Blogging For Money - May 2007
As many new site authors are aware, trying to monetize your website can be a very difficult process and requires a considerable amount of work to find the right balance. This series of posts is my attempt to shed light on the process that I am taking to see what does and does not work in my attempt to monetize my sites.
Back in March, I broke through with my first month of triple-digit earnings from blogging. Unfortunately, April was not quite as impressive as my earnings dropped a few dollars below the century mark.
With a firm belief that you cannot achieve success without defining goals in black and white, I had set a goal for the month of April to earn $125 and bumped that up to $150 for the month of May. While I have to report that I have yet to actually achieve my earnings goal, I am not afraid of failure and continue to get closer and closer to my goal.
More Monetization Options
In an effort to continue experimenting with alternative sources of income, I have been running a trial on this website with AuctionAds. The motivation here was that they were offering $5 just for signing up with the service, although you need to reach $10 to receive your first payment.
Last month you may recall that I had added LinkWorth to my *income toolbox* and also closed a private advertising deal at the end of the month. However, I have seen that my best performer is still Text-Link-Ads, which is now available on this site as well so be sure to sign up while the prices are affordable! 
Dollars and Cents
As I mentioned earlier, I had defined a goal of $150 for the month of May and came just short of reaching the goal this month. However, even though I may not have satisfied the goal I did have my highest earning month ever and only missed the goal by a few dollars.
- AdSense:
- Kontera:
- ReviewMe:
- TextLinkAds:
- Amazon:
- LinkWorth:
- Private Ads:
- AuctionAds:
- Contests:
- Grand Total:
- $29.72
- $12.00
- $0.00
- $49.98
- $0.00
- $0.00
- $45.00
- $5.00
- $0.00
- $141.70
This represents a 54% increase in my earnings from the month of April and I feel that is outstanding progress. There is obviously still a lot for me to learn and I am continuing to try new approaches to see what will work the best for me.
Following my motivation of setting a goal for my earnings, I came so close to my goal of $150 that I am going to set the bar at $175 for the month of June. In order to try and reach that goal, I have a few things in mind to try and tweak my existing sources of income.
Keep your eye out for changes around here and over at my personal finance site in the coming month. If you want to participate in my attempt to reach my goal, feel free to purchase a Text-Link-Ad for $15 per month! 
Congrats on getting so close, that private ad deal really helped out a ton. I just added TLA to my site now, so we’ll see how it works out for me.
Good luck on next months goal!
Thanks Dave! You’re right that the private ad deal helped and that ad is running for 5 more months so that will be nice.
Good luck with the TLA! On my other site I’ve had more success but it’s only been live here for a week or two.
Congrats, Derek. Movin’ on up!
Thanks Derrich! Slowly but surely, like the tortoise that beat the hare.
Hey Derek,
How long did it take you to sell a link for TLA? Did you sell any for this site yet? TLA sold one spot for me already in the first day…
I haven’t sold any spots on this site yet but my personal finance site had a spot sold in the first day as well and then sold 3 more within a week or so after that.
Congrats on selling the first spot!
You have some good diversity going on there for monetization, that’s great! I’m hoping to get TLA to approve me soon as well. Great work!
Dan, have you read my post with tips on how to get approved by TLA?
Try out those tips and let me know how it works out for you!
Nice to see that your blog is doing so well in such a short time. So far I only have Adsense but will have to look into textlink ads since they seem to perform so well. I don’t want to clutter my site with ads.
Leo, it is certainly a balance that you need to find. Also, almost all of the income is coming from my personal finance site which has been a round a few more months than this site.
Feel free to sign up for TLA through my affiliate link and get yourself $100 in free advertising in the process!
Congratulations Derek! Things are going well.
Thanks Melanie! My goal is to improve each and every month and continue to challenge myself. So far so good and I owe a lot of that to all of you.
Congrats Derek, but may I suggest you look into monetizing post content as well. Sites such as http://payperpost.com and http://blogitive.com have been paying me $$$ for a while now. Payperpost alone paid me more than your total, not bragging just a suggestion. I am a n00b from BAYB so sorry if I seem a little on the unknown side.
Welcome Ryan and thanks for stopping by! You make a great point about PPP and Blogitive (although I was not familiar with that one) but to this point I just haven’t gone that route. But I have seen quite a few people making a nice monthly sum with sites like that doing paid posts.
Maybe I’ll throw that out to my readers as I don’t want to start posting too many paid posts and run off the community that is building here.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and suggestions! Look forward to seeing you around.
Thanks Derek, look forward to reading you.
I also subscribed to TLA and they sold a link in the first day
since then, never heard of them
Hey, just came across your blog. Awesome to see you are making some money with the blog. I’ll be checking back for your latest monetization and numbers!
Zac, thanks for stopping by and sharing your encouragement. Slowly but surely the income has been coming in but I am afraid the summer weather is slowing that down some right now.
congratulation!i will try to make that amount next month.