Can you believe it is already September? The month of August was a blur for me as we prepared for the beginning of school and celebrated my son’s birthday.
While I was not able to follow up last month’s success of landing a front-page digg, I’ve seen the number of visitors continue to increase in August. It is always nice to see a few new faces and I truly appreciate how the community welcomes them in and makes them feel at home.
August also brought good fortune in my efforts towards blogging for money. My overall total income for the month was a new all-time high and following up my post about the secret to earning more with AdSense, I set a new record for AdSense earnings in one month.
Dollars and Cents
My goal for the month of August was to continue building on the progress of July and earn even more than the previous record-setting month.
- AdSense:
- Kontera:
- ReviewMe:
- TextLinkAds:
- Amazon:
- LinkWorth:
- Private Ads:
- AuctionAds:
- PayPerPost:
- Misc:
- Grand Total:
- $34.09
- $8.45
- $0.00
- $57.56
- $0.00
- $62.09
- $108.50
- $0.00
- $20.00
- $0.00
- $290.69
My earnings in the month of August increased by roughly 75% compared with my previous best in July. I’ve mentioned it before but the key to increasing your earnings is to maintain a diversified basket of revenue sources.
While I set a new personal best in terms of AdSense earnings, I improved the most with the new private advertisement deals that I closed in the month of August. In addition to the private ad deals, I had a substantial increase in my earnings from LinkWorth as I secured a text advertisement and wrote a sponsored post.
Rounding out the sources of income were PayPerPost and Text-Link-Ads.
Based on the numbers above, I’ve had very little success with ReviewMe and Amazon although I have not really tried to push Amazon too much in the last few months. My experiment with AuctionAds was not all that successful either as I was receiving a fair amount of clicks but they were not generating any revenue.
As many of you know, earning income from a blog is a trial and error process as you tweak ads here and there or introduce new offerings to see what gives you the best balance. In the coming months you might see some changes on this site as almost all of my earnings are being generated on my personal finance site.
Plans for September
After a decrease in earnings for the month of June, I’ve now had back-to-back record-breaking months and that is very encouraging. In September I am going to see if I can make it three record months in a row!
In order to do that, I think I will need to take advantage of this site as well as my personal finance site. When I introduced Text-Link-Ads on this site, I had hoped a few of the spots would sell out but I haven’t had any luck. As the traffic and rankings continue to increase, I think this presents a great value so hopefully I will be able to make some progress there.
Hopefully all of you had a successful month of August and will set new heights for yourself in September!
{ 27 comments… read them below or add one }
I would say that you are doing really well. Perhaps at some point you could share with your readership ways to make money?
That’s a great idea!
Where can I sign up for that program!? 😆
:opps:
I though she said “share you income with readers”
Hmm, that could be an idea for a future contest! 🙂
I’ve actually thought of it – something like “Guess my income and win it!” but I guess I just haven’t been motivated to start it up.
Feel free to use that idea! 😛
Court Tuttle was running a contest like that awhile back.
I was thinking something more like “Guess my income and win half of it!” 😈
Lol, apparently Rose doesn’t actually READ your blog.
Congrats on the great month, that’s a huge improvement over previous months income. You should post more details on how you got your private ad sales.
@Rose :: As Dave mentioned, I try to be pretty open with what I am doing to make money. If you have any specific questions, feel free to fire away.
@Dave :: Thanks! I’d love to share a great story about how I landed the private ad deals but each one has been initiated by the other party thus far. I might have a few tips to share on something that I think has helped close the deal though. I’ll add it to my list of post ideas.
Setting short and long term goals and achieving them beats any vitamin! Congratulations on a very profitable month!
Wow those private sales are impressive, nice work!
It’s interesting to see how low your adsense earnings are in comparison to the other methods. Considering as it’s the only revenue making system I have currently on my blog.
I think it would be best if I choose multiple methods of gaining income rather than just 1, but at the moment I’m not too focussed on earning. I’m just enjoying the writing element at the moment 🙂
@Damien :: Thanks!
@Matt :: As you can see by my numbers, I would be making only a few dollars per month if I limited myself to only AdSense – which I did do when I first started my blogs. As time goes by, you can introduce new options and you will see your income continue to grow. Any one of my income sources may not be impressive but together they start to add up to a nice number.
So are these numbers just for this blog? Or is there multiple sites factored in here?
Dave, almost all of these numbers are from my personal finance site as this site is not really generating any revenue. A portion of the LinkWorth revenue was from this site as well as a few dollars of AdSense. Oh yeah, the PPP revenue is from here as well.
I am definitely guilty of “putting all of my eggs in one basket” as far as advertising goes – but I just don’t have the time to seek out other revenue streams right now…
Another good month there. If Google finally gets around to updating pr, I bet you’d double August’s earnings easily. Nice job buddy.
Waiting for the update…well, let’s just say everytime I think about how long its taking, I hear the Jeopardy theme song in my head. *sigh*
Crossing my fingers for a 6. Wishful thinking perhaps.
I’m running out of chickens for my pr6 sacrifice ritual.
Note to self: Stop stealing Brown Baron’s chickens.
Congrats on the record breaking month. I also didn’t find success with Auction Ads and have finally removed mine. Good luck with all your efforts. I am in the same boat as you! I have a contest going on right now at Random Encounters of We if you are interested in checking it out!
Dave I do actually read his blog thank you very much.
@Brown Baron :: Thanks buddy! I’ve been waiting for the PR update for some time as I had originally guessed we would see it by August 4th. Boy was I wrong.
@Stefanie :: Thanks and good luck to you as well with your efforts. I’ll be sure to check out your contest.
@Rose :: I know you read the site and I appreciate your participation here. 🙂
Nice job! It goes up every month. Most importantly, it still sounds like you still enjoy blogging 😉
Absolutely, I love it! Every day I spend time thinking/planning what I can do to propel myself to the point where I can do this for a living, lol. 🙂
I’ve got something in the works that hopefully I will be able to share with everyone soon.
Nice numbers.
I recommended your blog and this page in particular in a new blog post at http://www.ppcthink.com/2007/09/05/awesome-power-bloggers-share-their-knowledge/ and if I weren’t such a blogging newbie I’d figure out how to automatically get that link to show up in your blog.
If you want to help a Newbie spread some link-love, drop by and tell me how?
Don’t go blushing and everything when you read what I wrote about you – it is ALL true. And I’ve been showing your blog to my blogging friends and they’re all very impressed too.
Rose, thank you very much for the truly kind words that you shared.
BTW, hopefully our IM conversation helped answer some of the questions about trackbacks but let me know if you need more explanation.
Thanks Derek. I’ve added a couple trackbacks to that article. Perhaps WordPress only adds those in batch mode as I don’t see them yet. I’ll wait 24 hours and maybe they’ll show up.
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