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).