John Chow dot Com rambles about many topics. However, the focus on most of the posts is to make money online. This is something I’ve been able to do with other sites but I have never tried it with a blog until seven months ago. That’s when I started a case study to see if you really can make money on the Internet with a personal blog. It has been a fascinating journey so far.
Starting with just Google AdSense, John Chow dot Com made $352.94 in its first month as a moneymaking blog. 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 and $7,011.05 last month.
With six months of non-stop growth, one has to wonder when the party will end. Well, I’m happy to report that the party is still going on!
Total Blog Income For March 2007: $8,545.25
I was actually skeptical about beating the February income because so much of it came from the 50% ReviewMe sale. There was no ReviewMe sale in March so advertisers had to pay full price for a review. However, it turns out advertisers like this blog so much, they buy with or without a sale. Here is the income breakdown.
- ReviewMe: $2,400
- Affiliate Sales: $1,962.20
- Text Links Ads: $1,308.06
- Google AdSense: $1,129.60
- Direct Ad Sales: $625.00
- Vibrant Media: $357.08
- Kontera: $296.12
- TTZ Media: $278.92
- FeedBurner Ads: $188.27
- Grand Total: $8,545.25
Blog traffic for March was 313,510 page views from 152,471 unique visitors, according to Google Analytics. This is a nice increase over February results but still off the 229,853 unique visitors and 360,967 page views posted back in October.
Blog expenses for the month was $480.75 for Google IM ads to other blogs and $197.45 in normal Google ads. John Chow dot Com is hosted on the TTZ Media servers for free. I estimate the hosting value at $25 per month. My friends at Bluefur.com has a $24.95 Enhanced Unix package that will easily handle the traffic this blog gets (use promo code JohnChowRock to get 15% off).
If you take the blog income and divide it by the blog page view, you get a site wide eCPM (effective cost per 1000) of $27.26. This is a crazy high rate for a blog. Most blogs are happy making a buck or two per 1000 page views. How much would your blog make if you can get $27.26 per 1000 page views? Here is how I do it.
Never Stop Tweaking
After posting over $7,000 of income last month, you figured I would leave well enough alone. In this business, you cannot stop tweaking – there is always something you can do to improve the blog. This something doesn’t mean just tweaking the ads. It also means tweaking the site layout and text. For example, I changed the title of the blog front page from John Chow dot Com The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul to Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com. This helped me rank number two on Google for search term “make money online.”
For this month, I am switching out the TTZ Media ads for Auction Ads. It will be interesting to see how they perform. I also plan to go after the keywords, make money on the Internet. Right now, I am at the middle of page two on the Google SERP. Expect to see me on page one this month. Never stop tweaking!
Add More Income Sources
You must never place all your eggs in Google’s basket. If all you have running on your blog is Google AdSense, you are losing out big time. The key to making money on a blog is the revenue mix. Add as many revenue sources as you can while still offering a good user experience.
A few days ago, I posted about the partnership I set up with Kontera that will allow smaller blogs to use their ContentLink service. If you haven’t signed up for that, you should. It’s a great opportunity for lower traffic sites to take advantage of a revenue source that is only available to high traffic sites. Fill out this application and enter “John Chow Kontera partnership” into the Comments field. The application is sent to my personal account representative. He will approve you based on your blog content and not your traffic level. I made almost $300 with Kontera last month and I know it will make way more this month because I only had it on for 12 days in February.
I had nine sources of blog income in March. If I only ran Google AdSense, I would have made just $1,129.60 instead of $8,545.25. At the very least I think you should sign up for ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Kontera. ReviewMe and TLA have fairly high entrance requirements, but anyone can sign up to Kontera through this blog.
For The First Time Visitor/Blogger
If you’re new to the world of blogging and want to know how to make money on the Internet, I recommend you read all the old posts from the Making Money From a Blog series. This will show you step-by-step, how I took this blog from zero to better than fulltime income. You should also check out the Top Posts. This is where I link to some of my best work with many articles talking about making money online.
