Friday 30 October 2009

Blog Income Review

I don't expect to get rich from blogging (or even earn a similar amount of income per hour spent blogging compared to my day job) but it does provide a (very) small stream of income and has practically no monetary cost (if one ignores pre-existing overhead costs such as my PC and broadband connection). I no longer do any paid posts - it's not that I'm against sponsored posts (if they are flagged as such) - but simply that there aren't any opportunities coming through from PayPerPost, Blogsvertise etc. that aren't totally crass and/or for something I don't want to be promoting on my blog. My blog income this year is mostly from the handful of text link sponsor ads in my sidebar (LinkWorth) and from the banner ad clickthroughs (Google AdSense). The text link ads are relatively lucrative (around $0.50 per day per text link ad) compared to Google Adsense income (around $0.50 per day), but I have to wait for advertisers to request a text link ad to increase this revenue stream (and advertisers can "pull the plug" at any time). Whereas Google AdSense revenue could be boosted through my actions, as it depends on blog traffic volumes (ie. what I post, how often, and how I promote this blog) and on click-through rates (ad relevance/post content and blog audience composition I suppose), but my natural level of daily page impressions is fairly static. Some attempts to boost traffic (eg. Traffic Swarm) are counter-productive (as they are considered 'spam' links and can lead to page rank penalties from Google etc.), and others just increase traffic without producing any long-term increase in readership or clicks on ads (eg. StumbleUpon), as seen last October.

Overall I receive about $2-$3 per day income from this blog, which corresponds to an 'alternate stream of income' equivalent to about 1% of my wage income. If I could increase this by an order of magnitude (either boost quality blog traffic ten-fold, or establish ten similar blogs that are low maintenance/post frequency) the extra 10% income stream would become significant, especially if it was all directed into additional savings and investments ;)

Then again, I may be too busy doing a MoA next year to worry about setting up new blogs!



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