Derek Semmler dot com - money, motorcycles and cars (with a little bit of everything else)

Ask anyone that has attempted to earn money from blogging and they will tell you that it requires a lot of hard work. There will be plenty of ups and downs along the way and nobody is immune to them, which is why it is important to stay consistent and give your best effort at all times.

Last month I was reminded of the ups and downs associated with earning an income from a blog, as I had a significant drop in blogging income. With the support of everyone here behind me, I was determined to roll up my sleeves and get myself headed back in the right direction.

Fortunately, I was able to make strides back towards my previous income level and I owe a good deal of that to all of you.

Dollars and Cents

Many of us were drawn into blogging by the dream of instantly hitting the “Big Time” and making insane sums of money each month. As the many abandoned blogs will tell you, unfortunately that is not often the case as it requires time to build an income through blogging. In an effort to share that process with all of you, I provide these monthly updates to show you what has been working for me and what has not been working for me.

As I mentioned earlier, much of my success this month is really due to the people in the community as you can see by the large increase in affiliate earnings. While I do not know who is specifically responsible, someone that signed up for TTZ Media under my affiliate id has been earning a nice income, which rewards me as an affiliate.

Even though the use of TTZ Media has not been very rewarding for any of my sites, I have been able to reap the rewards of someone else that has had much more success simply by introducing them to the service. It is for that very reason that I feel it is worthwhile to investigate services such as ASE Adnet or PerformancingAds, as you never know where the next source of income will appear.

It is interesting to note that the Amazon earnings, while still not a large sum of money, have doubled in the last month. After so many months of not earning a single penny with Amazon, I am encouraged by the results that I have had the last two months.

On the down side, Kontera continues to disappoint and will be removed at the end of August if the earnings do not increase. In the aftermath of a decrease in page rank, my earnings from LinkWorth and TLA have continued to decline as well, sliding below the $300 level for the month.

Plans for August

There is a lot of work to do in the month of August, as there will be a few private ad deals expiring that have been bringing in a consistent amount of money each month. This income will need to be replaced either by renewing advertisement deals or finding an alternate source of income.

Finding alternative sources of income is something that should always be on your radar as a blogger trying to earn money from a blog. As we have talked about numerous times, having a diverse source of potential revenue streams will help balance out the lean times that are bound to occur from month to month.

Awhile back, we talked about one such alternative when we discussed the idea of keyword sniping. While I am not quite ready to share an update on my experiment, I am happy to report that there has been a small trickle of revenue coming in as a result of my testing.

Even though I fell just shy of returning to the $700+ income level from blogging, I am encouraged by the progress that was made in the month of July. It is important to continue to build upon that progress and not stop moving forward.

Keeping a ball rolling is much easier than getting it started!