Blog Earnings: January 2009
February 2, 2009 Posted by Tyler CruzNote: Be sure to read the very bottom of this report to find out why this is most likely my last blog earnings post!
Last month my blog income finished with a very disappointing $3,329.24. While making $3,000 a month from a blog is nothing to scoff at, it was still disappointing because I had been averaging $5,000 a month for the 4 months prior to that.
With most anything in which you are not working with pre-defined, fixed numbers, you are going to run into the inevitable variance and standard deviation. Basically, sometimes you will have better numbers than usual and other times you’ll have much worse numbers than usual. Poker players often have different levels of variance in their profits due to their style of play; loose-aggressive players will often see higher degrees of standard deviation while tight-passive players generally take less risk and therefore have a more steady line of daily income.
My blog income used to be very predictable as it was comprised mostly of private ad sales. However, now that affiliate referrals make up a large portion, my blog’s income can sway in greater deviation since it is dependant upon other people’s income.
December may have been a slower month than usual, but January made up for it by being a better month than usual. In fact, it ended up being my blog’s best month ever, setting a new record. It didn’t just beat my previous record by a couple hundred dollars either. January completely smashed it by $2,000, finishing with a pretty amazing $8,688.06!
This extraordinary month was possible for two reasons:
First, my private ad sates were much higher than usual. My Embedded 300×250 Banner came up for renewal again and the same advertiser renewed it for another 3-months. This is partly why my private ad income was slightly lower than usual the past 3 months. I also received a paid review and a paid plug which help a lot considering they cost $175 each.
Secondly, my biggest MarketLeverage referral started pushing huge numbers again which helped push me over the top.
Here is a chart depicting the growth trend of my blog during the past 12 months:
That dip in December 2008 really looks bad, but April 2008 saw a big dip as well when my sites went down for 10 days and now it doesn’t look so bad. It’s hard to believe that it was only 12 months ago when my blog brought in $1,000 a month. From $1,000 a month to nearly $9,000 a month in just a year is my kind of growth!
If we assume my blog averages $8,688.06 each month for 2009, not decreasing or increasing, that would work out to $104,256.72 for the year.
Here are my affiliate sources. As mentioned above, my biggest referrer came back strong in the latter half of February which really helped pump up my MarketLeverage referral income. A nice new addition to the affiliate sources came from XY7 for the first time after holding my first Affiliate Marketing Competition with them, bringing $370 in referral income.
The pie chart below shows MarketLeverage continuing to dominate the rest of my affiliate sources. It would have almost fully comprised of the entire pie if it wasn’t for XY7. Actually, 6% for its first month on my blog is quite good.
Looking at my blog’s earnings breakdown pie chart below, I’m still not sure what the best mix is, but I think the most I’d ever want one single source to take up would be around 70% at the most.
I’m happy with the distribution of the pie chart below, although you can expect the Affiliates piece of the pie to continue to overtake the Private Ads section soon.
Affiliate Sources
- MarketLeverage has continued been a fantastic revenue source for my blog. In the latter half of 2008 alone, my referrals have generated me over $18,000 in commissions. This is not counting the money I make with them through my PPC affiliate marketing efforts.
- XY7 is a new source of referral income for my blog, but in its first month being promoted on my blog it has already generated $371.
- WordZe has continued to prove to be a consistent source of residual affiliate income. I only wish I catered more to affiliate marketers so I could promote it more. Their referral program is really lucrative, check it out if you have the chance, or read my extensive review of them.
BannersMall has an affiliate program and since their service is awesome their conversion rate is very high. I made $85 from them in March of 2008 which says a lot about their conversion rate considering I only get 10% and their banner prices are cheap…
Private Ad Shoutouts
I’d like to give some quick shoutouts to a few of my repeat sponsors and advertisers:
MotiveInteractive – They’ve been my 300×250 Embedded Ad Sponsor since March 2008 and have continued to renew every month. They’re now also my 728×90 Leaderboard sponsor which the recently renewed for another 3-months, as well as one of my 125×125 banner sponsors.
