My Blog Income Strategy
written by John Chow
Every time I post a new recording breaking earning reports, there will be comments and speculations on how high the blog income can go. I really like the one comment that took my 1 year blog income growth and extended it for another year and concluded that I’ll be at $300,000 a month by January 2009. While that would be really great, the reality is it can’t happen with the current setup of the blog.
How High Can It Really Go?
The mistake new readers make when they read that the blog went from zero to $30K in a bit over a year is assuming the blog looked the same back then as it does today. I had Unique Blog Design give this blog a complete makeover back in September so I can accommodate more private advertising.
Today, private advertising accounts for half of the blog income. All the ad spots are almost always completely sold out so there is really is no way to increase that unless I add more ad spots or increase prices. This blog is pretty ad heavy as it is so adding more ad spots really isn’t an option. Also, it would require another blog redesign to do it. Increasing ad prices will be the most likely course moving forward. However, I doubt I can increase prices enough to make $300K a month.
My ad prices are on the cheap side at the moment. The Cow next door charges $200 for a review. I charge $450. On the surface, I seem to be more expensive but I have over 10 times the readership Cow has. This helps to explain why I get so many review orders. $450 divided by 15K RSS reader works out to less than 3 cents per reader.
Make Number Two, Number One
The future growth of the blog will come from its second biggest money maker; affiliate commissions. The reason for this is many of the programs I participate in offer residual income potential. For example, Kontera gives me a percentage of the income from the sites that I sign up to them. This is not a one time payment. It’s an on going thing. The more sites I refer, the more money I make. TTZ Media, DealDotCom and many other affiliate programs I promote offer this type of compensation plan.
The advantage of this kind of setup should be obvious. As times goes by, affiliate income should overtake direct advertising as the number one money maker. While there are limits on how much ad space I can sell on this blog, there are no limits on how many sites I can refer to other ad networks. I may make $15,000 a month for selling direct advertising, but I much rather make 10% of what John Chow dot Com readers make for life. 
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wow you make a lot of money with your blog
respect!
John, I think you need to try other media. Like for example start selling video sponsorships and I bet you could sell out those sponsorships in a heart beat. Just make one or two video post a week and you can increase the income immediately.
Bleh - cram more ads in vs gouge advertisers more is the strategy? I suppose I vote you gouge them more, like you said… too many ads already.
I’m disapointed to hear that the strategy doesn’t involve improving content to offer readers more value, that might actually start increasing how many people visit. (scratch that, I just noticed you finaly removed the second “keywords” and “description” meta tags, finaly a little simply SEO!
)
15k RSS doesn’t mean much when like you have said repeatedly… people are too lazy to remove you from their email list etc. The lazy ones don’t read either. Nowhere near 15,000 people actually use their RSS daily and I bet some have even thrown feedburner to the spam filters. Shoemoney showed us just how meaningless RSS can be when he won your contest.
You rock, but I’d like to see traffic double, not income - THAT would be impressive given you’ve burned many bridges. I just put up a poll on my site to see what people think, so far they think you’ll reach your goal. good luck!
LoL after all, you knew about Kontera from John
In either case, it is true what John says, he is making monthly from his blog what a regular worker would be making in a whole year here in Italy where the normal pay is around 1000 euro (bounces from 1100 to 1200 in some cases).
Its funny, the other day my friends asked me how much I am making online since I don’t hang out with them that often (and the excuse is always have things to do), my number impressed them, but when I told them about John Chow they called me a liar (apparently for many, such income from online is really out of the realistic).
Making more money from private ad sales is possible, but that will penalize another thing (the promotion of TTZ media). Replacing the TTZ media at the bottom of each post with a 468×60 spot (rotating to 5 maybe, and charging even $150 per banner would raise the income by 750 USD). But i doubt you want to do that
Thanks for sharing this, John. I need to re-think my blog design and prepare of future ads.
What I want to know is when you are going to sit down and have a talk with kontera. You are getting ripped off at $1k a month Chow.
If you continue to get more traffic and get the 650K rss readers a site like techcrunch gets, you could make that $300K per month.
He maybe will earn that much if he had so many readers.
John, you are really inspirational and you give me motivations all the time. I really enjoy reading your posts.
Keep on that great work!
I agree with John that it’s unlikely that $300K per month is possible from this blog in its current state.
I do think there could be some problems with assuming affiliate commissions will keep growing:
“there are no limits on how many sites I can refer to other ad networks. “
That is true, but there is a limit in how many people will go along with you in signing up based on your track record, and you’re always at the mercy of the networks paying the commissions - if they fail, so do you.
Either way I’d say $30k a month from a personal blog is enough that you don’t need to keep proving yourself month after month.
Why don’t you invest on the bottom part of your blog? You could easily replace the “Recent Readers” with an ad box or additional text links.
Your blog real estate is far too important to show some random pictures.
Personally, I NEVER notice it. I read the article, some comments and I’m gone.
Sorry for my english.
I was wondering about your deal with Kontera.
Yeah man, you will be at the $300,000 mark soon and it will be my turn to be at the $30,000 mark. Well at least some close from a year now.
~Terry
And when you both hit your magical numbers, I`ll be happy if I manage to get $5k per month…
good luck to you all!
I agree with terry and love people like him and their enthusiasm. My goal with http://www.TysBlog.com is $25,000/month in 6-12 month. Then, rather then trying to increase it’s worth to advertisers, I will hire an assistant or two to help my write and keep up with it and start a new blog. Do this several times and Voilà, you’re making several million a year…
I also have to add that I just launched this blog and it won’t officially be live for a day or so - you can see the rough draft at http://tyco.wordpress.com. It was launched as kinda an experiment/bet with myself… Bookmark it and see how it does - should be entertaining to see it evolve… I hope it is the $tart to million$ a year!
