In the very first days of this blog, I was curious about other blogs, especially about their evolution, in terms of traffic, income and popularity. Now I’m able to draw a line and publish the evolution of All Tips and Tricks over its first 8 months of life. The graph illustrates the monthly number of visits, pageviews, organic search visits and income.
Referrals & blog promotion:
- 5-6 blog carnivals submissions every week, over the first 3 months
- social networking sites submissions: reddit, digg, StumbleUpon, ma.gnolia, searchles, fark, linkaGoGo, slashdot, NowPublic, Netscape, clipmark
- two swickis: one about MS Excel and one about personality tests
- one squidoo lens
Blog content:
- it is mainly original, yet during November and December I used some free articles (as you can see from the chart, they were not so appreciated, despite my efforts to publish only the ones I thought were best)
Blog traffic:
- August: very low, only from blog carnivals participation and from social networking sites; I did not comment on other blogs, nor did I participate in any group project.
- September: I got twice on the front page of Netscape (if you look at the chart, you’ll see that this reflects also in the income level - no other social network converted so well). By mid September I discovered StumbleUpon, and one of my posts got on the Buzz page (with no significant growth in income). Some shy referrals from Google search started to appear.
- October: I got farked. The server crashed at a point, but even so, the traffic spike was quite big. I can’t say the same thing about the income. Organic search results started to show, although Google PR was still 0. Special note: the Alexa rank did not improve as much as I have expected. It seems that many fark readers don’t use the Alexa toolbar.
- November: I moved the blog from a Romanian server to Dreamhost and I changed the theme of the blog. After the move, I noticed an immediate increase in organic traffic (it almost doubled). After changing the theme I noticed a huge headache, as my sidebar items got messed up. Even to this day my Blogroll is not displayed, so I gave it up, and now I’m using a rolling one.
- December: I started to pay more attention to SEO optimization. The results were visible during the following months. The domain got a PR 4, the blog page got PR 5 and the other posts got PR 3. No other notable fact until March 07.
- March: the post about how to see if your photo camera can take infrared photos was featured on fark (not on the main news page, but on the Science one) - this brought in about 5000 visitors and almost no money. After struggling hard to give my cat some pills, I wrote an illustrated post explaining how I finally managed to do it without chasing the cat around the house. The story was mentioned by Lifehacker. It brought in some nice traffic and my cat’s food for about one month (Special note: it’s a kitten, and she does not eat a lot).
Most of all, Lifehacker brought readers to this blog, it generated a lot of links (Yahoo estimates 720 links to that page), and the feedcount increased from 40-50 readers to about 150 (maintaining now over 100). Subsequently, the traffic from Google increased from almost 200 uniques per day, to more than 300. Another thing to be mentioned: the number of pages per visit increased from 1.5 to 6. I would say this was the best experience, which brought in the most long-term benefits.
Sources of income:
- The main source of the earnings on the chart is Google AdSense: $1150.
- Amazon accounts for $78, earned mostly during November and December.
- Linkworth (through their newest product, LinkWords) brought in the glorious amount of $2.60 during the two months it run (I have a feeling that it’s going to be taken off this blog pretty soon, because I don’t want to get rich so fast ;)).
- Text Link Ads: 0 (nobody wanted to subscribe, nobody wanted links; I sold the first link during April, so that is not included here). Later update: in June and July 2007, Text Link Ads became the second biggest money maker on this blog, accounting for 35% of total revenue. So, Monetize Your Site with Text Link Ads and you’ll enter also their referrals program which will allow you to earn $25 for each person who joins the program via your referral link.
- Commission Junction: 0. I promoted several affiliate programs by writing posts about those products, yet nobody seemed to care about.
- ReviewMe: 0. As people did not rush in to get reviewed by me, I doubled the price. Who knows, maybe I looked too cheap?!
- AdBrite: 0. I use it only as an alternative to Google AdSense - when there are no ads available, there comes AdBrite, displaying some stuff nobody clicks on.
- Adify: 0. I used it for one month, but I decided to take it off (the reason is obvious)
- Chitika: 0. I used it for about two months. Not anymore.
As you can see, I tried to follow the advice of not putting all eggs in the same basket: I used so many baskets, but it seems that they were too big for my eggs, which got lost deep inside.
Last, but not least, I want to address special thanks to all readers of this blog. Now you saw another piece of the iceberg of making money online. How is it compared to your personal blogging experience? What else would you like to know?
11 Comments
Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting to see how blogs grow. My blog is older so I’m doing a little better on the revenue front. However, I too have struggled with the diversification issue. I recently tried Amazon’s Context Links and Kontera’s Context Links. I got clicks and revenue from both, but both seemed to hurt AdSense. So I’m back to just AdSense. I’m hopeful that Google’s DoubleClick acquisition might open some more doors for us though.
@Marios: thanks for your comments. I’m glad you were interested in this blog’s journey. As of the diversification issue, it is normal that every additional program you add to your blog, hurts AdSense. The point is to see whether the income they generate is bigger than the loss.
Hey, This is really true i’ve seen from many websites that if you put so many ads, it’ll have a lot of affect on your AdSense. But Google never mention that did they????
Anyway thanks for the idea of the earnings Simonne
Cheers,
Singh
Of course additional ads affect AdSense, because they give your visitors more choices of how to leave the current page. If all links are AdSense, the probability of readers choosing them is higher. This is why, supposing that your main income from one page comes from an affiliate link, adding AdSense to that page will harm your affiliate earnings. You have to keep on testing; the choice is yours what to keep and what to let go.
Thanks for posting this. I’m just starting out blogging and it’s good to see examples of how others are doing - it’s a slow climb, but I’ve enjoyed the ride so far.
Hi, John, thank you for your comment. I posted this just because I remember that when I started, I was looking for such kind of info. Nevertheless, it does not mean that you should take it for granted: each case is unique, and there are people out there who make a lot of money from programs that did not bring me one cent. You have to try and see what fits best for your blog. Good luck!
What a refreshingly honest take on the topic. I’m rather sick of seeing claims to the effect ‘make $10,000 a month’ - send me $97 and I’ll tell you how… Have you noticed it’s invariably that sum.
Out of interest I have a few sites doing reasonalby well with text-ad-links. It doesn’t work well for general sites, but popular, focused / niche ones do tend to attract advertisers.
Out of interest, I get revenue rather more from folk asking for long term advertising contracts than I do from ADsense or anything else.
Conchika etc meanwhilw I found useless, though again some sites claim to do well, usless niche hardware based ones.
Good luck feeding your cats anyway
~ Paul
Gah, lots of typos above. what can I saw, it’s 2.30am here >
Thank you Paul. Those $10,000 a month guys probably make that. All they need is 1,000 people giving them $97.
I had a very nice plugin that allowed you to edit your comments, but it is not working for the moment. Don’t worry about the typos. You made your point very clear.
Interesting stuff. Just show google adsense is best source of income for many bloggers, this is certainly my experience
Tejvan, thank you for your comment. Yes, AdSense was the main income source for this blog. However, Text Link Ads is gaining momentum (I think they are almost equal for the month of July)
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