Million Dollar Portfolio

It’s once again time to report my figures for April 2008. I am no John Chow, but my blog is making money and I think its important to be honest, even when you aren’t making the kind of money that Chow or Darren Rowse are making. This blog isn’t about getting rich quick. It’s about my journey to become independently wealthy.

I started this blog 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 April 1 to April 30 were 1647(an increase of over 1000 visits over the month of March) with 1940 (an increase of 1440 over the month of March) unique visitors. That’s an average of 1.17 pages per visit and a bounce rate of 90%. Comparing these figures to March, my bounce rate dropped by 1% and my average pages per visit went up by .01%. Not a big deal right? Wrong. What this means is readers are sticking around a bit longer than they had before and that’s a good thing.

Most of my traffic came from my use of Entrecard. Last month, Entrecard changed the way credits are calculated so the massive droppers don’t benefit as much from 300+ a day drops on other sites. I

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.

15% of the visits in March were new which means 85% were returning visits and that’s good news. It means I have 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: $53.00
• Adsense: $4.97 (after reinstating in a higher heat area)
• Clickbank: $0.00
• LinkShare: $0.00
• NeverBlueAds: $0.00 *is the banner ad market dead?
• ScratchBack: $4.10 *It’s $5 to advertise through ScratchBack, just click on the text.
• PPP Direct: $0.00 *no reviews requested so far
• Project Wonderful: $1.04 *average cost of $.02 to advertise a 125×125 banner here! cheap!
• AdToll: $0.00 (they make the widget in the upper right of the blog and a 160×600 ad in the sidebar)

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 $47.81 which surpasses the income from March (progress!). Gross income was $62.81 from all sources.

Summing It All Up

As you can see, 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. 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.

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for the programs I mentioned in this post. You can put them to work on your blog almost immediately and start experimenting with advertising. Some bloggers will tell you not to advertise anything until you have a lot of traffic but I started from the get go. The key is to have a blog design that allows you some space for ads but plenty of room for your content. Remember, without content it won’t matter how many ads you have on your site because there won’t be anything worth sticking around for.

*I still have some schwag(free stuff) from the Ad:Tech expo to give away. Just make a comment on this post or this post and let me know what you want. The Rubic’s Cube is already taken.

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