I’ll get right to the point: we are excited to announce that for the month of April 2013, we made $98.79! Now I’ll “back fill” a little bit about this Monthly Income Report – April 2013:
When Tiffany and I first started researching the ins and outs of having a blog, one area of interest was answering the question of how blogs make income. 95% of the blogs we visited had advertising on their site or Amazon shops or sold eBooks or included links back to resources that offered affiliate programs or all of these.
We were intrigued.
If you read my earlier post, 2 Girls with an Idea, you’ll know that we didn’t set out to have a blog – we set out to set up a company with a storefront presence in our local community to serve elder care needs. But, we kept running into blogs when posing questions in search engines.
So, obviously, we searched how blogs make money, how much money blogs make, how much income can you make from blogging, etc.; all in an attempt to get some answers.
One of my favorite sites, Pinch of Yum, has consistently and transparently posted their income monthly for more than a year now. This site is the creation of Lindsay and her husband, Bjork. Lindsay, a teacher at an orphanage in the Philippines (see earlier post, Salted Maple Pecan Pie Bars from Pinch of Yum, for details about their amazing story of love and sacrifice), manages a beautiful food blog, makes marvelous creations and takes fabulous pictures. Bjork does many things behind the scenes (such as the tech stuff) to support Lindsay and he publishes a monthly income report.
His transparency and willingness to share have been inspiring to me. More than inspiring, they are educational and have helped both Tiffany and I move forward step-by-step in our goal to make a beautiful blog, with useful content that makes money!
Bjork started posting their monthly income reports in September 2011. In that first report for the month of August 2011, Bjork reported their income at $21.97. A year later, his September 2012 monthly income report reflected income at $5,466.69 and as of their latest report in April, for March 2013, they made $6,914.71 from their blog! In the 20 months that Bjork has been posting his reports, they have made $57,201.46!
Before you run screaming out your door, “I want to blog, too! I must do a blog NOW!”, let me temper your enthusiasm just a tiny little bit – just a tweak. In that very first report, Bjork talks about 50,996 “impressions” they received in the month of August 2011, which probably translates closely to “page views” in other terminology (a glossary is at the end of this post, for those interested). So, to make this easy for comparison purposes, I’m going to only talk in “page views”.
A year later in his September 2012 Monthly Income Report (for the month of August 2012), he reported 424,980 “page views”.
For March 2013, he reported 735,905 “page views.”
Folks, while I’m excited and very happy to report our monthly income for April 2013 at $98.79, our “page views” for the month were 3,000! We have a long, long, long way to climb. I also want to point out that Lindsay had been blogging for more than 2 years before Bjork started posting his monthly reports, so she already had a following which continued to grow during that time. If you want to learn more about Lindsay and Bjork, their mission in the Philippines, Lindsay’s fabulous recipes or Bjork’s income reports, I encourage you to visit their site: Pinch of Yum.
Here’s my point: you CAN make money from blogging and running a blog, but it takes time, consistent hard work and long hours! So, don’t quit your day job until you are well established!
So, back to Toot Sweet 4 Two – two bits of exciting news to report for our Monthly Income Report – April 2013: we made $94.66 through our Amazon Affiliate Program and we have our first revenue from our Google AdSense affiliation!
I am beyond thrilled to see revenue from Google AdSense! Even though it’s only $4.13 for the month, I didn’t expect that we would receive ANY revenue from Google AdSense for quite some time – until we had built up our readership and saw way more “page views” than 3,000 for the month! NOTE: while our actual “page views” were 3,000 for the month of April, our “page views for Google AdSense” were 1,998 (see glossary below).
So, how does this revenue generation thing work?
With Amazon, if a reader clicks on any of the 3 ways to access Amazon through our site (our Shop Toot Sweet tab on our toolbar or the Amazon affiliate widget on our sidebar or the ad that runs on our sidebar), goes into Amazon and places an order through Amazon, we will earn a small commission from the reader’s purchase. This does not cost the reader any more than if the reader goes direct to Amazon. But, the beauty of Amazon’s Affiliate Program is that Amazon reaches more people by allowing affiliates such as blogs to have Amazon stores and links on their sites (Amazon is one savvy company!). So, with Amazon, we only make money if (1) the reader clicks into Amazon through our site AND (2) if the reader makes a purchase. The reader has to do both: click from our site AND purchase. Here are the three ways to access Amazon through our site:
Access #1 – in our header by clicking on “Shop Toot Sweet”
Shop Toot Sweet
Access #2 – in our “Shop Toot Sweet” widget located on our sidebar
Shop Toot Sweet Widget
Access #3 – Amazon ad in our sidebar
Amazon Ad
BTW – none of the above photos link to Amazon because I don’t yet know how to make that happen!
Google AdSense is a whole different ballgame. You make money based on both “page views” and “clicks”. What does all this mean? Advertisers pay Google for ad space based on the number of “page views” their ads receive on websites and blogs. In addition, if readers click on the ads and are redirected to the advertiser’s site, Google (and the advertiser) pay a higher percentage. So, there are two components to the advertising you see floating on our side bar.
Anyway, here’s a glossary of terminology to help explain some of this (this is just the “tip of the iceberg”! For more detailed information, visit Google AdSense).
GLOSSARY
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Clicks – when a user clicks on an ad
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CPC (Cost Per Click) – the formula used to price online advertisement
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Page CTR (Click Through Rate) – the number of ad clicks divided by the number of page views
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Page RPM (Revenue Per Thousand) – calculated by dividing your estimated earnings by the number of page views you received, then multiplying by 1000 (the “M” in “RPM” is the Roman Numeral “M” for 1000, thus “Revenue Per Thousand”).
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Page Views – every time a user views a page
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Page Views for Google AdSense – every time a user views a page displaying Google ads
Check back next month! We are looking forward to our numbers climbing! Thanks for sticking with us and thanks for your continue readership and support on multiple levels!
Tootles,
Related Posts:
(other Monthly Income Reports)
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