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I never started John Chow dot Com to make money. This was just a place for me to post my miscellaneous ramblings about whatever was on my mind. While I cover a number of topics, from car to fine dining, the main focus of this blog is about making money on the Internet.

Back in September of last year, I began a case study to see if money can be made from a blog. Starting with just Google AdSense, John Chow dot Com made $352.94 in its first month as a monetized blog. The next month, revenue 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, and a record $3,440.66 last month.

With only 28 days, February is the shortest month of the year. However, that did not stop this blog from posting its biggest income figure ever.

Total Blog Income For February 2007: $7,011.05

feb2007.png

In just six months, I have taken this blog from zero to well beyond what many people would consider a good full time income. How did I do this? We’ll begin by breaking down the February earnings so you can see where the income came from.

  • ReviewMe: $2,250.00
  • Text Links Ads: $1,162.50
  • Affiliate Sales: $1,005.00
  • Google AdSense: $977.60
  • Vibrant IntelliTXT: $516.98
  • Direct Ad Sales: $400.00
  • AdVolcano: $375.00
  • TTZ Media: $224.17
  • FeedBurner Ads: $99.80
  • Grand Total: $7011.05

Blog traffic for February was 266,641 page views from 127,614 unique visitors, according to Google Analytics. That’s an 11,067 page view increase from January (which had three more days) but still well off the 229,853 unique visitors and 360,967 page views posted back in October.

Blog expenses for the month was $418.94 in Google “IM” Ads to Darren Rowse and other bloggers. If you take the blog income and divide it by the page views, you get a site wide eCPM of $26.30. That is approaching NYTimes.com territory. Most blogs are happy making a buck or two per 1000 page views. How much would your blog make if you can get $26.30 per 1000 page views? Here is how I did it.

Find Your Big Moneymakers

ReviewMe (aff) has gone from last place to first place as the blog’s biggest moneymaker. Thanks to some great advertisers’ testimonials (here, here, here, and here, just to list a few), and a 50% ReviewMe coupon for February, this blog had it best ReviewMe month ever - over $1,000 of reviews orders came in on the last day.

The other big moneymakers were Text Link Ads (aff), affiliates sales and, everybody’s favorite, Google AdSense. Direct sales has gone down because I don’t really do it. All my direct advertisers came to me; I didn’t go out looking for them. As stated in my Vancouver Sun interview, I rather produce content and let the ad networks handle the ad sales. However, if an advertiser wishes to come to me directly, I’m happy to work with them.

Making money from a blog is all about experimenting and finding what revenue sources work best. You have to be constantly mixing and remixing the revenue mix to find the balance between maximum blog income and a good user experience.

Ask For A Better Deal

As your blog traffic increases, you can ask for a better deal from your ad networks. Just because the network say they’ll give you 50% or 60% doesn’t mean you have to accept it. I was able to get an increased revenue share from a few advertising networks that I deal with.

This is one of the advantage of building a big site - they get special deals that smaller site cannot get. In almost everything else, when you start producing huge numbers, the unit price gets smaller (that’s why a Ferrari cost more than a Honda). In web publishing, the higher your numbers, the higher your unit price. Read Big Sites Rules, Small Sites Drool for more information.

For The First Time Visitor/Blogger

If you’re a new blogger wondering where to go after reading all this, I recommend you read all the old posts from the Making Money From a Blog series. This way you can see step-by-step, how I got this blog from zero to hero. 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 on the Internet.

I also recommend you read the comments left on this blog. John Chow dot Com has a very vibrant community of users with great ideas to share. Please consider joining it.

The Winner Of The Guess My Income Contest

I held a little contest yesterday asking readers to guess my February income level. There were over 200 entries. The winner had to come closest to the actual income figure without going over.

The winner is Matt608 from Successful Online Money Making. Matt’s guess of $6,829.00 came the closest. It was good to see that I beat nearly everyone’s guess. What was your guess and how much did I beat you by?

The question everyone will be asking now is, can I beat February? Well, just like last month, I don’t recommend betting against me. :twisted:

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.

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    268 Comments »

    Comment by Promotional Pens
    2007-03-01 11:59:42
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Congarts John !!

    Keep up the good work!!

    Comment by Mr. Stockshaker.com
    2007-03-01 17:29:04
    MyAvatars 0.2

    John - you deserve it buddy!

    But you deserve it because of the community that has been built right here.

    Congrats to all of you! I love reading your comments here as much as I like reading John’s postings!

    Keep up the good work all of you!

     
    Comment by Ronald Lewis
    2007-03-01 21:40:32
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Congrats indeed. I’m not surprised by the figure, as I came in second with my estimate of $7,325 — just $313.00 over.

    Finally, congrats to Matt!