I also recommend you read the comments left on this blog. John Chow dot Com has a very vibrant and active community of users with great ideas to share. Please consider joining it.
April is going to be a real interesting month. I have new ad sources running and AGLOCO is set to release their Viewbar. You think I’ll be able to beat March earnings? 
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{ 172 comments }
Nice to see you keep going up and up!
I was accepted for Kontera and I have a little bit of tweaking to do I think with it.
It’s also nice to see your ReviewMe reviews are steady and help with the majority of March’s income.
I also took advantage of the Kontera offer and have already seen some rewards. While not much compared to John’s numbers, I am seeing results already after only a few days.
In addition to that, I have already sold 3 of 6 TLA spots (although my prices are dirt cheap) and I’ve had a couple of ReviewMe reviews come in. Top that off with increasing AdSense earnings and my blog is finally starting to get a little traction.
Thanks John!
Someone’s messing up Technorati!
and it’s not John Chow….
I just visited and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Cant’ say I had their logo memorized though.
I memorized it.. I don’t see any changes
Congrats again on another record breaking month! John Chow, making money online whore.
Thank you,
Wesley Novack
http://DVDRentalForums.com
Yea me 2! it’s like the same parin;)
I posted just about all of those images.
http://www.derrich.com/2007/04/01/april-fools-fun-around-the-internet/
Rotatechin and Nicethroat rankings are very important these days..
Good news John from your corner.
I beat you in page views for the first time this March (I had 350,000 with 41,000 unique visitors). The humble result however is trhat My Adsense income for all that was just a little less thaty 400USD, compared to your 1,129.60USD Adsense income, while my Kontera for the same period was 31USD, compared to your 12-day Kontera income of 296.12USD.
Is there anything that I am not doing right? Please I need your invaluable and worthy advice.
I just placed Kontera on my blog. I hope it will provide a good option to Adsense.
I got into Kontara as well.
I’m still waiting on Kontera! I plan on making April the month to start making some cash!
– Scot
Planning on signing up for Kontera real soon, myself
Yea me 2!:) kontera has unique ads
Just signed up, I’m waiting for approval…
John,
why did you switch from intellitxt to konterra? esp as itxt was giving you $600-500 vs konterra’s $300?
IntelliTXT ran for the first 19 days. Kontera ran the last 12.
Congrats John, great month.
Regarding Kontera, I signed up and have been running it for a few days now.
My CTR on the ads is great and I like the number of clicks I generate. But the CPC for my Kontera ads is just awful, something 4 to 5 times lower then other CPC programs I run.
Kontera says something about giving it a couple of weeks for tweaking but is CPC likely to increase?
so how did they stack up? a review perhaps?
can you run both at the same time? or would that be too cluttered even if the tos allowed it?
Kontera already accepted me andmy blog has hardly any traffic! – and I didn’t do it through your thing John
Unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable.
I predict that you’ll hit $10k within two months; you seem to have a tremendous amount of positive momentum right now, and a great mix of advertising.
I concur. I think John will be able to hit that mark quite easily and beyond. Good on you John! Oh, and it’s nice to know you are still around here. I was really worried when I initially read your April Fool’s joke!
I wouldn’t be surprised if he hit 10k in two months either
I don’t say two months, i would bet that the next month john will hit the 10k mark
Yea, I’ll be waiting for that to happen as well..
It shouldn’t be too far away.
I agree with you, I think he will make it this month.
He will be getting a bit more traffic from Google with the new keyword ranking.
Yes… I think John can beat it
I think next month is a bit too soon for him to be hitting the 10k mark.
Once you start snowballing, it doesn’t get smaller
– Scot
What needs to happen for John to catapult his income over 10k is $500 review me’s again. For that to happen, he needs to get back in the top 100 of Technorati, but that shouldn’t be a problem he’s up to 133 already
you said so!! I mean john’s income grows every month!
