Blog Earnings: December 2007
January 1, 2008 Posted by Tyler CruzEver since hitting my $1,000 milestone last month, I’ve been eagerly awaiting making this post. I love breaking personal records… part of it is the OCD in me, but another part is the fact that it’s simply very motivating.
My goal for my blog’s December income was to set a new record and hit $1,200. I did quite a fair bit of work in trying to make this goal, and now I’m fairly close to having maximized the monetization potential of my blog. However, there are still a couple tricks I have up my sleeve without having to oversaturate my blog with an overabundance of banners and ads.
First, I have a deal with a certain ad network pending which should hopefully go live in January. Secondly, I haven’t taken advantage of affiliating yet. Writing reviews or promoting various products or services through affiliate programs makes up a large portion of blog income for some of the top bloggers, and I have yet to try my hand at this. However, I have been working on this, and have been reviewing a certain product during the past week. I’m about 30% done and hope to have a review of it up within another week or two, and will then see for the first time, the potential of affiliating on my blog.
But other than these two things, I’ve pretty much maximized my eCPM; December’s eCPM was around $55 (not counting RSS views; only actual visits to my blog), which works out to 5 cents per page view. Now that my blog is finally properly monetized, I need to focus on marketing and promotion. I started this already with my $300 RSS Contest which was a great success.
Anyhow, here are the results for December 2007:
As you can see, December brought in a new record at $1,103.64! This is bitter-sweet though; while it’s a new record, I didn’t make my goal of $1,200.
This is partly due to the season – as John Chow had predicted to me, December is usually a poor performing month due to the holidays. Not only do we have Christmas, but New Years as well.
The other reason December didn’t make my goal was because of timing. I sell my ads on a fixed monthly price, and sometimes advertisers renew their campaigns early. In fact, normally they do renew early so that their campaigns will continue to run unaffected. However, not all the advertisers renewed “early” this month, so I didn’t make my goal.
Private Ads are continuing to dominate the earnings breakdown, which is fine with me. But I’d like for the Affiliates section to grow.
Sidewide 125×125 Banner Slots Available
I currently have two slots available for the Sitewide 125×125 Banner campaigns. They cost $40 a month and can be purchased on my advertising page. If they’re good enough for John Chow to purchase, they’re good enough for you!
Sponsor Shoutouts
I’d like to give some quick shoutouts to my repeat sponsors and advertisers:
- InstantCoding – You must know these guys by now, as they have the most prominent ad on my blog. Check out my review of them.
- PSDGator – While it’s the first time PSDGator.com has been advertised on my blog, it was bought by longtime repeat advertiser Lee Bandoni, who had previously advertised GetMeContent.com. It’s sure nice to see a new banner up top – it will probably do well due to the “change of scenery” alone.
- TTZMedia – John Chow has continued to renew his ad for his TheTechZone affiliate program for the third time. Check out TTZMedia.com and try John Chow’s very own affiliate program.
- Entrecard – Entrecard purchased two reviews from my blog. Read the first one here, and the second one here which details the effects of having used Entrecard for two weeks on my blog.
- AdToll – They bought another paid review from me, as well as a 125×125. Check out my latest review of them where I discuss some of the latest improvements.
- WordZe – they haven’t purchased any advertising this month, but I’m making continual residual income from them each month. Their referral program is really lucrative, check it out if you have the chance, or read my extensive review of them.
- Finally, a big thank you to NeverBlueAds for sponsoring my $300 RSS Contest!
Overall, I’m satisfied with December’s results. Even though I didn’t make my goal, I did set a new record, and helped silent a couple of TylerHaters who thought that November’s earnings was a fluke š
My goal for January is to make $1,300. Wish me luck, it’s not as easy as it sounds!
Nice job Tyler…I have a feeling that this site is in for big things in 2008!
Good work Tyler! Seems you`ve made a lot of accomplishments with your blog in 2007. Hope 2008 is even better!
Well done Tyler!. as long you are breaking a record you are doing great. me two like to break record. but the total is too small at the moment so i won’t bother it yet. hopefully when the number on the higher hundreds i will try to break record for motivation. anyway thanks for sharing your numbers.
Congratulation and i have to say you did a great job.
Would be interesting to know the breakup of your affiliate earnings Tyler.
Right now it all comes from Wordze
Phenomenal Job Tyler.
I truly believe in 2008 there will be even bigger numbers and even higher bars raised!
Congratulations Tyler. You’re doing amazingly well at monetizing this site, and I’ve got a lot to learn from this site – mine’s making about half of your earnings, with a similar number of RSS subs (but lower amounts of traffic).
Keep up the great work mate,
Adnan
P.S. And Happy New Year!
I thought for sure you would beat $1,200 easy with all the new additions to the blog, but I had forgot about the holiday week. Still not bad, $1,000 a month is my first goal this new year.
Congrats!
Perhaps with the TLA or PPP affiliate program you could reach your goal?
Perhaps not š I’ve sent several dozen referrals to PPP, and guess what – I got $0. Do NOT promote PPP for affiliate/referral purposes. They only pay $15 CPA anyhow.
I don’t promote TLA because I don’t like to promote things where I only get paid CPA when I could promote another ad network and get lifetime residual income..
