Blog Earnings: October 2008
November 2, 2008 Posted by Tyler CruzLast month my blog brought in nearly $6,000 for the month of September which was my best month by far. While it was a huge success, it was also a bit misleading as one advertiser had prepaid for 2 ad campaigns 3-months in advance. As a result, my blog’s earnings for the month were moderately inflated.
Therefore, I knew even then that October would not set a new record or even come close. In fact, my prediction was that October would bring in just short of $4,000. Fortunately, I was wrong and October finished with a total of $4,966.17.
If we take the average of the past two months and assume that my income stayed at a fixed rate of that average, that would work out to $64,953 a year. That’s more than most people make working full-time working at a job that they hate!
The majority of my blog’s income comes from my MarketLeverage referrals, of which one affiliate is generating the majority of (82.24%). This is a very scary thing as it puts a lot of my eggs in one basket, for if that affiliate suspends his campaigns, my blog income will have a dramatic decline.
However, my blog is just one of my sites and isn’t my biggest money maker (although it soon will be), so I do have a pretty good spread of sites to break my fall if my blog’s income ever does dramatically drop.
Here is a chart depicting the growth trend of my blog during the past 12 months:
My blog has come a long way from exactly one year ago when it only brought in $384. In fact, increasing from $384 to $5,000 a month within the span of a year is quite awesome when you think about it.
The huge increase was again largely in thanks to MarketLeverage. As any regular reader will know by now, I’ve been running MarketLeverage competitions and have so far referred a total of 113 affiliates. They generated over $73,000 in September, and since I get 5% of whatever they generate, I made over $3,600 from them.
As much as I love MarketLeverage and welcome the added boost of revenue to my blog, I’m still not thrilled by the fact that my affiliate breakdown is so heavily dependant on them. I need to really start generating some other sources of passive recurring income as well.
The pie chart below shows MarketLeverage continuing to dominate the rest of my affiliate sources. In fact, pretty soon you might not even be able to see any other sources, but just one giant pink circle.
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, so I need to find a way of growing some outside affiliate income for my blog.
I’m happy with the distribution of the pie chart below though, and would be happy with a distribution balance as high as 75/25 either way.
Affiliate Sources
- MarketLeverage has continued been a fantastic revenue source for my blog. In the month of October alone, my referrals generated me over $3,600 in commissions. This is not counting the money I make with them through my PPC affiliate marketing efforts.
- 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.
My AdToll income stems from the Peel Away Ad located at the top right of my blog. I love Peel Away Ads because they are a new and unique form of advertisement. They are also very visible yet not over intrusive. If you want to buy a Peel Away Slot on my blog, the cost is $15 per week through AdToll.
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.
BooksWealth.com – This is their 9th 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.
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November Goals and Predictions
As much as I’d love to beat my record month of September ($5,859.46), it will be still be some time before I’ll be able to do so.
Last month, I had predicted that October would bring in just short of $4,000. Fortunately, I was wrong and it brought just shy of $5,000! It did a lot better than I expected as my MarketLeverage referral income grew by another $600 and I received 5 paid reviews which helped a lot.
My goal for November is still to break the $6,000 mark, but my prediction is that it will bring in about the same as October, just shy of $5,000.
As usual, stay tuned a month from now to see the results from this month, and wish me good luck!
The blog is growing Tyler. That must be a good feeling to have it generate money on a monthly basis like that. Is it possible to share how much you spent in advertising if any? Curious to know how much was organic, subscription, vs ppc traffic.
Sure: $0. 🙂
Not trying to put your hopes down, but have you thought about what may happen after ML is finished with sponsoring all the prizes?
-Mike
Yes… but what can I do about it? I’m already trying to diversify the revenue sources…
If ML ever stops sponsoring my Affiliate Marketing Challenge, I’m sure I could find another network to take their place due to the huge success they have been.
Yes you are right tyler, affiliate challenges were huge hits in past and they will always be. I have seen other bloggers running them but they are not huge, may be caz MAL offereing them less as prizes….best of luck
It is still a very nice earnings. Greg Ellison
You are the master of contests now. You might have lost against Mr. G, and your contests might not have been as attention drawing as the ones on winning the web, but overall I think your contests have been some of the best win win situations ever. You gave away gifts and recieved massive referral earnings.
Congratulations Tyler. I think the most amazing thing is that it’s grown this much in the space of a year. The fact that you earn 5% of whatever your referrals earn will compound your income as you get more and more successful referrals per month.
Your competitions are great. I have not seen people give away such great prizes like you are. My blog has never taken off due to the writer’s block I currently have. I think reading blogs like yours will give me inspiration and a lot of things to write about.
John
First off, congrats. Your contests are doing well for you and driving your earnings. You have found a great area to drive some income from and I don’t see any reason to stop.
Now the bad news. Starting up contest #5 is starting to turn your blog into the “Contest” blog. This is not all bad. I know you want to diversify your revenue – are you allowed to run contests for other networks while running the ML contests?
The killer will be if ML ever stops sponsoring your contests – I don’t see why they would, the income you generate pays for the prizes many times over. With the amount generated you could offer your own prizes, but you can cross that bridge if it ever comes up.
Your challenge now is to find more CD8470s to enter your contests. ML has to notice that the number of new referrals you bring each month is going down. Perhaps you could work on increasing the number of new accounts you open for this contest. You had to sift through 115 affiliates to find one mega winner – imagine if you had over 1k sign up through you and you found 10 8470s!
I really enjoy reading your blog and have looked at all of your other sites – even contemplated buying movie-vault when I saw it on Sitepoint (too rich for my blood right now). Good luck with the contests and with your blog.
Congrats on the jump in $$ over the last year. Inspirational stuff.
WOW! Thats cool! Hope you go more high
Man, I wish I had this kind of income coming in. You let everyone else do the work, and you take a little cut from all of them. The Internet Marketer’s Dream.
That’s the mentality behind PublisherSpot 🙂
This does show the power of leveraging other’s work. It has me inspired to get off my duff and get busy signing new affiliates with Market Leverage.
Nice contest.. great prizes!
// Ace
// Follow Me twitter.com/acesblogdotcom
// I’m Giving Away an iPhone and $500 FREE – http://www.acesblog.com/?p=60
WOW marketleverage does really well for you.
// Ace
// Follow Me twitter.com/acesblogdotcom
// I’m Giving Away an iPhone and $500 FREE – http://www.acesblog.com/?p=60
Marketleverage seems to do pretty well, maybe i should check it out.
You are really picking up steam! Good job.
I don’t think everyone realizes this is just one of your sites. This is just part of Tyler’s online income.
You continue to be the number one inspiration for my attempt at online money making. Over the past month i have started to take things more seriously and have increased my visitors to my blog by 30 times, so now its time to make 30x the money!!
Keep it up Tyler!
Well done, Tyler. Nice to see another pro blogger making a living doing what they love.
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