Making Money With A Blog – October Recap

By November 2nd, 2006 Leave a response Uncategorized

Record Breaking Traffic

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The blog enjoyed record high traffic for October, receiving 229,144 visitors and 360,967 page views according to Google Analytics. When you consider that just two short months ago, the blog was doing only 12,000 page views, the numbers look ever more amazing. The blog now does in a day what it uses to do in a month.

Here are the top 10 most viewed pages for October:

The most viewed page of all times is the post about the Google Whores – to date, it has been read 123,265 times.

Blog Income

My goal for October was to hit $1,000 in blog income. I am happy to report I exceed that goal by nearly 40%. Google AdSense brought in $740.01 and Vibrant Media IntelliTXT added 621.63 to bring total blog income to $1,361.64, or $22.70 per blog post. That’s not a bad rate considering some of the posts (like this one) took too me about two minutes to do. Taking the blog income and dividing by the monthly page views results in a site wide eCPM of $3.77. This is not bad but it can be a lot better. By comparison the eCPM at The TechZone is nearly five times higher. I expect eCPM to improve as the blog’s search engine traffic increases.

There are three ways to increase blog income; increase traffic, increase eCPM, or increase both. While it doesn’t seem like it – given the blog’s traffic growth – it is easier to increase site eCPM than it is to increase traffic. Yes, in the building stages your traffic will increase tremendously. However, you will soon slow down and plateau. When that happens, the best way to increase income is by increasing the site wide eCPM. Doubling eCPM has the same effect as doubling site traffic.

Increasing eCPM isn’t that hard. Sometime a simple change in the Google ad can yield big increases. For November, I am adding premium sponsorship and text link sponsorship to the revenue mix. So far, I’ve sold two links. I’m offering a total of 10 links at $150 each. Once sold, these links will bring in up to $1,500 every month. If I find a buyer for the sponsorship unit then total private ad sales will bring in $2,000 per month. Add the $1,400 from Google and Vibrant and we’re up to $3,400 – almost full time income.

Whether or not I’ll be able to sell out the ad spaces remains to be seen. I could take the easy way out and ask a few TTZ sponsors to take an ad but I want to see if the blog can attract its own customers. If your company wants to reach a large user base of Internet entrepreneurs, investors, tech heads, gears heads and interested consumers, then buy a text link or premium ad!

You Can Do This

I don’t want to sound like some get rich quick sales guy trying to pitch an eBook, but I have to say this. Anyone could have done what I’ve done. Please don’t use my experience, or the fact that I own one of the biggest tech sites on the Internet, as an excuse for keeping you down. I started this blog with nothing except the cost of a domain name. I spent zero dollars on promotion. All the articles that I have written were not top-secret stuff. Anyone of you could have written The Internet’s Biggest Goggle Whores. The information was already freely available. All you had to do was put it together.

Success is an attitude. Someone with a loser’s attitude will never be able to do this because they’ll come up with a thousand excuses on why it won’t work. I have come across tons of these people. Many of them wrote some not-so-nice comments in my Trading Hours For Dollars post. If you want to be successful on the Internet, or anywhere else in life, you cannot have a loser’s attitude. It’s been said that from birth to age 18, you have heard the words “No you can’t” 185,000 times and “Yes you can” only 2,000 times. Therefore, it’s natural for most people to be negative about new ideas. Even if they were positive about the idea, they set themselves up for failure by thinking, “I’ll give it a try but it probably won’t work.” With that kind of thinking, it won’t work.

You can do this. There is nothing that I did on this blog that you cannot do yourself, or learn to do. Keep your attitude positive and keep at it. You will get there.
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