BLOG$ FROM BLOGS

How Much Money Can My Blog Make?

Copyright 2008 by Jane Chin, All Rights Reserved.

A first question you may ask about starting any business - including a full time or part time blog based business - is, “How much money will I make?” You’re going to see the answer coming: “It depends.” It depends, and not always only on website traffic.

My opinion is that sustained viability of a revenue-generating blog depends entirely on content. This is a strong statement, and I will expand on this rationale in a separate post.

How to Make 19 Cents

“For every cash building blogger there’s a Jane Chin (www.janechin.com), who reports earning 19 cents in the initial months of her blogging “experiment” (her word).” David Garrett wrote in his “Can Problogging Build your Bottom Line?” in November 2006 issue of Certification Magazine.

David was referring to a post I had written in March of 2006 when I participated in a “network blog” as a contributing blogger. David’s article is important because it helps people know that problogging isn’t as easy as people seem to think it is.

I do want to clarify that 19 cents actually came from my participation on the online “blogging network”. Given that was the first month’s performance on a new “channel” at a new network blog portal, I was disappointed but not surprised.

Perhaps I’d have done better if I stuck it out, writing short cancer commentaries for the blogging network. But I only go for quotas that I set for myself. I blog every day, but not in the same blog, and certainly not only in one subject. I joined knowing full well that it would be a test run. I also made this clear to the channel editor who recruited me. When I quit after a month, neither of us was surprised.

I did much better on my own blogs - free of any network blogging affiliation, and actually now earn over $500 a month on my own blogs, and blogging part time. Blogging is something I already enjoy, but I’m still looking at the viability of the “earning” of problogging.

How My Blogs Began to Earn $500/Month

I started putting contextual ads on 10 of my websites in May of 2006. Two of these sites are true “blogs” that are periodically updated, even though the other sites use a blogging backend (Wordpress). I don’t consider any of these “high traffic.” In fact, I’d be happy if I get 50 unique hits a day. I purposely created my sites in narrow (”niche”) topical content areas.

When I first put up ad codes on these websites in May 2006, the sites earned about $80 that first month. As of December 1, 2006, my blogs and sites (now over 40 sites) was earning over $700 a month. The graph used to make this website’s title graphic comes from actual numbers I ran on my websites that display text ads, as well as affiliate sales and paid reviews.

This graph represents the first 7 months of monetizing websites and blogs, and doing this on a part-time or semi-professional basis.

Probloggers Warn Blogging Won’t Get You Rich Quick

Popular problogging website Problogger.net has a post about how much money a blog may earn. Darren Rouse is quick to point out that problogging is not a get rich quick scheme, and even as he claims to have purchased a house from Google Adsense earnings, he emphasizes that his blogging income comes from at least 20 blogs. Now that Darren and colleagues have founded a network blog company called b5media, I am sure that Darren makes a very comfortable 6-figure income as a true professional blogger or problogger.

I’m more impressed with Steve Pavlina, who claims to make over $1000 a day from his personal development website, because this is earnings based on one blog. Steve has written an extremely long, 7000+ word article on monetizing his blog. The earnings result he reported on his blog is after 2 years of his site coming online.

Citations
How much money can a blog earn?

Problogging is not a get rich quick scheme

How to make money from your blog

What I use on almost all of my blogs: Wordpress

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