    I’ll put in my bid for March: $11,068

    Comment by Jonix
    2007-03-02 16:37:10
    MyAvatars 0.2

    If the value of reviewme reviews continues to go up, i’ll say not 11, but $12,125 .
    Let’s see what happens :)

     
    Comment by Jez
    2007-03-05 09:45:54
    MyAvatars 0.2

    I think the fact reviews were half price attracted a lot of reviewMe business, I reckon he will do a similar amount next month, maybe around 8k :?:

     
     
     
    Comment by derrich
    2007-03-01 12:00:30
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Wow…I was way off.

    Comment by ilker
    2007-03-01 14:25:01
    MyAvatars 0.2

    That.. is amazing!! It is a great post though, I bookmarked it in case I decide to make money from my blog one day :wink:

     
    Comment by Saman Sadeghi
    2007-03-01 14:35:45
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Me too! I suspected a modest increase but that was a huge jump in income!

     
    Comment by lyndonmaxewell
    2007-03-01 16:02:48
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Superb jump! Exponential returns to be expected, yea? That was truely great work, John.

     
     
    Comment by Matt Coddington
    2007-03-01 12:00:54
    MyAvatars 0.2

    You rich bastard.

    Comment by Ali
    2007-03-01 12:03:52
    MyAvatars 0.2

    I second that motion!

    Good for you though John. Now hire me!

    Comment by ilker
    2007-03-01 14:30:53
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Hire me too :twisted:

     
    Comment by Saman Sadeghi
    2007-03-01 14:37:45
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Just goes to show how far dedication can take you!

    And and evil heart :twisted:

    Comment by Jez
    2007-03-05 09:48:06
    MyAvatars 0.2

    “Just goes to show how far dedication can take you!”

    And the know how and network, John has been in this industry a long time. If you consider the post that got a lot of us hooked “Biggest Adsense Whores”, you cannot get that kind of material without being on the inside track, or can you???

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    Comment by Matthew
    2007-03-02 11:09:18
    MyAvatars 0.2

    lol hire me three!

    Comment by Jonix
    2007-03-02 16:43:29
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Hire me four, lol

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    Comment by Matthew Berman
    2007-03-01 12:01:31
    MyAvatars 0.2

    congrats

     
    Comment by James Gill
    2007-03-01 12:01:53
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Thats impressive! :shock:

    Very well done to you John.

    James
    http://www.jamesgill.me.uk

     
    Comment by Chris
    2007-03-01 12:02:43
    MyAvatars 0.2

    I was about $3k off.

    $10k next month is my best :cool:

    Comment by Chris
    2007-03-01 12:07:52
    MyAvatars 0.2

    bet*

    Comment by Kalle
    2007-03-01 13:35:15
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Nice way of increasing comment count(joking) :lol:

    Comment by Chris
    2007-03-01 13:39:32
    MyAvatars 0.2

    :eek: I wouldn’t do such a thing!

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    Comment by Jonix
    2007-03-02 16:44:55
    MyAvatars 0.2

    of course not :mrgreen:

     
     
     
     
     
    Comment by Jonix
    2007-03-01 12:07:04
    MyAvatars 0.2

    congratulations john, much much way up that my thoughts about the final earnings :) The reviewMe indeed was a great importance in this money cake.

    Comment by Saman Sadeghi
    2007-03-01 14:40:55
    MyAvatars 0.2

    I am still on the lowest rung of the ReviewMe ladder, but I don’t want to review any ‘ol site just for better opertunities. I feel like I own my readers better quality then a review of a lame site.

    Comment by Jonix
    2007-03-01 16:20:31
    MyAvatars 0.2

    I agree with that. Well for my site i don’t want any reviewMe reviews, neither is a blog that could have something like that. But i’ve other projects and new ones, were reviewME could be a great opportunity, but i must think very well first. If i don’t like to read most of the reviews in other blogs, should i do the same to the readers of my blog? I suppose not. In my country we’ve a saying that is very wise to this “don’t do to your neighbour what you don’t want them to do to you” (something like that, translated). I like some of john reviews, but the last ones, was too much, only one or two were interesting. I know that reviews give him lots of money, but is what we said yesterday, it is us (readers) that make the success of a blog. People can write the best thing in the world, but if there is no readers, that thing will be never known. John, don’t get me wrong, but please, don’t “give us” so many reviews, or at least don’t do reviews about sites that don’t give us some “adicional value”.

    Comment by Josh Rives
    2007-03-01 17:54:40
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Agreed. Yeah your income shot up, but how sustainable is it. Will people really return to read a bunch of reviews that you are getting paid for? That doesn’t seem to be the niche for this site.

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    Comment by Jonix
    2007-03-02 16:46:38
    MyAvatars 0.2

    We can read reviews Josh, but they need to be more “target”. There were too many reviews that, well, doesn’t fit here at all. I hope that the next ones will be more targeted

     
     
     
     
    Comment by lyndonmaxewell
    2007-03-01 16:04:56
    MyAvatars 0.2

    I guess that the 50% discount at Reviewme was one of the deciding factor for you this month. It formed almost 1/3 of the total income.