I can’t wait until the AGLOCO viewbar comes out. I bet your monthly income jumps quite a bit
Keep up the great work!
Many of us could only wish to make as much as you do with a website and blog…
I wouldn’t classify Agloco income as blog income. Also when it does come out, that doesn’t mean money is going to be flowing right away either. Since the company is giving stock for view time, not money.
Agloco income is definitely classifies as blog income. Tell me, how many referrals would John have if it hadn’t been for this blog?
Where does john put his agloco links?
He has a category devoted to AGLOCO and he posts about it occasionally..
I don’t know… I’d put it as “miscellaneous other”, but hey it’s John’s site and he can do as he pleases
John,
Can you give me the link to your post about how you begin TechZone? I am reading it yesterday, but I forgot to bookmark it. Now, I couldn’t find it in your archive anymore.
Is this the post you were looking for?
Very nice article
Very interesting read!
That’s nice! nice article john!
I want to congratulate you john for such a great site!
Wow that´s great!
You are close to achieve the 10k for dot-com mogulness only with your blog
YEa.. I dunno with john! he just discusses his mogulness but still earns alot of greens!
John has some good posts about earning money.
Too busy to miss your April Fool joke, but glad to read your March’s numbers.
Excellent work John, soon you’re going to have to recreate your Internet whores list.
It’s Google whores and he’s got a long way ahead of him to get on that one
Yeah those guys earn at least 15 times more than John per month. John’s got a long way to go before then.
Should be 10k before…June?
Well he should be at Computex during June. Unless he doesn´t sleep, he won´t be able to post that much.
He has the help of his two other guest bloggers though.
That’s what his two guest posters are for, obviously! Notice John hasn’t really wrote any of the reviewme’s himself anymore?
With so many post popping out each day, you got to have a crew to help you out…
Yeah the guest writers are a great idea. Since he hasn’t included them in the costs for his blog, it looks like John is harvesting all of the profits while his guest writers do it for the publicity. Great move on both sides.
As others have said, he’s hired a few guest bloggers– w00t!
And they’re doing a fine job as well!
Wow, you are definitely going to see an increase in traffic now that you are #2 on google for keyword, “make money online”.
I bet your traffic will go up another 30-50%
Great job! I would love to get there some day.
John is number 1 for that now
I don’t think his traffic will go up 30 – 50% just from that term though. In fact I’m sure it won’t. Dont’ get me wrong, he’ll get a nice chunk of traffic out of the number one rating, but he gets a lot of traffic from other sources too.
I guess that 15% is closer to reality, but that’s still a huge number
I don’t know if it’d even be that high of an increase. But I don’t have the numbers memorized so I Can’t say for sure.
“Make money on the internet” should be interesting, if you look at his competition right now.
I wonder if his competition is aware of his intentions, I’m sure they are.
S
I think it would do up by 10-20% hehehehe
Congrats, John. You’ve managed to increase your income every month, which is always a plus.
I wish I could get a piece of the ReviewMe pie, but I haven’t been able to bag even 1 review. Perhaps I should lower my price just to prove that I’m capable of writing quality reviews. That’s 1 income source that I want to expand for next month.
As for TLA, I think the Google PR update will help me and a lot of other bloggers a lot. Moving from a PR4 to PR5 separates you from the rest, and places you within the medium pack of elite sites on the web. I am aggressively link building in anticipation of the next update. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!
Also, I’ve taking a few of your ramblings, and collected them into a useful post on making money with your blog. These lessons have allowed me to keep eCPM around $25 in March, but I haven’t maximized affiliate or TLA earnings. April shall be an exciting month for everyone!
Can’t wait until the PR update as well.
I guess it should be soon, by the end of this month.
I’d agree, have to keep the back links up.
