It’s time to update you all on this blog’s earnings. Last month was better than I expected. I’m in no way at a point where I can stop working, but progress is progress and I’m not going to poo poo what I have earned because it’s important to understand these things take time.

I started this blog nearly a year ago in May, 2007 and at that time it wasn’t making any money at all. The challenges for any new blog are getting traffic and loyal readership and making money doing it. I never recommend anything I don’t do or use myself. I’m not averse to doing paid reviews, but none have come up yet. ReviewMe hasn’t accepted any of my blogs (probably because I don’t meet certain traffic requirements) so my sources of income may seem odd.

Million Dollar Portfolio isn’t the only blog I write. I also run an Investment blog that accounts for some of the income you see reported here. Why report it here and not on my investment blog? Simply because this blog is about making money online and that’s just what both of my blogs do. It’s all the same income to me.

Now, without further ado…

Traffic Statistics

According to Google Analytics, page views from March 1 to March 31 were 579 with 500 unique visitors. That’s an average of 1.16 pages per visit and a bounce rate of 91%. These numbers I attribute to my use of Entrecard. The bounce rate is high because most people think by dropping as many cards as possible, you can artifically inflate your EC advertising price and by doing so appear as a more desirable place for other people to spend their credits. This is of course a double edged blade. On the one hand, at first glance that 300 or 500 credit price will impress people until they see

1. Your RSS subscriber numbers
2. Your Alexa ranking
3. Your Technorati authority

Then what happens is you stop getting ads placed on your widget. This happened to my investment blog. When it got over 100 EC to advertise on, my frequency of advertisers dropped off. I wasn’t even spam dropping…if you will. I would simply visit the blogs I liked, click on their widget and without even trying my price shot up to over 100 EC. The point is, dropping 300 cards a day doesn’t make your blog any more valuable, it only serves to limit the number of people that can actually advertise with you. I prefer to be more organic about it.

44% of the visits in March were new which means 56% were returning visits and that’s good news. It means I have some loyal readers but enough new ones that eventually something is going to pique their interest and convert them to RSS subscribers. I value RSS subscribership more than anything because its a better barometer of how many people actually read your blog vs the traffic results from Google.

Income Sources

My top income source for March is once again Text-Link-Ads. Advertising on this blog and my investment blog through Text-Link-Ads is only $15 a month.

Here’s the breakdown:

• Text-Link-Ads: $44.72
• Adsense:             $1.42 *I removed most adsense ads because they were not performing well
• Clickbank:          $0.00
• LinkShare:         $0.00
• NeverBlueAds:  $0.00 *is the banner ad market dead?
• ScratchBack:      $0.00 *donate already sheesh! it’s cheap!
• PPP Direct:        $0.00 *no reviews requested so far
• Project Wonderful: $1.54 *average cost of $.02 to advertise a 125×125 banner here! cheap!
• AdToll:                $0.00 *average cost of $.20 to $.40 to advertise with adtoll! again, cheap!

Those are the sources of income for this blog. Hosting is $15 a month for all my sites so at the end of the month I netted $32.68 which still beats February’s income. Gross income was $47.68 from all sources.

So, i’m not going to be able to retire on that kind of income but readership is growing and as traffic and readership increase, so should my income. It comes down to basics. The more eyeballs you have, the more you can charge for advertising. This should be good news for all you bloggers out there wondering how you can make money doing this. My 3 rules are:

1. Write about what you know.
2. Content is king, don’t rip off other people’s stuff…come up with your own
3. Don’t put all your advertising eggs in Google’s basket. Find what works for your site and don’t be afraid to drop anything that isn’t working.

I give each new ad program about a month before I decide to ditch it if the numbers aren’t good. Several of the programs I mentioned above haven’t been there for the full month of March but you may not see them when I make my April income report if they don’t perform. After all, its no skin off my back getting rid of valuable ad space that isn’t performing. Just because they haven’t worked for me, doesn’t mean they won’t work for you. In fact I know several other blogs that use these exact programs and they earn much much more than i do. It comes down to how much time you can spend marketing and promoting these, your blog design, how much traffic you get and most of all ad placement. Ads above the fold tend to perform better but there are all kinds of theories on that. You’ll have to figure out what works for you.

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