One of the biggest questions asked to me about this blog is ‘how much do you make with it’… I’ve answered this a lot in private, but here’s the public answer. Directly, I make next to nothing, have always made next to nothing, and probably will make next to nothing in future. For those interested in the figure, it’s around $500/month give or take a little bit :)

The thing about blogs… is that there is a cap on earnings. There is only so much ad space, so many affiliate products you can push and so many other types of ways you can monetize it without people getting pissed off. Bloggers look at John Chow, and think they can reach that stage… with a blog in this niche, it’s very unlikely you’ll make even a tenth of what he makes, monthly.

I stopped concentrating on directly monetizing this blog ages ago… yes, there are direct ads, but apart from that next to nothing. I’ve promoted one or two affiliate products to you guys in the last year, mainly because I feel it’s not worth the hassle.

Now indirect income… that’s an entirely different thing altogether. This blog makes quite a bit more than a tenth of John Chow’s monthly income indirectly, and although a large chunk of that is through profitable joint ventures, a lot of this is also through occasionally promoting products and projects of my own.

You can make a full time living doing this, and quite a few marketers do.

I did this when I started out on this blog… every week, I promoted a different product (which no doubt pissed people off :razz: ), got a few sales and then sold off all rights. Of course, your blog readers will get irritated if you constantly try and sell them things… which is why you should promote your own projects and reap the benefits.

I haven’t done this in ages, as most of my projects tend not to be in this niche… it’s far easier to promote where people are unaware of internet marketing. However, those of you that remember the old owner at John Cow - he used to do this quite a bit, and I did this for the launch of Blog Premiere - nearly every single member of that site came from here.

If I sold Blog Premiere today, I’d net at least a few thousand for it. With no costs on promotion etc. Of course, Blog Premiere was a slightly expensive project to get off the ground for people that would be starting out, but what about other blogs?

Had I promoted DaBlogger on TUK when I started it, it would have 2x - 3x the readers it does today, and would be worth a lot more. I didn’t, because at the time I wanted to use it as a case study and work at it from the newbie’s perspective… so didn’t want to distort the statistics.

The thing is, blog readers actually LIKE hearing about projects, whereas they HATE being sold to. Due to this, they’ll check out your new projects, maybe interact or subscribe… and you have a project that you’ve recently started getting visitors with you doing nothing.

You can do this for every single project you ever launch (if you are that way inclined)… start one, benefit off the initial boost of traffic and revenue (while having to do less promotion yourself) and sell it after a month. Rinse, repeat, over and over and over again. Of course, do not do this too much as if you give people too many options, they’ll usually choose none of them :)

I’ve always recommended people have a flagship, ‘personal’ blog… it’s a lot better for networking and here’s just another reason why you should. You don’t even have to try and directly monetize it - indirectly works far easier and is a lot less work. :)

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