Yea me 2! It wouldnt take too long for now
Well done, a $25 CPM is very respectable
Nice to see your income is still rising
Keep tweaking :p
Interesting results! I would have guessed much higher income for March (not that $8.5k isn’t enough!).
It would be great to see some faithful readers come up in the ranks due to the work of John Chow and his money making ideas (paging Dr. Harper?).
It seems that many people reading this blog are doing their own ‘make money online’ blogs and maybe miss the point of where the ideas should be applied.
John Chow makes money online by giving you great content and ideas about how to make money online, in an easily consumable package.
I think everyone likes to marvel at the feat of pulling in thousands of dollars a month from a mere blog, but most fail to see the connection between the great strategies he’s using, and how that relates to the dollars!
John is already there, he has the audience now and the search engine rankings to stay on top.
For us little guys, (myself included) I think it’s important to select a niche to blog about (in terms of money making online)For instance, on our blog, we generally focus on the down and dirty basics of developing sites for yourself.
This is perfectly put.
- S
well john, i’m glad you’re still here first of all, i acutally thought you were gone for good not realizing that it’s april 1st.
then, many congrats on achiving all these success within only 7 months.
and be well
Nice ‘stach
- S
Let’s see if you can do it in March too.
April?
- S
Congratulations (AGAIN) john. You’re our inspiration to keep fighting for a place in the high mountains of income
… and also to be…”evil”
I was wondering… Shouldn´t you count the expenses on Fine Dining as a cost? I know you would go out dining even if you didn´t blog about it. But if you think it, you still get a revenue over dining, so basicly is a cost. Am I right?
I guess that would be an additional pain for him..
How on earth are you going to track down every single cost of your meal or living expenses? 
I don’t think the tax man would see it that way
Well done for growing your business, despite the technorati issues!
If you can make a fortune off of the fabled Agloco viewer, then you should give up blogging and set up a fortune-telling business. According to my crystal ball, no way is Agloco going to swell bank accounts.
Yea, no one yet knows about the future.. What IF it does run for at least a few months? Hmm…
Yep, i must agree with that, for now it’s very difficult to guess what agloco will be.
If there is money to be made from AGLOCO (which is a possibility) it’s a long long time coming. You need the viewbar to come out (which isn’t anywhere in sight) and then beyond that you need to get the company to a point where they will actually give you something for the shares.
According to its owners, viewbar should come out until 16 April. Well just have to see if that will really happen.
It’s been delayed multiple times, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was delayed once again.
once again, thanks for the great info!
Looks awesome, John! Regarding your statement: DIVERSIFYING AND ADDING INCOME STREAMS — Why not resell monthly recurring services and make RECURRING commissions. Make money month after month for the life of the contract. Services like hosting and my own site would fit the bill of such recurring service partnerships. Hit me up for more info.
That’s what AGLOCO is for.
the “evil” strikes again
Nice work, and to think that the income is still steadily growing. It’s 10K in no time!
Next month, i bet next month
Amazing given the short amount of time you are doing this. Keep the good work and the evilness level
Hi
Nice numbers again John. can I ask how much you sell your text links for? $1308 is a lot considering it’s after TLA take their 50%
EB
Simple math…count up the number of TLA links on his site and divide :p
Well John, you never fail to amaze me. That is a nice chunk of cash for your side job/hobby. Keep up the good work and I can’t wait to see next months.
Adam
Good Jobs John, Congratulations ^_*
Im actually surprised, I thought the numbers would be a little higher… but then again as you mentioned, the ReviewMe from last month was a big chunk of your blog income
When his review me price sits at $500,he’ll break the 10k barrier.
He’ll break the barrier with or without it..
congrats on the revenue boost john!
$8.5k, you’re incredible John – that’s more than twice, perhaps three or four times the average income – I only just hit the $550 on my blog
$550 is nothing to scoff at.
