that Adtoll displays are irrelevant and very low paying. It is almost better to have a completely ad-free blog and then sell your own advertising, because if you use Adtoll and do not fill your own inventory you will just be throwing away money. I would much rather have a visitor on my blog for an extra 30 seconds than 2 pennies for him to go visit a flashing banner ad.
The Adtoll Result
I am going to “keep what works” and “drop what does not.” In other words, I completely removed the 160×600 banner advertisement as it was having a lot of flashing colors and had a very low click-thru ratio, with a very high noticability. I did not sell any 160×600 advertisements so I have replaced it with Adsense like I originally had. I am going to be keeping my 125×125 advertisements as they have been selling well (and they should because it is only $3 to advertise for an entire month!). I will also keep my top banner ad with Adtoll until the last sponsored advertisement has run its course. Would I recommend Adtoll? — Only if you can sell your own advertising space.
My Upcoming Ventures
I am very proud to say that I have THREE big websites being developed. Unfortunately, I only expect one of those three to be ready for a public launch this March. I will give you more information as it gets closer to the release date. The only information I can tell you right now is that it is going to be a social media site that will help bloggers and webmasters like you promote yourselves and make money. Stay Tuned!
How much did you earn in February?
I am looking forward to the new project….I have very high expectations and I am really sure it wud be really good
Thats a nice income for february..i dont even make 1% of that..hehe:)
I agree with what you had to say about AdToll. If you can’t sell your ad spaces, then AdToll isn’t really recommended. I’ve been using AdToll and I’m quite impressed with the results. I was able to sell ad spaces and I hope I’ll be able to do that next month!
I can’t wait to see what you have in store for us
-Mike
Hi… Can you please tell me why my blog at *link removed* got a PR 0?
It’s just not fair…
I am not Google… how would I know?
Congrats. I’m sure you’ll be reaching $13,000 a month soon
For a blog, what matters the most is readership. As you gain more and more readers, your traffic will automatically grow as they do the promotion for you. Traffic from sources like Digg are one-time events…
I too have been disapointed with adtoll.
over the last month of February i have been building my site and working on SEO about 10 / 20 mins a day at max in an attempt to get some PR before i start dedicating time to content which will be about easter time when uni is over and i only have to worry about a part time job :p.
My latest report (found here http://rants.thenexus.tk/020308-update/) shows that ‘white hat’ techniques ie Metadata, sitemaps and clean urls work good.
My next plan is to work further on SEO for the blog part now and experiment with monetization methods.
your site since finding it has been invaluable and i hope to put it to use on another experiment site that i will start soon. So hopefully post exams etc in july i will have a report such as this showing first months earning.
Excellent job, Collin. Thanks for the review of AdToll - I’ve been trying it out and was experiencing results similar to yours (I removed it a while back). I’m going to be trying out the Rubicon Project - just waiting to get approved.
Great job, Collin. I only made $40 in February.
Collin,
It’s helpful to see you and some of the other readers here have come to the same conclusion I have with AdToll. It wasn’t doing anything but displaying really obnoxious adds and not bringing in any sort of money. Thanks for the review.
Collin, there is something wrong. How can this article Surprised PageRank Update February 2008 claims MixedMarketArts.com PageRank dropped to 0?</strong
I too noticed this. Perhaps Google dropped PR because of some black hat tactics in link building cookbook?
Might be an update fluctuation. Who knows?
Interesting to see that you are running Adsense when a lot of bloggers don’t. I’ll keep my eye on your earnings there. Curious to see how it does.
What do you mean by advertising? Daily income or expenditure? Or may be even monthly income? Anyways, nicely done!
That is all income. Advertising just means my income from advertising networks or closely related things.
Excellent job,Fantastic article.Online advertising is fast becoming the main marketing medium to increase the awareness for new products or services. With the increase in number of web users, there is a moving trend towards Internet marketing and online advertising.
Thanks for the valuable info.
@ Collin LaHay Oh, its just $39.87 from Adsense/month seems quite bad.
I’m pretty happy with it, considering all of last month I had only Adtoll on the blog. I didn’t have any expectations for CPC advertising. My blogging income comes through knowledge and networking. =)
Congrates! at least you still made the money though not even close to…what you got last month.
I’ve experimented with Adtoll on several sites over the last month or so and the results have never been what I’d hoped. I came in just shy of five figures on last month, but like you, a good chunk of that income came from consulting and freelance projects.
Your link building tips are great. Just wanted to let you know that my Kontera income started slow also but is building each day a bit more.
After using it for three weeks I’m glad I added it to my site.
There’s a trick, you know.
Thanks for the honest insight into AdToll. I was thinking about signing up and using it on my blog but thank goodness some bloggers like you give honest info and don’t just try to promote anything for a buck !!
Keep up the good work !!