Stuart has posted about receiving his first AdSense payment at Your Money 2 Keep which reminds me a lot of my early days in this game.
The thing I like about Stuart’s attitude is that despite the fact that in month 1 he only earned $1.51 he’s stuck at it.
Many bloggers experimenting with making money from their blogs don’t get past a few weeks into their venture without getting frustrated and throwing it in.
Lets look at Start’s earnings graph:
While it’s pretty small you can see that he’s getting between 40% and 150% growth each month (guesstimate).
While the numbers are quite small to start with it significantly increases when you stick at it.
Extend this graph out another 7 months with similar monthly growth (lets say at the lower end of 40% growth a month) and he’ll be earning around the $1500 mark per month. Make it 70% growth per month for the next 7 months and he’ll be over $5000 per month.
I’m not wanting to hype this or set anyone’s expectations up for that kind of money as a guarantee but when you ask most full time bloggers about their earnings over time you get a very similar graph with very low numbers at first but exponential growth.
Here’s my own graph of AdSense earnings in the first 18 or so months.
I talked about this graph and exponential growth in previous posts here and here.
The take home lesson is to work hard and to stick at it in the early days. Don’t focus so much upon the total numbers but the percentage changes from month to month.
A lot of people set $ figure goals ($100 a day, $1000 a month etc) for their blogs but I prefer to set myself goals of % of growth over time. Neither is right or wrong – but sometimes I think looking at trends can be more motivating and less depressing than looking at total earnings – especially in the early days.
Not everyone will hit this type of exponential growth in their earnings of course – for whatever reason some blogs just don’t take off – but if the beginnings of your graph are slow but steady increases be inspired about the potential growth that could be ahead of you if you keep working hard.
