Make Money Online - May 2007
written by John Chow
This quest to make money online with a blog has been an amazing journey. What started off as a personal home page has turn into a five figure per month operation. I never intended the blog to ever make money. However, because one of the subjects I blog about is how to make money by blogging, I monetized John Chow dot Com as part of a case study to show what can be done if one pulls out off the stops.
Monetized back in September of 2006, the blog made just $352.94 using nothing but Google ads. In October, the blog income went to $1,361.64 because I added more revenue sources. The blog income continued to grow: $2,139.93 in November, $2,790.05 in December, $3,440.66 in January, $7,011.05 February and $8,545.25 march and a record $11,702.66 last month.
After eight months of non stop growth, I am happy to report that the blog has finally experienced its first decline in advertising income.
Total Blog Income For May 2007: $10,559.40
Why am I’m glad for the income drop? It’s simple. When you keep showing month after month of non stop growth, people have trouble relating to you (they think you’re Google, or something like that). Now, everyone can see that I’m just human. Here is the income break down.
- Affiliate Sales: $2,485.74
- ReviewMe: $2,000
- Direct Ad Sales: $1,650.00
- Text Link Ads: $1,521.07
- Google AdSense: $1,246.50
- Kontera: $1,000.00
- FeedBurner: $300.53
- Buy Me A Beer: $194.65
- Subscription: $110.00
- TTZ Media: $50.90
- Grand Total: $10,559.40
Blog traffic was a record high 374,255 page views from 187,324 unique visitors. This finally beats the traffic level set back in the Digg infested month of October 2006. The blog is also experiencing record high RSS subscriptions (please subscribe if you haven’t done so).
Blog advertising expenses for the month was $522.14 for SiteMatch Google ads and $326.40 for normal Google ads. Hosting for John Chow dot Com is provided by BlueFur. The blog is hosted on a BlueFur Xlite dedicated server which cost $169.95 per month. Use coupon code JohnChowRocks for 15% off.
Looking at the revenue number, you can see most things went up but there was a huge drop in ReviewMe income - they are no longer my number one income source. I also experimented with a few other income sources in May. I added a Buy Me a Beer plugin for readers to send me beer money via PayPal. Surprisingly, it worked really well, raising almost $200 in nine days. What didn’t go over as well was the offer to remove nofollow in comments for $10 a month. Only 11 readers signed up for that. But that’s OK because you never know until you try. Making money by blogging is all about experimenting.
Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com E Book
Every time I post a monthly recap, I get a ton of email from people asking how I did it and how they can do it too. Most of these questions I have already answered in the blog. However, not many people want go through over 100 pages of blog posts to find the answers. To better serve readers wanting to make money by blogging, I have created an E book on the subject. Best of all, it cost zero dollars (and comes with a 1 million times money back guaranteed).
Find out what I am doing right now by following me on Twitter! If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.
(13 votes, average: 4.54 out of 5)
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Congrats on the ongoing success of this case study. The Buy Me A Beer plugin is my favorite, as it takes a fun twist on the simple donation process. I’ve only netted two beers on my blog, but hey, thats a good start!
Cheers!
John, Shawn,
Other than TTZ and this blog, do you have any plans to launch any Internet Startups of your own?
A blog of this income level is very nice but how long can this last when most of your readers gradually fade away after they found out that making this level of money blogging is rather rare? I would be real interested about what other kind of venture you have an interest on.
Congrats for your great month though.
Jimmy
I am doing other stuff but it’s offline and not online.
Fair enough. Wish you the best
John just keep at it, you’re doing great. I’m sure you have past the one million dollar mark in earnings by now.
I main source of online income comes from my computer hardware review site OCIA.net… similar to John and his tech site, The Tech Zone.
I have been running my site for six years and its going stronger than ever, so I don’t think it is necessary to look into other money making options at this point.
I think John’s just being wise, he’s diversifying his income sources! Not a bad idea!
I think making money advices are great, but when someone like john gets to be so popular, it doesn’t matter what he blogs about.
Britney Spears needed to learn how to sing, dance, and entertain people to get attention. When she became famous, it didn’t matter what she did. Everything and anything she did still got people’s attention.
Another thing, I think the reason why adsense clicks are going down is because feedburner is increasing. As more and more people are reading his articles else where, less of them are coming to the site to click on ads. Thats just my 2cents
I agree with you Andy. I think the best the thing to do to increase ad profits is to not show the full articles on the syndication. But then again you can’t be too greedy otherwise you’ll loose readers.
Jimmy,
You wrote: ” … but how long can this last when most of your readers gradually fade away after they found out that making this level of money blogging is rather rare …”
We need to be diligent students of content and creativity. That is the secret of John’s prosperous blogging.
I disagree with your scary statement about fading readers and impossible blogging income. If content brought the readers, content would sustain and increase readership.
Don’t deify John, he is (human, just as he stated above), only among the pace-setters in the blogosphere.
He is not the first to climb to that elite 5-figure blogging income. More bloggers are rising and would climb towards that level.
