I hit a couple of blogging milestones on Sunday. Along with setting a new one-day blog traffic record, I also set a new one-day blog income record. I posted the The World’s Most High-Tech Urinal on Saturday and it very quickly made the Digg front page. Then on Sunday, Slashdot, Fark, Engadget, Gizmodo, eBaum’s World, USA Today, and a ton of other blogs picked up the story. That helped propel the blog to a record 57,426 unique visitors and 64,305 page views. Here’s a break down on what all this means.
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Record Blog Earnings
Back in September I posted The Internet’s Biggest Google Whore and set a one-day traffic record of 55,856 page views, which translated to $95.13 in blog income. Since then, I’ve been tweaking the blog’s advertising setup to increase its performance. Here’s the Sunday breakdown.
- Google AdSense: $160.18
- Vibrant IntelliTXT: $157.86
- TTZ Media: $99.49
- Total: $417.53
That is quite an improvement over the last big traffic day. I did just 8,449 extra page views, yet the blog income went up $322.40. This is the power of tweaking. It is not enough to just slap on a few Google ads and expect them to perform right out the gate. You have to play around with colors, placements, number of ads, etc.
Breaking down the AdSense number is truly revealing. I have always stated that the best performing AdSense unit is the 300×250 square. However, I have never given exact income figures on each ad units because I’m not sure how Google feels about me revealing that kind of information. Well, I’ve decided to reveal that information. If Google doesn’t like it, they can tell me to remove it. Of the $160.18 the Google ads made, $123.44 of it came from the 300×250 AdSense unit. If you’re not running a square ad unit on your blog, you’re losing out big time!
I am very happy with the performance of the TTZ Media shopping ads. They outperformed (by over 3 times) the Google 468 that uses to be there. I was barely getting 50 cents eCPM out of the bottom Google AdSense unit. Sometimes, in order to increase overall revenue, you need to remove or replace a low performing ad unit. The bottom Google 468 wasn’t cutting it. Replacing it with a TTZ Media ad was a logical move.
Taking the Sunday blog income and dividing by the Sunday page views results in a site wide eCPM of $6.49. That is significantly higher than the $3.77 posted in my October Recap. So far this month, site wide eCPM is running at $8.50, and that doesn’t include the income from text link sales. As I’ve stated before, this is the power of tweaking. I now make more than twice as much for the same level of traffic.
Slashdot Still Rules
Digg maybe the new kid in town, but when it comes to sending an ungodly amount of traffic, very few sites can beat Slashdot.
Looking at the above Google Analytics pie chart, you can see that Slashdot accounted for 33.35% of all visitors - well ahead of Digg’s 15.24%. eBaum’s World beating out Digg for 2nd place was the big surprise. I had no idea that site can send so much traffic. However, Slashdot still sent more traffic than eBaum and Digg put together.
While Digg now gets up to twice the traffic of Slashdot, Slashdot will still send you more traffic if you get a story on their front page. The reason for this is simple. Digg has hundreds of stories travel through their front page everyday. Slashdot has just a dozen or so. That means a Slashdot story stays on the front page a lot longer - sometimes more than a full day. Depending on how fast Digg is moving, a Dugg story can fall off the front page within a few hours.
Unique Content Drives Traffic
I get asked so many times, “How do I get traffic to my blog?” The answer is so simple – write unique content! Look at what one unique article did for this blog; 15,000+ page views on Saturday, 64,000+ page views on Sunday, 30,000+ page views so far today. Unique content drives traffic. Unique content will get you slashdotted and Dugg. Unique content will bump your RSS to 4000+. Sure, you can build a blog with free articles or by recycling news, but the chances of making $400 per day doing that is pretty slim.
Creating unique content isn’t that hard. You just need to be creative and keep your eyes open. I came up with the high-tech urinal story when I saw a small burp about it in Maclean’s magazine. It was interesting enough for me to track down the manufacturer so I can get those photos and video to write the story. I wrote up the story in 15 minutes and it will probably make over $1,000 before all is said and done. That’s not bad for 15 minutes of work.
The Numbers Could Have Been Better
Weekends are notoriously bad for traffic. The best traffic day is Monday, which was the day the Google Whore article hit. Even with the help of every major news sites, my urinal story only beat the whore story by 8,449 page views because it hit on the weekend. Had the story hit on a Monday, traffic would have been 2 to 3 times higher, and the blog might have its first $1,000 day. Oh well, can’t win them all.
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Congrats John! Keep up the good work!
Wow John! Your successes are motivational to us little guys out here. Keep up the good work.
