Million Dollar PortfolioReal Strategies for Making Money Online

Well, 2008 has come and gone. I can hardly believe another year has gone by already. We saw some rough times in 2008 both personally and professionally. I lost a good friend last year to Cancer and another friend who battled a short illness in late 2007 but the world, as they say, keeps turning.

These events did give me pause to get my house in order in terms of insurance coverage and the sort so that should something happen to me, my family is taken care of.

All that being said, 2008 was a good year for this blog. I gained 50 new RSS subscribers and 176 Twitter followers!

For those of you that are new, I run two blogs that account for my online income and it should be known that I also report other forms of income not related to blogging but related to making money online. Blogging isn’t the only way to go about earning a living online, nor should it be. Just as you don’t want to use only one advertising system as a revenue source, you don’t want to confine yourself to just blogging.

And now, the nitty gritty.

December was a challenging month. Advertising revenue overall dropped as a result of several factors including our tanking economy. Online advertising in general in all markets is down. Digg.com (one of the largest social networks on the web) still isn’t profitable and they have all kinds of sponsors. I’ve read even some of the best affiliate marketers have trouble in December so I’m not surprised by some of the results. However, as you will see, it pays to diversify your income.

Blogging is my hobby and only one of my many passions in life. I report these earnings to help you, whether new or experienced in the world of blogging, I think there are lessons to be learned everywhere from everyone.

That being said, you should be working on your affiliate campaigns through PepperJam Network and NeverBlueAds to take advantage of any dry spells in advertising revenue. Keep in mind also, more people spend time indoors and (potentially) more time on their computers which means you can convert more traffic than usual during the fall and winter.

Traffic is the lifeblood of a blog and without it, you aren’t going to be able to make much money. Advertisers need eyeballs and that means you need lots of viewers. Then the trick is converting those viewers into clickers and buyers of the products you advertise.

And now without further Ado…

Traffic Statistics

I always like to start out these reports by explaining my traffic. As usual, Google Analytics doesn’t provide the whole picture so I use Webalizer for my stats. These statistics come directly from my web server. Since Webalizer has direct access to the server itself it tells me much more about the traffic on my site including 401 errors, 301 redirects and much much more.

So for the month of December I had 21,627 page views from 6,293 visits. Most of the traffic is from RSS readers, which is actually a really good thing. What it means is people are picking up the feed and reading it regularly. You’ll also notice my visits are down but the page views are up compared to November 2008. This is also good because it means fewer readers are bouncing or leaving the site after only the first page. You always want to go for the “long tail”.

The Proficient Investor, my other blog also has some good statistics. For December, PI had 51,536 page views from 10,603 visits. As you can see PI, which is a financial/investment blog had more page views than MDP which I attribute primarily to the current fiscal crisis facing this country and the number of Twitter followers who read the blog has climed to 176. Twitter has been a great source of traffic and information and I highly recommend you join and follow me.

Revenue Report

The following is combined income for both blogs. I document earnings here for your benefit. I can talk all day about SEO techniques, writing quality content and how traffic is going to make or break your online business but I also want to show that anyone can make money online and i’m not just talking about blogging. Income can and should come from multiple sources. Revenue should actually be higher from TLA but they pro-rate sales to the time when the ad was first bought. So even though my current price is $18, if you bought a recurring ad when the price was lower, you get that lower price month to month.

Text-Link-Ads: $43.97
CafePress: $119.96
Adsense:  $2.16 (anyone still making money from google adsense?)

Total:  $166.09

This is nearly the same amount as November’s income, and Text Link Ads continues to be the leader in earnings. TLA is the easiest thing I have ever done to earn money online. Sign up for their program, slap in a wordpress plugin and then all you need to do is get traffic to your blog. The wizards at TLA take care of the rest.

The increase in CafePress sales is higher because of the holiday season but not nearly as high as last year which was nearly triple this year’s amount. This is certainly a result of the very serious financial crisis facing this country. You may also notice a lack of affiliate sales. I had really no time to spend on any CPA campaigns from any source so there’s nothing to report in that regard.

What you should take away from this is that if my blog continues to produce similar results month after month, it’s definitely worth the time I do spend on it. At this rate, assuming an average of $150 a month, that puts $1800 in my pocket for the year.

Keep creating original content, drive lots of traffic to your site and then maximize the return of that traffic and you’ll have success. Sign up for every single one of the affiliates mentioned here as well so you can find appropriate products to advertise on your site.

Also, if you are looking for really great gifts that let the recipient choose for themselves, there’s no better place than to shop at Ribbon:The Gift Of Choice. Shipping is included in the price of the gift book you buy and they range from $20 to $500.00 including 3 or 4 night vacation packages. If you want to be able to resell these same books, use the contact form and I’d be happy to explain how Quixtar works and how you can make money running a Quixtar business.

There’s no real magic behind making money online but you don’t want the only purpose of your site to be making money…it doesn’t work like that. Find your niche, write what you are passionate about and the rest will fall in place.

Find out what I am doing right now by following me on Twitter! If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.

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