Blog Earnings: November 2008
December 2, 2008 Posted by Tyler CruzExactly one year ago, I hit the $1,000 milestone with my blog for the first time and stated: "The $1,000 milestone mark is so important in my eyes because I honestly believe that if you can make $1,000 from your blog, that you can make $2,000. And if you can make $2,000 from your blog, there’s nothing stopping from you making $5,000 or $10,000."
I truly believed that then, and still do today. Especially in the world of making money online, making the first $1,000 per month from a site is almost always the hardest. Once you’re able to make $1,000 a month from a site, there should really be nothing stopping you from growing that to $5,000 a month and then to $20,000 as long as you have a quality site and there is a market out there for it.
I’m proud to say that I can back up my words. Exactly one year after I made that post and $1,000 milestone, my blog’s earnings for the month of November 2008 came to a staggering:
$6,663.94.
This is a new blog record for me, surpassing the previous record of $5,859.46 generated in the month of September. What’s scary is that December is currently on pace to exceed $10,000…
If we assume that my income stayed at a fixed rate of $6,663.94 with no growth, that would work out to $79,967.28 a year. That’s $80,000 a year for running a blog that I’d do for free!
The majority of my blog’s income comes from my MarketLeverage referrals, of which one affiliate is generating the majority of (82.63%). 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, I recently signed up another pretty big affiliate which should help balance some of the weight.
My blog is now my biggest money maker, although it’s not my only site. In fact, it only comprises roughly half of Merendi Networks Inc.’s earnings 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 $1,047. In fact, increasing from $1,050 to $6,660 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 135 affiliates. They generated over $110,000 in September, and since I get 5% of whatever they generate, I made over $5,500 from them.
The pie chart below shows MarketLeverage continuing to dominate the rest of my affiliate sources. In fact, pretty soon I might have to stop displaying it since soon it will just be a giant pink dot…
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 start overtaking the Private Ads piece soon.
Affiliate Sources
- MarketLeverage has continued been a fantastic revenue source for my blog. In the month of November alone, my referrals generated me over $5,500 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 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.
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.
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- Spy on Your PPC Competition with PPC Bully
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December Goals and Predictions
I never like to count my chickens before they hatch (although I often do anyway), but I’m quite confident December will set a new blog record, and actually hit a new milestone by breaking the $10,000 mark.
My goal for December is thus to hit the $10,000 milestone, but my prediction is that it will actually hit $11,000.
As usual, stay tuned a month from now to see the results from this month, and wish me good luck!
WOW, remarkable growth. I think the key that I have seen from reading your income reports is that you just keep at it, day after day you work to improve your blog and slowly but surely the income starts rolling in. Any business owner would benefit from following this example, whether they run an online biz or a brick and mortar shop.
Thanks for sharing,
Matt
Yeah, as I like to say: “You can’t succeed if you give up” 🙂
Stay tuned for December’s blog earning report… it’s pretty insane… I can’t even believe it myself…
Congrats on the milestone, just don’t be surprised if the publishers under you jump ship to another affiliate network and you drop back down to ~$1000 a month. Although I am wishing you the best of luck.
Yes, but I think Tyler is aware of that, which is why he mentioned he’s happy that he signed up another big affiliate. Diversification is always key.
Congrats on the milestone Tyler – it’s inspiring!
$6000 from blog is a little amazing!
WOW! Amazing worl Tyler! I think you’ll hit the $11,000 with all your affiliates making more from ML cause of christmas 😀
dam your going up the ladder
Yet another false acai berry blog. I hear the FTC knocking. 😉
Congrats Tyler! Looking forward to seeing if you can break the $10k mark. Maybe $100k exactly a year from now?
Well done Tyler, amazing to see how ML has pushed up your earnings so much. I must admit, I do agree with you about all your “eggs in one basket”, it’s risky, but it’s working now and I’ll hold thumbs that this continues for you : )
Congrats. I’m sure you inspire people everyday with this huge blog income
Really Incredible Growth, I hope to see more people expanding there blogs to this amount, It’s truely incredible.
Excellent job Tyler. I hope one day I can hit some of those marks.
Just keeps going up keep it up Tyler great earnings!
I’d be interested in knowing who that top market leverage affiliate earner is.
Good job Tyler nice monthly income. Thanks Greg Ellison
Tyler,
How about talking about how you actually spend your earnings?
Have you bought anything interesting recently?
Has your spending gone up as your earnings have gone up?
Anything you’re looking to buy?
I’ll consider blogging about this in a future post 🙂
Seems like a lot of people who become successful with their blog make a good percent of their income from affiliates…?
Congratulations Tyler. Your success is well deserved. Keep up the great work!
Do like following your growth, inspiring. Hope to see that $10K figure soon.
Great job, Tyler. While I’m not surprised at your income level, it sure is growing much quicker than I’ve seen. Great job.
I’ll need to post my income report this week. Seems like its the “in” thing. 🙂 Hehehe…
Nice that even as the economy struggles your revenue increases. That’s the glory of this biz.
economy struggles–not in internet advertising!
The internet, especially internet marketing and SEO is less likely to be affected by the economic downturn. Ad rates may decrease slightly with less advertisers bidding up rates, however its still possible to make a great income online as Tyler has proven.
Congratulations on the past year!
Very nice, well done.
Congratulations! I hope I can make similar accomplishments by the end of 2009!
WOOO HOOO!! Another high for ya Tyler 🙂 It’s amazing it’s just from your blog stuff.
-Mike
man, that’s awesome..
keep working, you will definitely beat chow in near future 😀
I love to read case studies and I like to write them as well. I’m curious about how you are doing with you keywords and whether you are getting decent traffic from them.
I read about you on the pepperjamnetwork.com and that is the reason I came to your site. I think you have done a great job at increasing your income and it’s amazing what the internet is still capable of providing to people despite the national economic conditions.
Congrats!
Some nice earnings there tyler, its always inspiring to see this, from my new blog http://www.buyers-web.com(6 months old) i am earning just over 350 a month…
Its always good to see, higher amounts to keep us all inspired…
WOW. November is your highest earner. Seems that you are not affected by the world economic crisis. You know what, my monthly earning is only 1% of your monthly earning.
But your doing some really good things here at the blog. It’s a little scary to have to much in one basket, but if that were to go away I think you’d come up with something new. You have a great mind and solid authority here with this blog.
wow, congratulations on hitting the milestones and achieving the goals you’ve placed for yourself. I’m trying to just build up traffic on my blog but in no rush, yet seeing blogs like yours really is an inspiration to aspiring bloggers such as myself.
It’s very impressive !!
My earning is just arrount $200 from my blogging at themondey.info
There’s a lot of thing I have to do huh ? 🙂
Dinh Trung
tvnew.info
Dam!! Nice stats man. Hope to achive half that some day 😀
Very impressive Tyler. Its nice to see it all go up, keep the trend going on.
Congrats man, Im learning a lot from you. I’m jealous !
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Yoochee mama, that’s alot of cashola!
damn it your really good.. how did you do that?