Last month was a pretty big month for me when it comes to bringing in the money. I’m nowhere near ready to quit my day job but I’m closer than last month.
Here is what worked and didn’t and the details of where the money came from.
First, how much did I make?
- AdSense – $96.25
- Text Link Ads – $87.64
- Review Me – $30.00
- Squidoo – $1.16
- Total – $215.05
Pretty cool. That comes out to $6.94 per day.
So how do you go about making enough to eat lunch at McDonald’s everyday?
I’m getting a fair bit of search engine traffic to one of my sites right now. 200-300 uniques per day or so plus the regular visitors. I had a post get several thousand hits from StumbleUpon and Reddit but that actually seemed to drive my AdSense money down during those days.
I kept most of my ten slots full with Text Link Ads throughout most of the month. A couple advertisers dropped off, but a couple new ones picked up the slack. So far, all of them have stuck around in April.
I only did one post for Review Me. I didn’t love doing it and didn’t hate doing it. I would never do it for a site that I didn’t think deserved some attention and I would not want to do more than around 2-4 per month. It’s an interesting change of pace to do a very direct ad for another site. The focus is very different.
Squidoo is perhaps my most entertaining income source. You have to love anybody that will pay out once you clear $1. I have two lenses that I created back around Octoberish just to see what the site was all about. I haven’t touched them in ages but every month or two I get a buck or two with no real explanation given for what happened to earn me the money. It really is like free money.
I made a couple bucks on Amazon last month but not enough to cross the threshold for a payout so I won’t include them until that happens. Money isn’t really earned until somebody plans on sending a paycheck in my book. I’m doing the Amazon Context Links Beta on a site and it is doing absolutely nothing so far. I’m going to leave it running through the end of the week. If there isn’t some sign of life, than I’m getting rid of Amazon entirely for the time being. I don’t do any gadget sites or anything else that seems designed for making money with Amazon. Some revenue models will not work on every blog.
While AdSense is humming along, I would really prefer to find a way to earn enough money on my main blog to get rid of it. I general it would be nice to be able to do that on any blog. AdSense is such an ugly middle man scenario. In the next few months, I’m thinking about trying to get some blog specific merchandise to sell. T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. I think they might have a chance based on the theme and the basic marketing plan. It would be more entertaining to make any amount of money, even a few bucks less, selling my own stuff instead of just being the middle man in the click game.
I’m also thinking about trying to get somebody to do some direct ads. Something along the lines of a 125 by 125 pixel banner ad or something like that.
AdSense and or Text Link Ads might be the best long term option, but if I like to keep experimenting and learning how new things work so that I can know what works best for me.
That was my month. How did you do?
Related posts:
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
You are doing good with the ads, What do u think of having your own product to sell? Or If you would like to do some bigger project online , what would it be?
If I do get around to selling my own product, I would probably start out with t-shirts, coffee mugs, golf balls. I’m hoping to get a real logo designed for my main blog sometime in the next couple months and then get a batch of t-shirts made up and see if anybody orders them. That is about as much of a plan as I have right now.