- MarketLeverage – ML is not only a repeat Affiliate Marketing Competition sponsor but also a loyal banner advertiser as well. They even donated to my SPCA Fundraiser, sponsoring 3 dogs!
BooksWealth.com – This is their 10th month renewing their 125×125 Sitewide Banner with us. Scott Phelps runs the site and also writes great guest posts here, so if you haven’t checked BooksWealth.com out yet, maybe you should!
SharpWitDesigns.com – Another advertiser who has renewed many times. Need a custom WordPress skin? Check out their colourful designs.
SEOIntelligence – SEO Intelligence is a comprehensive set of SEO analysis and keyword building tools which can really help you to improve your rankings on search engines. View my in-depth 1-hour screencast review of them here.
SpeedPPC – Speed PPC is a software tool that helps you generate thousands or tens of thousands of keywords and ads for your PPC campaigns within seconds. It will create highly targeted longtail keywords and ads built upon a set of predefined lists that you create. I personally use SpeedPPC for my own PPC affiliate marketing.
- InspiredMoneyMaker.com – This is Paul Piotrowski’s blog. You might find his name familiar from the superb guest posts he occasionally submits to my blog.
Get a Paid Review
For $175, you can order a custom review written by me on your website, service, or product. I cannot guarantee a positive review as it is after all a review and not one long ad. However, you will get the benefit of receiving an entire post written about your company or product in great detail.
Feel free to view some of the many past paid posts I wrote. Below are the most recent ones:
- A Timesaving Site for Domain Flippers
- Review of Amped Media
- Spy on Your PPC Competition with PPC Bully
- StoreStacker Review
- CoolProducts Review
- Iranian Blogger Nima Heydarian
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For the same price, you can purchase a Paid Plug, which is essentially a paid review written by yourself.
Grab a Paid Plug or Paid Review!
This is My Last Blog Earnings Post
This is likely the last Blog Earnings post I make on my blog. I first started making these reports in July 2007 and have managed to provide a detailed report at the beginning of each month since then.
I’d love to keep doing them, but once PublisherChallenge launches it will pose the issue of where to attribute referral income to. Unfortunately, very few affiliate networks offer any sort of subID tracking for their referral programs which makes determining the source of them impossible.
Because of this, I essentially have to attribute my referrals to one source. Since I’ll be using PublisherChallenge to promote my Affiliate Marketing Challenges and the site’s revenue model is based on referral income, I’ll be counting my affiliate network referral income as being from PublisherChallenge.
Now, I could mark a line where my existing referrals from my blog lie at and continue to count those towards my blog, but that would require a lot of hands-on accounting and be very convoluted, especially the way DirectTrack is set up.
I could also continue with my Blog Earnings reports, just not counting my referral income, but that would effectively be portraying false data since I’ve worked hard the past year to grow my affiliate income source on my blog.
Due to these reasons, this is likely the last Blog Earnings post I make on my blog. I hate to stop them as they provided great motivation for myself and are inspiring to look back at how much I’ve grown the blog’s income over the years.
To make up for what is probably the end for these Blog Earnings reports, I’m considering making a new series: Merendi Networks Earnings Report. Basically, I’d provide an approximate total of all my revenue streams from various sites and sources, breaking them down by site.
For those of you who are very long-time readers of my blog, back to the days when it was entirely pink, you will remember who I used to provide my monthly and daily average income on the right side of my blog. If I start this new series, it would essentially bring this back in a way.
I still haven’t decided if I should start this new series or not. These reports take me a long time to do, and doing a full site report would probably take even longer. Let me know what you think.
I have to say without a doubt that you should definitely do the updates for the whole Merendi networks. That would be awesome.
I think it would be valuable to your readers, but more importantly valuable to you and your company. You can then easily see what is making money and where you can possibly improve.
Well, I already know what is making money and what isn’t. I keep a close eye on everything and have accounting records for all my sites, I just haven’t disclosed them in a long time.
