Blog Money Whore

Another month, another $10.91!

That’s $10.79 from AdSense and $0.12 from AdBrite on 1,221 pageviews and two measly posts. I need to write and promote more but have been extremely pressed for time. This will likely not improve in August, though I expect it to get much better in September. Well, maybe. August will instead be focused on three things: studying for the GMAT, selling everything I own, and photography.

Unfortunately, the Revolution Money Exchange gravy train has ended as Tom points out in his comment. One thing I definitely need to do this month, though, will be searching for some new revenue streams (not just this site but my many others) due to the cessation of the AdSense Referral program. If anyone knows of any good alternatives, then please let me know! I tried Commission Junction briefly, but it just wasn’t bringing in the dough.

As always, this data is in the Earnings, Pageviews & Posts table along with historical data since the start of this blog.

Yikes! Is it already July? And I’ve done so little with this site! Argh! Sigh, I have so many grand plans but so little time and energy.

Well, June saw another 1,087 pageviews with $9.66 from Google AdSense, $0.15 from AdBrite, and $10.00 from Revolution MoneyExchange. I only posted thrice. Considering the amount of effort that went into this, that’s not so bad. It’ll buy me a few sandwiches. Well, maybe two after taxes.

As always, this data is in the Earnings, Pageviews & Posts table along with historical data since the start of this blog.

May was an interesting month with much of it taken up by travel. (In fact, I’m currently writing this from a bus headed from New York City to Philadelphia.) Nevertheless, the website chugged along without much effort going into it and raked in a few bucks. May saw only three posts with a measly 952 pageviews. AdSense brought in $14.29, AdBrite brought in $0.15, and Revolution MoneyExchange brought in $20.00. Overall, this was a disappointing month with a large drop in revenue. Hopefully, June will be better.

As always, this data is in the Earnings, Pageviews & Posts table along with historical data since the start of this blog.

Sorry for the late update! I was traveling abroad for a month and just didn’t have the patience to try to do much work in internet cafes. Anyway, April was an interesting month, especially since much of the activity happened while I was away! With three posts, my pageviews went up a bit to 1,248 from 1,102. The earnings from AdSense happily went up from $23.22 to $25.42 while the earnings from AdBrite went down from $0.14 to $0.11.

More significantly, I added three new columns to the earnings, pageviews, and posts table. The first column is referrals, which will include all earnings from referrals that I can trace directly back to this blog. In April, I earned a whopping $50.00 from referrals from Revolution Money Exchange (you can still get $25 for just signing up!). The second column is ads, which will include all earnings from advertising I sell directly myself. In April, I earned $72.52 from selling sponsored ads for some of my old posts. The third column is total, which will simply be a sum of all earnings for that row.

Earnings grew tremendously last month—more than six-fold! I don’t expect this trend to continue, but it is indicative of the growing clout this blog has. I’m still not rich, but $148.05 is certainly not insignificant, especially considering the minimal amount of time I put into this blog last month!

Something else I should note is that all amounts in the table are after fees but before taxes. Nearly 50% of all earnings will likely go towards taxes due to running my own company.

March was something of an accidental experiment for me. So much for “a great deal more posting”! Although traffic to this blog is generally low, there was still enough to see whether or not frequent blogging actually matters, especially for a young blog. The results?

Google AdSense brought in $23.22 (a decrease from $25.81 in February), and AdBrite brought in a whopping $0.14 (a decrease from $0.24 in February). Keep in mind that AdBrite only runs in the bottom banner ad, so this isn’t necessarily a slight against this ad network. I also had a handful of referrals for Blingo, Prosper, and Revolution Money Exchange. I don’t think these have actually resulted in any payouts, though, and I leave them out of the final tally anyway, as I’m not 100% certain they came from this blog.

All this happened with only two posts and a total of 1,102 pageviews (a decrease from 1,312 in February) according to Google Analytics. That just goes to show that subscribers and frequent posting may not be as important as some may think. Instead, I suspect that content and search engine rankings are more important, and what I’m trying to do is capture the long tail of personal finance topics.

I’d say these are pretty impressive statistics considering the amount of actual work that went into this blog. I spent maybe two hours at most working on this, though it did constantly occupy my thoughts.

As always, this data is summarized in the earnings, pageviews & posts table.

Anyway, here’s to April and making money one post at a time! Let’s see what happens!