- S
True, but sadly that’s income of paid blogging only, with my 7k hits last month, regular ads aren’t quite worth bothering yet, while John made quite a big part of the income without too much time being put into it
congratulation John
from : poor blogger
I think I just won an argument with my partner over the growth levels of your site
$8.5 k and 360k hits? OMFG.. I wish I have that kind of high traffic too…..
Nope, October is still the record!
John, will you reach 10K within the next month?
What happened to having another ‘Guess my income contest’! Will you have one for April?
Well, i hope so…
I tried out Kontera ads last month on 2 of my websites and made $90 in 7 days (check my blog for details).
The problem was:
a) my visitors weren’t too happy about the ads.
b) it affected my Adsense earnings.
c) I hated how it make my sleek webpages look.
So in the end, I removed the ads.
It’s a shame that Feedburner ads are so hard to monetize..
Yea.. you only earn couple of bucks with that
The benefit of feed subscribers is they have direct impact on your reviewme price, also you can do evil things to get your subscribers to visit the site
Yes, but it requires some tweaking…time…
I think you’ll see more results if you put some effort in making the feed readers come to your site once in a while to comment or participate in contests.
Yes, I know. there are tons of ways to get readers to come to your site.. I was talking about Feedburner ads individually. Anyway, I won’t even try Feedburner ads until I have a large readership…
always nice to see the growth of this blog over the last few months. I think John is showing us the way, with his trial and errors, a newcomer can quickly see what works and what dosent.
Kudos.
That’s ridiculously inspirational. Though I’d never expect to make anywhere near that much money, any extra amount to pay off my dads medical bills would be fantastic. Perhaps I’ll give it a look.
Just imagine how much money he makes off of his main TTZ network.
Soon we will have a whole new category of mogul: the blog mogul..
Thanks John for being so open about your blog profits. Always great to see exactly what is possible at the high end. How about doing a comparison post? Find another blogger willing to share similar data that started at the same time, then compare their traffic and profits to yours and discuss the reason for the differences. Would be highly educational for some of your readers (me). Just a thought. Thanks.
Good idea, find someone who makes less than you and make fun of him
Morning,
I definitely agree with mixing up the income sources, and not only using google adsense. The thing I find most spoken about in my realm is that people are worried about adding new income sources, as most places have a minimum payout value of say $50, and it’s not often that easy to target that amount!
I recently signed up for Kontera via your blog, and am hoping to see a little income from it..
Regards,
Chris
I guess the harder thing to do is to get accepted as publishers for smaller sites/ blogs. That is why most people are just keeping to adsense.
I see a lot of low-traffic blogs accepted by kontera (without John’s program). It’s a problem to profit from programs like Text Link Ads or ReviewMe that insist on a high PR and traffic..
Yes Kontera / Intellitxt was the only network that didn’t allow low end traffic sites. That problem is solved.
TLA , Review Me and Affiliate sale links are all available to most moderate sized blogs.
John, your’s is one of the first blogs I read when I got introduced to this back in November. You’re a great inspiration!
Awesome!!
Way to 10k.
Since nobody else has asked…can you lend me five bucks?
Kumiko
xo
At this point, by the time your daughter grows up, she might have enough saved up from this blog’s revenue to never work
Bill Gates made his kids work in fast food joints. Why would John be any different
I agree as well. Kids must definitely learn how to work their way up in society.
Do some of you people just live on this blog??
John, did you notice you have a penis enlargement advertising right on top of your sponsored links?
lol. And it’s one of his featured site.
The top one, that is too!
John doesn’t look at the site, he looks at the offer. I bet that penis enlargement site paid a large sum for the link…
HAHA i might have to turn that one down if it were me – and I’m not one to turn down money very often.
But penis enlargement just doesn’t seem to fit on a blog like this , eh?
Take a look at review batches, I saw a few far more disturbing sites than this one..
Nice profit John! I’m only trailing you by about $8,540!
Wow, very impressive John. I wonder how your income will change once the AGLOCO viewbar is released, which should be in a couple of weeks.