Excellent article, very helpful information for me personally. Keep up the great work!
Wow great stuff John! Interesting traffic breakdown too.
I guess it really helps to already have a steady stream of techie readers on your blog, who will instantly submit articles they find intriguing to digg/slashdot etc.
John, well done. Amazing breakdown of your Super Sunday!
Holy crap.. that’s an amazing amount. Great job John.
Well done my friend.
Awesome, thank you for sharing the stats John!
Great info, and congrats! Your content keeps getting better, and I’m glad it’s paying off for you.
Nice! Well done! But I got my success through ad positioning which will get visitors to click on the ad no matter what. Please read my post at and tell me what you think. Thanks
That’s wonderful. you got it going on! keep up the good work.
Wow! Great Sunday :-). First time on this blog via BlogHerald — nice one.
It’s not the income that surprises me, but the sources people get.
$160 from google adsense in ONE day! That is incredible! John you really keep us bloggers hopeful!
Joe
http://www.StingyFinance.com
John, I meant to ask, but forgot. Even though in the absolute numbers, the post has been very profitable.. but how does the click-through ratio of Slashdot/Digg users compare to say your daily averages from regular readers/oranic traffic?
Also it appears that your Feedburner stats have dropped down from 4000+ to 2600. In one day? I always thought that their statistics were kind of sketchy…
Where is Ebaum’s world linking to you from?
John, and what was the number of website unique visitors on that Sunday?
Tony - Slashdot/Digg users don’t click anywhere near as much as organic traffic. That’s why the eCPM for that day was $6.49 vs. the monthly average of $8.50.
Geiger - Ebaum’s world linked to me from their front page. I was listed under “Links.”
Alex - 57,426 unique visitors and 64,305 page views.
Wow, great job.
John, great post.
What about a cost-per-click post? My blog has a 5k+/d unique traffic. Last month i was making up to $40/d, but this month with the same traffic and clicks i’m just making about $15/d.
I figured out the problem: cost-per-cliclk, but i don’t know how to get it higher.
How did you get eBaum’s attention?
As I wander around the lanscape of trying to Monetize my Sites, I keep ending up back to you. I’ve just bookmarked you. Oh, “Unique Content is indeed King”, as you say.
In my own tiny, tiny way I have also seen that Sunday, or the weekend, is very, very slow.
Thanks for being out there!
Adler in Arizona
[...] Making Money From A Blog - The Super Sunday 417 dólares em um dia de blog. Isso é que é viver de blogs (tags: AdSense Retorno_Financeiro Blogging ProBlogger) [...]
[...] E não tem nenhuma mágica: a dica do Chow é algo que todo mundo sabe, mas muita gente tenta ignorar e pula direto para as técnicas de otimização (deixando assim de seguir os conselhos do Adams Óbvio). E dá de sintetizar a dica em uma frase só: Conteúdo diferenciado e relevante atrai tráfego, e tráfego gera faturamento [...]
Congrats. Unique content is definetly true but also not the easiest to create.
I’m liking your articles. I wish I knew more blogs like this one.
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Hey John. A great and inspiring article — makes me want to focus on writing unique articles for 2007!
[...] Making Money From A Blog - The Super Sunday [...]
I’ve been wondering, how to do that. Probably a brand new blog won’t be able to hit that high, your ex visitors and social *life* helped you to hit that hight.
If you’re blog was brand new and you posted that article, then you have gotten that traffic. Whether or not you can make $400 from it is another question.
[...] E não tem nenhuma mágica: a dica do Chow é algo que todo mundo sabe, mas muita gente tenta ignorar e pula direto para as técnicas de otimização (deixando assim de seguir os conselhos do Adams Óbvio). E dá de sintetizar a dica em uma frase só: Conteúdo diferenciado e relevante atrai tráfego, e tráfego gera faturamento [...]
[...] What does this mean for bloggers? I think Johnchow.com does a good job of this. We’re basically taken along for a ride on his quest to make money from a blog. We’re given updates on his quest but that’s not all that’s covered. His blog is richly interspersed with life as an internet entrepreneur (trade shows and expensive dinners) and quality posts on a variety of topics. [...]
I was wondering how you implement the block google ad within text, using WordPress. Do you put it within the post or do you place it and align it to the right on the template. If you could help out with this it would be great. I’m doing my best to take tips from one of those successful bloggers out there ;).
All I can say is that this stuff is great, and its great learning.
Sure does Jeff, sure does, it’ll require quit some willpower to pull this off as well yourself
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