I started John Chow dot Com almost a year and half ago. The intention was never to make money online from it. For the first nine months of the blog’s life, there was not one piece of advertising on it. I used the blog as my personal journal to do miscellaneous ramblings about stuff that I find interesting. One of those interesting topics happens to be making money on the Internet so an idea came to use this blog as a case study to show just how much money one can make by blogging.
Monetized last September, John Chow dot Com made $352.94 from Google AdSense. In October, blog income jumped to $1,361.64 as I added more revenue sources. And it continued to go up: $2,139.93 in November, $2,790.05 in December, $3,440.66 in January, $7,011.05 February and $8,545.25 last month.
April was a hard to gage month. Compared to March, I had one fewer day and I had server problems that added another lost day. However, that did not stop this blog from posting another record-breaking performance.
Total Blog Income For April 2007: $11,702.66
In just eight month as a moneymaking site, this blog has achieved Dot Com Mogul level income. It is certainly well pass what many people would consider a full time income, which was the original goal of this case study – part time blogging, full time income. Yes, John Chow dot Com is still a part time venture for me (it’s really a hobby). Here is the income breakdown.
- ReviewMe: $4,500.00
- Affiliate Sales: $2,150.00
- Text Link Ads: $1,352.81
- Direct Ad Sales: $1,200.00
- Google AdSese: $1,077.67
- Kontera: $1,000.00
- FeedBurner: $271.44
- TTZ Media: $150.74
- Grand Total: $11,702.66
I received a $500 gift from a sponsor in April but I did not include it in the total income because it was a gift and not cash. However, I wouldn’t have received the gift if I didn’t have the blog. Adding in the gift would bring the total April income to $12,202.66.
Blog traffic for April was 129,605 unique visitors viewing 266,300 pages. This is down from March because of the one less day and server problems. While it looks like the blog may never beat the 229,853 unique visitors and 360,967 page views posted back in October, this blog does in fact get higher traffic than back then. This is because over 4,000 people read this blog everyday from the full feed RSS. Add that into the equation and unique visitors swell to nearly 10,000 per day.
Blog advertising expenses for the month was $342.34 for SiteMatch Google ads to other bloggers and $223.74 for normal Google ads. SiteMatch ads expense went down because part way through the month, Problogger blocked my ads from showing up on his blog. Hey Darren! Don’t you love me anymore? 
Recommended Money Makers
As you can see from the above, this blog makes money using a bunch of different sources. You should never put all you eggs in one basket (especially Google’s). The more diverse your income streams, the better off you are. To help new bloggers out, I created my recommended moneymakers page. The page lists all the ad sources I use to make money online. I recommend you apply to all the ad networks listed.
May should be a very interesting month. We’re entering summer and that is normally low season when it comes to online advertising. Kids will be getting off school and families will be going on vacations. However, this blog is now a PageRank 6 and I’m about to raise my ReviewMe price to $400. Yes, it should be a very interesting month.
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