Go back and study his income pattern of the last nine months, you would notice pluralism and diversity, as an effective weapon for breaking the mediocrity mould, (which you feared) in blogging.
But that’s the point, John is showing us how to make some money! He never said every blog can make this much! I don’t think he even realized it could make this much himself! Personally, I think it’s the ‘how’ that’s much more interesting!
More ‘how’ John!
Personally I hate the ‘buy me a beer’ pluggin.
I think it’s really tacky.
John, I was wondering, do you think your ReviewMe income has gone down because you raised your price?
Also please could you show us a breakdown of where your traffic comes from internationally?
Thanks and best wishes,
G
Most probably from the US but I would love to know those minute details.
Check out Alexa for that info. It may not be accurate completely, but will certainly give you enough info.
Kenneth
I think most of his traffic comes from USA and Canada.
$194 for beer funds — not bad at all, John.
ya thats a great plugin and way more beer than you can drink
It’s really a nice touch! Makes it feel donating is fun! That will reward the giver as well! It’s more fun to give ’something’ than money!
I guess that your reviews are just a little TOO honest for some would-be purchasers! But that’s okay. Integrity matters more to your readers!
Thanks, Good luck in Taipei!
As an after thought, stripping out the reviewME reviews, you still did better!
I’ll be publishing my ‘less than spectacular’ results in the next few minutes! So don’t laugh guys! But I think I’m making a start!
Maybe he finally capped the number of review mes? We havent been seeing that many lately.
Yeah I remember last month there were tons. This month I can’t remember past 3 or 4.
His price for a review may be above what most websites starting out would bear. Also, he tends to give ‘real’ advice, not advertising schpeel, so some ‘advertisers’ may not like the tone he took, or what he said. Personally, I think that makes the review more valuable not less, as a critical review will help readers too.
Nice stats, John. You did better than I expected given that I haven’t seen nearly as many paid reviews this month as last. Congrats!
What happened to the TTZ Media ads? They have become your worst performing block!
The TTZ Media ads were not running last month. I had a few embedded into some blog posts, but that was it.
You should mention that in your post, don’t want to give your company a bad name!
Man, I really hate to hear about the slow down in ad revenue. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we see you in the soup lines down at the Salvation Army
Seriously though, congrats on your successful blog.
Now if we only knew why Darren blocked you…
Any reason for the drop off in ReviewMe ads?
Also - you used to have people write some of them but that doesn’t seem to occur as much anymore.
It’s summer. Advertising is generally lower.
But it was the first full month at $400/review. Maybe that hurt$$ you also.
Is the Google Adsense moslty clicks(x%) or you have CPM/referral(Firefox)?
I dont understand why advertising is lower in summer. Maybe you could please tell me or it would make a great post.
Kids are out of school, people play outside more, families goes on vacations.
Was it reviewme that put a limit of 10 paid reviews a month? Seems that could be the reason. The numbers seem to add up.
$400 - 50% = 200
200 * 10 = 2000
I broke $500 in revenue this month from blogging, I do not think it will hold steady.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard any mention of your earnings with your blog. $500 a month is still pretty damn impressive.
I generaly prefer not to talk about my earnings because I don’t blog about making money
This month a bunch of “we don’t pay until you pass $XXX” services all passed their cash thresholds.
Another $3500 and I’ll have the debts I need to pay off gone!
The real kicker is that I need to acquire a PSP for some video game reviews and I don’t want to spend $170 to buy one! Call me cheap but I don’t think a PSP is worth that much.
The reason I need one is that I am going to be getting some pre-release PSP games to review and talk about! So, I need a PSP!!!
Borrowing can help!
i think you should go and buy it on credit…write a review and retun it the next day…
Actually John does it every month. These are the feb earnings, and you can find others in ‘related posts’
HERE
It was in response to HMTK Steve’s comment. I know John blogs it each month.
Sorry. I need to read the comments properly from now
congrats man!..
Yeah $10,000 isn’t a setback by any standards.
Still John, $10k is a lot, I would be laughing if I were you! Congrats!
You can see my earnings for this month (though not solely dependent on my blog, and significantly less than you of course).
If you think 10k is a lots for John, you are forgetting something. THE TECH ZONE IS HIS MAIN SOURCE, AND AS PER SOURCES, ITS WAYYYYY MORE THAN JOHN CHOW DOT COM
Sorry, but I have no idea what you just meant or said.
I meant John Cohow dot com is probably a very small source of income if you compare it to what John is getting from his review site TTZ
Ah, yes. But still, I’m just saying $10k a month is not that bad at all for a blog.
Congrats on your success and thanks for sharing your success and even the not so great successes with your readers. You make it an enjoyable learning experience.
Thought you were going to say something like “This blog has served its purpose. I won’t be updating it anymore and instead blah blah blah.”
Glad you’ll still be around.
He’s pulled a similar stunt on April Fool’s day. And that was probably the first time JC DOT COM got 150+ comments