Million Dollar Portfolio

Every month I go over my advertising systems I have in place and determine if they are really worth keeping. Those that are making money get to stay and those that aren’t get the boot.

This month I have decided to ditch Project Wonderful. It started out as a good idea. Offer a low cost alternative to the 125×125 ad boxes that seem so popular these days. The problem was, I had no control over the cost of advertising on my site. The cost was all determined by traffic and a lot of times, the code wasn’t read properly by the Project Wonderful site so my average price was $.01. Ideally, people would begin to bid on the spot they wanted and others would outbid them…etc etc until you were getting a decent price. In turn you could then bid on other sites to place your own ad, not unlike Entrecard only this is cash instead of credits.

At one point my account was up to $2.04 or so and I decided to take out some ads on other blogs/sites. That $2 drained fast and now for one reason or another my code isn’t working…and no ads have been placed recently.

So, that being said. I have removed Project Wonderful from my blog and I have no intention of reinstating it. Without the ability to set a price I think is fair for the amount of traffic I get, I just don’t like the way the system works. My traffic also didn’t increase much as a result for using PW. Entrecard on the other hand is staying. I get quite a bit of traffic from using it and the system works a lot better now after they changed their formula for calculating how credits are accumulated.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I guess nobody likes getting free stuff. Maybe you didn’t need a mousepad or a squishy stress-relief ball. Someone, however wanted a rubic’s cube. I’ll be sending that off as soon as I get the postal details.

Congratulations to Tracy Kehr who was the only one to comment on the post and won her choice of prize.

I haven’t heard from anyone at the expo if I have won any iPods or other gear, but I’ll keep you posted if I do win. For those of you that are into podcasts, Episode 6 of my movie review/gaming podcast is up now and you can download it or subscribe via iTunes. Go to http://eastwingpodcast.com for more information.

April was a busy month for me at work which is why there haven’t been a lot of posts here about making money online or making money by blogging. Sometimes there just isn’t much to say and I would rather not say anything than fill a post with meaningless banter.

I will be experimenting again with another affiliate marketing foray but my past trials didn’t fare so well. Unfortunately, most of the products offered from affiliate programs like ClickBank are things like “Warcraft Riches” or believe it or not, make money programs…it all seems so silly. I can see the scenario now. I write a post about making money from affiliate programs by advertising a make money from affiliate programs program? That makes my head hurt.

I’m trying to find tangible assets to make money from not just ebooks about making money, that never really helps anyone. Also, after the fiasco with Joel Comm (I almost ordered that $9.95 adsense book) before I found out he had an auto subscription for a monthly fee. Previously I purchased the Google Assassin package which also has a monthly subscription fee but after using it for a month solid and making only $15 and spending an additional $125 in advertising costs, I cancelled it. Maybe I’m not cut out for affiliate marketing or maybe I just haven’t found the right niche market yet, I don’t know. I understand that it takes some money to make money but I think for now I’ll stick with what I know works.

What are your experiences in affiliate marketing? How do you advertise your products and do you get a good ROI?

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If you are new to the Entrecard game and want to get a massive head start on advertising on some of the most expensive sites out there (like JohnChow.com) now is the time.

John Chow is giving away 10,000 Entrecard credits to some lucky blogger.

I use entrecard as a way of doing some free viral marketing. Some have argued that the traffic isn’t high quality enough because most people drop a card an move along. I disagree. I think any traffic is good traffic. Think of it this way, if you got 1,000,000 hits in one month and even 1% of that 1,000,000 stopped to read something you said and then 1% of those readers subscribed to your blog, you would have 100 new readers that month. That’s pretty darn cool.

Head on over to JohnChow.com and enter the contest and then if you don’t want em you can give them away yourself.

Popularity: 17% [?]

John Chow isn’t the only one going to Ad:Tech. Although this will be my first time going, I’m no stranger to conferences. I used to attend the annual 3D Design conferences held every year in the bay area. I try to go to MacWorld which is also held in San Francisco but I hate that they charge you just to attend the exhibit floor. After all, the vendors have already paid for they booths, why should I have to pony up extra dough just to see them hock their wares?

This week though, I will be attending Ad:Tech because if you registered by today you could get in for free. Otherwise, it’s a $125 entry fee for the exhibit floor.

The coolest thing about attending any exhibit hall is all the giveaways that happen. Usually they scan your badge for each drawing and in return they get your email or mailing address to send literature your way. It’s a good system.

I’m looking forward to meeting John Chow if I can find him at all in the crowds on the floor. Best of all, if I win anything in any drawings it’s likely I’ll just be giving them away on the blog so stay tuned. I’ll take what photos I can and post them so you can see what you are missing if you aren’t attending.

Popularity: 22% [?]

In the world of blogging, there are very few who become superstars. Those that do got there by being consistent and following their own rules they set out with. These successful bloggers also build a reputation with their content and quality posts. These are important if you are going to sell space to advertisers or at some point decide to sell  your entire blog.

One such individual is the Irish owner of JohnCow.com. The blog started as a parody of the JohnChow.com site but quickly grew into its own. A lot of early traffic can probably be attributed to misspellings of people trying to get to JohnChow.com. It was a brilliant move in registering a domain name so similar and then putting a twist on it by writing from the point of view of a cow.

What started as a parody has become a well followed blog. Now, it’s up for sale. According to the site’s owner, the blog currently makes about $3500 a month from advertising revenues. The site is listed for sale on sitepoint for a minimum of $25k USD. Its a decent price if you consider long term you are going to make that back in less than a year and if you wanted to break into the blogging business with guaranteed income, this is the way to do it. By the way, if you end up buying it as a result of reading this post, make sure you let the ol’ cow know.

Find out more here.

Popularity: 22% [?]