It’s good to see that you are making progress Tyler, and I would suggest investing at least a percentage of the earnings in order to promote your blog at this point, as it deserves far more than 14k unique visits per month, given the fact that you are indeed providing value to your readers on a regular basis.
Alan Johnson
I agree, and I’m currently looking into some ways to advertise and market my blog. But man, it’s not cheap out there!
And I also agree that my blog should be getting much more traffic, for the value that it provides… I need to do somethign about that…
A word of advice Tyler: don’t neglect PPC campaigns, you might just see some more than worthwhile results š
Alan Johnson
I was thinking of trying this out during the past couple of days actually, but I can’t help but coming back to the fact that I don’t sell anything. I don’t sell any products or services… and so even if I grab quality traffic at $0.20 each, that’s paying $200 for 1,000 clicks/visits. If 0.5% of those clicks become regular readers, which is fairly high I’d guess, that’s $200 for 5 regular readers…
Personally, I am using AdWords, YSM and AdCenter for promoting my ebook (I offer it for free to all of my newsletter subscribers). Basically, the first thing users see when they visit my landing page is the field where they can enter their email address and a short message explaining that all subscribers receive a free copy of my ebook.
Basically (and this is extremely important), they should know what action is required on their part within seconds, otherwise, they will simply leave.
With this approach, I have an average conversion rate of over 20%, which definitely makes the campaign worth it.
If you want to start a PPC campaign, it is important that you don’t take visitors directly to your homepage. In your case, you can create a landing page which explains why they would want to subscribe to your RSS feed and make sure that the subscription buttons are extremely visible.
For actions such as entering an email address an subscribing via RSS, 0.5% is extremely low if you target the right keywords and do your job right. If you don’t see a conversion rate of at least 10% for such a campaign then it is definitely time to drop it and target other phrases/improve your landing page.
Best wishes,
Alan Johnson
Happy New Year, Tyler! Wish you luck for 2008!
-Mike
An excellent job you had done and how you attract so many visitor to your blog, i have been blogging around 2 weeks ago and my visitor is not that much compare to yours.
Actually, given the quality of his content, this blog deserves a lot more exposure than it is currently receiving.
Alan Johnson
Yes, off course, and I believe it will get there in 2008, for sure.
He will definitely be able to considerably improve his traffic with a decent advertising campaign. After all, it is always a lot easier to advertise a good product š
Alan Johnson
Congratulations on hitting the record, good luck in 2008.
Congrats on breaking another record.
Not sure if you got rid of the “sponsored post” where you let people review themselves but haven’t seen one lately and happy about that ;). Hopefully it doesn’t cause your income to go down but I am sure you have plenty of more productive methods under your sleeve and looking forward to seeing how you break this months goal.
He is still offering paid plugs for the same rates as reviews (all prices can be found by clicking on the “Advertise” link).
Alan Johnson
Congratulations Tyler.
Have you seen John Chows report? $2k less this month than last but definably inspiring to say the least.
While he has indeed earned less this month due to a drop in traffic (which is absolutely normal this time of year), an impressive barrier has been crossed: over $100 eCPM
Alan Johnson
Nice job, Tyler. I’m sure you’ll beat your goal in January. Maybe the fact that it was December, you missed getting $1,200 (low traffic and all). Your eCPM’s pretty good! And you haven’t even monetized your blog that much…Good luck for the future!
He is doing his job right as far as monetization is concerned, obtaining more traffic is the name of the game with this blog.
Alan Johnson
I do want to earn also as big as like that. But I don’t know how can I improve my blog to gather more advertisers. I hope by this year I monetize my blog as like what you have now.
Job well done.
Congrats on breaking your old record! Here’s to next month’s profit being even greater. š
Steve
Glad to see your doing so well Tyler, i rememebr reading your posts on sitepoint a long time ago. I am getting back into this webmaster world to try and pay for flying school! Its a big ask, but you have inspired me to take this up and try again š
The best of luck to you and, as a word of advice, be sure to develop websites related to a topic you are passionate about since, as far as productivity is concerned, it will make a huge difference (given the fact that you are doing this in order to pay for flying school, there are definitely a few areas where you can put your passion for that field to good use).
Alan Johnson
Nice job. Keep this up and you will probably start getting 1k+ a month. It’s really inspirational to see stuff like this.
He is already earning over $1k per month and definitely has the potential to earn a lot more than that.
Alan Johnson
Congratulations on your earnings. Mine were down as well for December, even overall affiliate earnings. That’s just the way it goes. January is usually a pretty good month so I’m looking forward to it.
[…] Tylercruz.com konnte seine Einnahmen im Dezember weiter steigern, wenn auch nur um rund 60 Dollar. Dennoch profitiert er stark von seinen selber verkauften Werbeplätzen: […]
[…] a little carried away when I set my 2008 income goals. This reality really sank in after reading Tyler Cruz’s December Earnings report. He’s a pretty popular guy and his blog made just under $1,200 last month. So, since I have […]
Nice job man, hope you can achieve it very soon!
[…] Blog Earnings: January 2008 February 2, 2008 Posted by Tyler Cruz Paid Advertisement Months seem to fly by these days – we’re already into February! And with a new month comes a new blog earnings report. In my previous report from last month, I announced how December made a new record, having brought in over $1,100. […]
Seeing trough my eyes this is great revenue. Iām just a curious which PPP made you the most?