Unfortunately, my blog makes up the majority of Merendi Networks’s income now so it won’t be much higher 😛
Tyler, I agree with the poster above; make it your whole network. Then we can see what Publisher Challenge made or Publisher Spot or PokerForums that way we can still see how you’re doing. You’re an inspiration and I think losing posts like this would hurt (so many others have stopped posting revenues and it kinda stinks).
Nice growth Tyler.
You’d expect the growth for 09 to cotinue, especially with the launch of publisherchallenge.
I’d love you to keep up the monthly earnings thing…it is very inspiring to me so yes, if you can’t keep doing the blog earnings then definitely do the Merendi earnings. 🙂
Wow nice Tyler keep up the good work earnings keep going up also congrats on all the referrals
I think it is a shame you are going to stop the blog earning reports but I realize you have a very good reason for doing so.
I sort of despise MMO sites that don’t tell you how much they are earning but again you have a reason for doing so and your not really a MMO blog 😛
You have been working hard and you deserve the reward man. 🙂
Also a question: What did your site look like when it was first released?
http://web.archive.org/web/20051231040458/https://tylercruz.com/
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately as well. I reported my income for about 6 months on my Blog, but then decided to stop as I’m not really running a MMO Blog so it seemed like the income report might be annoying to those that aren’t into making money online.
Also, when I’ve read some of the posts on Shoemoney’s site, I saw that he’s had some problems with threats against his family and also people doing a lot of “spying” on his campaigns, denial of service attacks against his site etc.
In a recent article he even said that when he talked about a local campaign he used to do for dentists, he had some idiots calling dentists and leaving messages on their machine saying “Shoemoney sucks” or something like that.
I liked reporting the income on my Blog because I always found it inspiring when reading John Chow’s reports and your reports etc., so I hope that others can be inspired by my success, but then when I hear these types of idiots being out there it makes we kind of want to be humble and quiet about how much money I make online.
Have you ever had any issues like this Tyler with reporting your income?
Nope, but that’s because I don’t make very much.
I’m sure it’s a lot more prevalent with the higher earners and more public bloggers such as Shoemoney.
Hi Tyler, I think you should continue posting your blog earnings because it really does help encourage people that making money with blogs really is very real and very possible.
Asher
Keep up the great work. Greg Ellison
Wow, nice earning mate, i hope i also can get 4 figure earning
Yay, I’m glad for you, Tyler.
It’s so cool to see our blog earnings rebound and grow in leaps and bounds.
I think the running total on the side you wrote about would be a great idea.
Just keep us apprised of your earnings.
Only because I have “blog earnings” set up in my Google Reader feed did I find this post.
Thanks for that 🙂
I have to thank you for changing it because (no offence) it looked horrible.
What?
Thanks for showing me what your blog looks like before.
That pink did not look too good 😛
Very impressive earnings Tyler.
Too bad most affiliate networks don’t use sub id tracking because I enjoy reading up on your monthly earnings. Gives me some good motivation.
You sneaky sneaky man 🙂 So you do make a grip of money from ML through the referral commissions. Boy are you lucky to have them choose you as the big contest runner 🙂
-Mike
This shows consistency and high knowledge of the market. looking at your growth graph, I think this is a true example of showing that experimenting/trying out new ideas does help. Great post, I like the layout too. Thanks
It is not good to count the other people’s money from the ethical point of view,but they talk it might be great motivation.
Just thought I’d add my 2 cents into this…. I would say that doing the “Merendi Networks Earnings Report” would be a great new concept to take place of your current monthly earnings report of this blog. Just be sure to really think it threw, because releasing broader information like that, could be dangerous. I guess I always like to be careful, hehe.
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Wow nice Tyler keep up the good work earnings keep going up also congrats on all the referrals
Sorry to hear you will be discontinuing your blog earnings, it has been really informative reading it and a real eye opener. Thanks!
How could I miss this post?
BTW, Great job Tyler.
Wow these are great earnings, keep up the good work.
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