This Blog is getting more popular day by day…More popular=More money
MR CHOW~! YOU ARE AN UNCANNY MARKETER! HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF GOING INTO NETWORK MARKETING? A MAN OF YOUR SKILLS WOULD DO QUITE WELL SINCE WE SEEM TO SHARE THE SAME PHILOSOPHIES. MUAHAHA! MUCH ADMIRATION!
~ Justin
There’s a reason I signed up over 30,000 people to AGLOCO.
Too bad Agloco failed before it even got off the ground…
LOL - tell me about it, I had over 3,000
Ever the inspiration for those of us aspiring to moguldom (is that a word). Believe it or not you along with Zac, Shoe, Cow, 45n5 and many others have quite improved the incomes of folks like myself that live in very rural areas in America where an extra $3000 a month is a huge deal.
So what I’m saying is thanks for shedding light on this field.
C’mon John! Bring up some contest and giveaways for your readers
He does give up some contest for readers to win.
You make a good amount of the blog, well deserved.
I think you can reach $100K a month in a year, John, if you keep offering the quality content and slowly raise advertising prices (as well as introduce new ways to make money).
You are very determined and usually get what you want, but $300K a month is serious baller status (and probably near impossible to create from a niched personal blog like this).
You have a long way to go if you want to make some serious cash off of Kontera, $1,000 isn’t very much.
The only way to hit the 300k is making this blog into something I say a dual blog one offering this making money online niche and other niche like in the tech area or John Chow take on poltics . Engadget gets about 2,200,000 uniques a day , Imagine chaging that into an epcm of $109 that will be about 250k a day. So, a dual blog or maybe a forum mixed into your blog , something similar to 5 star affiliate except you can attract more people to your forum and probably have it own the same level as digital point forum. Like you said the blog money making niche is probably limited so branch out to making money online in every aspect niche which will get you a triple digit alexa ranking. Oh I forgot my blog is kind a dual niche except my site isn,t optimize yet because I am using a blogspot blog.
http://www.livelymoney.blogspot.com
I definitely dig the strategies that you’re going after. What also strikes me that you have that many others don’t is a plan of how you’re going to accomplish things. Many would be wise to do likewise. Myself included.
You shouldn’t underestimate this blogs potential and your potential. You just need to think outside the box when it comes to ad formats. The ad strip that appears at the top is very interesting. I’ve thought of some new ad format ideas like post sponsorships. Check out my blog to see an example: http://www.lyved.com
-Andrew
Hi John…I think your blog has lots and lots of potential growth room. I think you should keep up with your regular motivational posts AND then have an aggressive posting schedule of reviews…either pushing Amazon or ClickBank products…..plus get into TripAdvisor’s affiliate program…plus some sportsbetting picks and posts….keep pushing those Affiliate review posts…don’t worry about what other Bloggers might say….you won’t lose many readers because you will still have the motivational posts…you could also hire some people to make affiliate posts for you…basically, you need a mix of your current blog and something similar to Blogpire.com.
Let me know if your are hiring…I can posts tons of stuff for you!
John,
How about working half the time & making twice the money?
Congratulation again john.
John, you are definitely rocking and rolling here. I’m still amazed at those, like you, have parlayed their blogging passion into FT income.
Yes, I and a couple of others went down with AGLOCO too.
Great post by the way, were learning alot and promoting the heck out of our new blog.
Joy
http://www.monthlyvideocash.com
John Great post, as usual!
Joy
Pure brilliance, John. My focus this year has shifted towards building on residual income sources as well. I’m willing to work hard so that I can eventually earn some serious passive income!
nice inspiration’s john. It just motivates me more and more every day.
john,
how about you make another blog (different niche of blog, not internet marketing, invite for freelance writer)
that would u had more than 2 blog that had pagerank5. and this will double your income, and so on…
Great and motivational post. Congratz! I’m still waiting for my first $1000 month.
[...] leaves Chow with only one remaining option: Price Increase. Chow announced on his blog today that he feels his current rate card is very affordable and he offers a better bang for his [...]
Good strategy John, keep making that cash-money
There are only two ways to continue the growth curve:
-Expand to different and aux sites. Your linking will give them fat readership asap. Think of it like Berkshire A+B Shares..
-Own the distribution. Fund one of the link guys. Your traffic alone is enough capitl for some VC guy.
Wow! This is my read of the day
Keep up the good work!
-Mike
[...] My Blog Income Strategy [...]
In Sweden with blogs in Sweden I assume this income is impossible to reach. I am sure if we swedes want to have a good income we have to blog in English. This blog is inspiring me a lot.
[...] Chow brings out a good point in his latest post. Now he talks about a bit of pondering that’s going about how high an income his blog could [...]
If only it would stay at 10% for ever, WidgetBucks switching to 5% is really putting a dent in my ambitions!
Incredible, I wasn’t aware that a blog could ranke in so much money. Back to the drawing board for me.
Although I agree that this site is crammed with ads,the flow of the ads are somewhat artistic which adds to the site. I’ve seen other blogs attempt to mimick this with no success leaving their blog to look like the infamous ‘fleamarket’ sites.
As for the private advertising,most bloggers don’t command enough reader-respect to be able to charge anything,so I guess that comes back to creating quality content. Good blog post!
Your fees for reviews should be even higher for sure. Shoemoney charges $2,500 for a review (don’t believe me go look on reviewme marketplace) so you should be at least increasing those prices