One Full Year of Monetized Blogging

In September 2006, I decided to try a little experiment to see if it was possible to make money by blogging. Before that date, John Chow dot Com made zero. The blog was just a place for me to post my miscellaneous ramblings. However, one of the topics I like to ramble about is how to make money online so it made sense to do a case study on that by monetizing the blog.

John Chow dot Com finished September 2006 with $352.94 in blog income, all of it coming from Google AdSense. It’s amazing what can happen in only one year.

Total Blog Income For September 2007: $20,512.17

If someone would have told me in September 2006 that a year from now, the blog would make over $20,000 a month, I wouldn’t have believed it. Yet, here we are. I can only imagine where this blog will be in another year. Here’s the income breakdown.

• Private Ad Sales: $7670.00
• Affiliate Commissions: $7,244.94
• Text Link Ads: $2,047.23
• ReviewMe: $2,000.00
• Kontera: $1,000.00
• AuctionAds: $500.00
• Subscriptions: $50.00
• Grand Total: $20,512.17

Blog traffic was up slightly at 338,859 page views from 176,354 visitors, according to Google Analytics. If you take the blog’s page view and divide it by the blog income you will get a site wide eCPM of $60.53. That means for every 1000 page views, this blog makes over $60, or 6 cents per view. It’s an astronomical number. Most blogs would kill for this eCPM rate. How much would your blog make if you could get $60 for every 1000 page view?

RSS subscriptions continued to trend upwards and should break the 9,000 reader mark within the next week. The competition with Shoemoney over who can get the most new RSS readers will help drive the RSS count. Please subscribe if you haven’t already done so.

Private ad sale overtook affiliate sales to become the blog’s number 1 money maker. The best performing affiliate program for September was Text Link Ads, accounting for $1,850 of the $7,244.94 affiliate income. TLA has been a consistent money maker for me and I highly recommend them.

If you look at my blog income reports from the past year, you’ll see the revenue mix has changed a lot. This is one of the keys to the success of the blog. Making money from blogging is a constantly moving target and you can never stand still. This blog started with Google AdSense. It no longer runs Google AdSense. You have to keep experimenting with your revenue mix to get the maximum income out of each page view. Check out my recommended moneymakers to find out more about all the ad networks I use.

Blog expense for the month include $602.43 for Google Adwords advertising, $25 for a private ad and $90 for a page on the Million Euro Wiki. You can get a wiki page for $90, instead of $100, by using coupon code JohnChow at checkout. Hosting for John Chow dot Com is sponsored by BlueFur Web Hosting. Use coupon code JohnChowRocks for 15% off any BlueFur hosting packages.

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If you haven’t already done so, I high recommend you sign up for the John Chow dot Com newsletter (sign up form at the top of the page). Not only is the newsletter free but you’ll also get my ebook, Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com, for free when you sign up. Every time I post an earnings recap, I get bombarded with emails from readers asking how I did it and how they could do it. Many of these questions have already been answered in the ebook.

We are about to enter the Internet’s biggest advertising months. I cannot stress enough that NOW is the time to set up that website or blog so you can take advantage of the Q4 advertising bonanza. $20,512.17 is a great record income but I have a feeling it’s about to be broken.