     
     
    2007-03-01 12:09:45
    MyAvatars 0.2

    The key thing to notice here is that Adsense is not the only way to make money from your websites.
    Congratulations. You are indeed a lucky bastard. :wink:

    Comment by Saman Sadeghi
    2007-03-01 14:42:58
    MyAvatars 0.2

    John has said that for a while, don’t put all your eggs in one basket!

     
    Comment by lyndonmaxewell
    2007-03-01 16:07:40
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Yea, and what did you get? Multiple streams of income, all comparative to one another. You proved that there is not one BUT 9 ways (and more in future) to earn money from blogging!

    Comment by Jonix
    2007-03-01 16:22:11
    MyAvatars 0.2

    there is more, like PTR or cash emails, rmx media (that john talked yesterday), and many many more :) You just need to try and see what best fit your site/blog

     
     
     
    Comment by Ali
    2007-03-01 12:10:17
    MyAvatars 0.2

    You didn’t post your advertising expenses.

    Comment by Ali
    2007-03-01 12:16:20
    MyAvatars 0.2

    now you did.

     
    Comment by lyndonmaxewell
    2007-03-01 16:10:37
    MyAvatars 0.2

    For the traffic that came to it, I guess it was well worth the advertising expenses, yea? Comparing the expenses to the overall income generated, it is a total winner. Profit earned? Few hundred percent over.

    Comment by Jonix
    2007-03-01 17:32:14
    MyAvatars 0.2

    yes. In a good business you allways need to reinvest some money to climb another step in the stairs of success.

     
     
     
    Comment by Leftblank
    2007-03-01 12:11:02
    MyAvatars 0.2

    I’m shocked John, it’s simply amazing how much you’ve made. I wouldn’t expect such a huge growth compared to your previous months, but it seems like you’ve done so nice work.

    You’re a true inspirer, very nice!

     
    Comment by Gary Lee
    2007-03-01 12:13:24
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Great Job John! I think you’re truly becoming one of the cinderella stories of the internet! Zero to Hero! Feel Good Story . . . whatever you want to call it! Keep it up!

    Comment by Marc
    2007-03-01 12:34:13
    MyAvatars 0.2

    I’d hardly call John a Cinderella story…

    John’s been around the net for long enough.

    Comment by Gary Lee
    2007-03-01 12:43:54
    MyAvatars 0.2

    I know he’s been around, but in regards to starting his own blog, that’s a pretty fast pace he’s on, right?

    Comment by Courtney Tuttle
    2007-03-01 14:43:34
    MyAvatars 0.2

    That’s an unbelievably fast pace. I doubt if it’s ever been done that quickly by anyone!

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    Comment by Saman Sadeghi
    2007-03-01 14:46:49
    MyAvatars 0.2

    More like “Zero to Evil”!

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    Comment by lyndonmaxewell
    2007-03-01 16:12:38
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Yea, and I am pretty sure that this is neither the end of it, or the limit of what one can earn. I guess expectations can be running high now, but who knows how much he can earn this month as well?

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    Comment by Samer Bazzi
    2007-03-01 12:19:15
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Great, congrads,

    You really are a class act and it shows.

    Keep up the good work.

     
    Comment by Shawn Knight
    2007-03-01 12:22:01
    MyAvatars 0.2

    I was “only” off by about $2200.00 lol

    Congrats on yet another successful month, and I have no doubt that you will surpass this in March… granted, AGLOCO releases the Viewbar as promised :mrgreen:

    Comment by lyndonmaxewell
    2007-03-01 16:15:33
    MyAvatars 0.2

    When and if AGLOCO does come out as promised, and the number of referrals that John has, what is stopping John from surpassing his current monthly income many times over? I can almost smell the dollars in the air.. :shock:

     
     
    Comment by Blain Reinkensmeyer
    2007-03-01 12:22:25
    MyAvatars 0.2

    John, that is totally sweet!! Mad props to you for making it happen so fast, talk about a sweet job :mrgreen:

    Comment by Courtney Tuttle
    2007-03-01 14:44:14
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Blain how does your blog do? Are you just starting out?

    Comment by lyndonmaxewell
    2007-03-01 16:19:40
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Well, you should have seen the review on the site by Michael Kwan. I totally agree with Blain. Sweet, mad props.

     
     
     
    Comment by Joseph.C
    2007-03-01 12:23:46
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Wow!..thats great Johns….you give people like me hope.

     
    Comment by Cory OBrien
    2007-03-01 12:25:43
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Wow, that’s quite a figure. Congratulations. Is it too early to start guessing for March? I see 5 digits in your very near future.

     
    Comment by Hannes Johnson
    2007-03-01 12:27:53
    MyAvatars 0.2

    Wow! :shock: That is amazing… congrats. I knew you would beat January by a long shot but I was still $1600 off.

    Yeah, having a big site certainly has its benefits - you rich jerk… no wait, that’s probably trademarked :)

    But I don’t think you’ll double your income this mont