Even if the viewbar isn’t pushed back even farther, it will be a long time before it actually starts generating revenue.
Congrats, John.
A few notes:
- Looks like if you hadn’t added ReviewMe to the mix, your income would have been pretty much flat from the previous month.
- For me, RMXDirect turned out to be a bust. Overall, VERY low eCPM (the top was about $0.36) and I notice that despite your positive review you don’t use it here.
- On the other hand AuctionAds is doing fairly well for me. In the past I’ve tried: Allposters.com, Sideshowtoys.com, Netflix.com, Clearplay.com and probably a few others without generating ANY money (my site is TV/movie-related). AuctionAds took about 10 days to start generating commissions, but now I’m at about a 2.5% CTR and about $5/day on an average of 6,200 impressions a day.
Except for the food/restaurant items, I continue to enjoy your blog.
Vic
Congrats! I’ve been running Auction Ads for a few weeks now and see about a 1.5% ctr, I’m sure it could use a bit of tweaking as well. I’m also now running Kontera ads since Friday, thank you for hooking up us bloggers who wouldn’t normally be able to get in.
Strange but true, that the king himself- SHOEMONEY, was here this minute, I saw his avatar on the MyBlogLog widget.
I am sure he came either to check how his Auction Ads was placed and doing. Or came to read the March blog income recap.
Which ever is the case, let’s welcome King Shoemoney to JohnChow Dot Com
Long live Queen Shoemoney
I wonder if auction ads will do better than the hot deals affiliate links he had posted.
Keep your tweaking John. I don’t care how much your blog makes, it is the tweaking and your analysis of the results that I keep reading it. If your blog made a 100 grand a month and you didn’t write about new blogging revenue techniques, I wouldn’t be reading it.
I will be interested to see your experience with AuctionAds. I qualified for them, but I didn’t make one penny in two weeks. My blog is small, but I am able to pull over $50/month from it, none from AuctionAds though. I switched to Chitika to try them out just recently.
Maybe your style of blog will work better with AuctionAds.
It looks like Auction Ads are not very profitable for smaller blogs..
..but who knows? Maybe it’ll be profitable in the future..
I am still not getting any single cents from Auction ads yet. I guess it’s time for me to be dugg! wahaha!
Lemme see….
WOW
http://newmozillafirefox.info/
I will be interested to see how AgLoco pulls through for you, I have heard from some people that Agloco is going to pay with stocks though, which will end up worthless.
Also, I have yet to see YOUR entry into my contest John, don’t want to make yourself appear evil ?
http://nick.techboggle.com/contest-1-photoshop-it-evil-john-chow-10-prize
man….., u got a whole lot of ppl here…,
Good jobs!
John you are evil + genius!
http://whono.blogspot.com
These earnings are really inspirational to me, and everybody i’m sure.
Oh my. That’s pretty intense.
Impressive.
I broke my record too last month.
Agloco’s gonna release their viewbar in _______ (fill in the blank) . . . what’s really going on John? are they just messing with us?
Pretty impressive. I think your ReviewMe requests are going to keep coming – esp. when people compare the effort that you go to compared to ShoeMoney & ShandyKing with their reviews.
You are really evil john
And keep rock
Fabulous month John. Watching these earning reports gives me a nice jolt each month to stay on top of what I’m doing. I appreciate it.
Ok, let’s see if this post shows up. Third try… of course by now I have nothing to say as I don’t want to type my comment a THIRD time!
Vic
John
You continue to be one of the few bloggers willing to publish very detailed breakdowns of their earned blog income and for that I salute you.
hey john,
can i run text-link-ads with adsense? will that violate any TOS?
thanks
Great work John. Glad to see you’ve increased your income from last month. Very impressive…. so much so, that you have inspired me enough to get off my butt and do my own blog.
Hopefully I can have as much success as you.
Thanks for the tips. I love reading your blog. It is very informative.