It’s that time of month again where I talk a little about the split of my own income streams in the previous month. We’re looking at June here and I’m excited to share this month’s charts because it illustrates something that I’ve been saying for the last couple of months really well – things DO vary from month to month.
In April and May we’ve seen the charts look much the same from month to month with AdSense being the #1 earner, followed by Affiliate earnings, eBook sales and Continuity programs. This month we’ve seen AdSense toppled as the #1 earner.
eBook sales dwarfed all other income streams in June – mainly because I released a Travel Photography eBook. I should note that the figures I used to calculate this graph are not total income from eBooks but just my share of them (I do a revenue share with the author of this eBook).
Continuity programs also earned just a few dollars more than AdSense this month so it was pushed down into #3 position.
Interestingly the earnings in all areas except eBook sales, continuity programs and the Job board were down on May figures. I do tend to find this happens most years in the middle of the year – probably due to a bit of a downswing in the number of people in the northern hemisphere who are getting out and enjoying good weather in comparison to the number of people inside during winter months in that part of the world.
I thought it might also be interesting to share the different income streams over the last 3 months so you can see how they each do go up and down a little from month to month.
Last month a couple of readers pointed out that the charts are a little meaningless without actual dollar figures and people were confused about whether we were talking about the different areas being in the tens, hundreds, thousands or more. I’m not going to get into specifics on this except to say that June was comfortably in the six figure zone for a month after expenses.
July will probably return to a more ‘normal’ looking month – although I do hope to launch another small eBook here on ProBlogger in the coming weeks which could lead to that segment being a little higher than in April/May (although I doubt as high as June).
Hi Darren,
I find your breakdowns very intriguing, even without specifics. I actually prefer this percentage based report because it allows me to compare to what I’m doing a lot easier – and it doesn’t allow me to get to discouraged by the astronomical difference in dollar amount.
It’s also encouragement to continue focusing on producing my own ebook products, because of the income potential.
Thanks again for sharing your amazing report.
Hey Darren,
It clearly shows that having your own ebook or products can benefit someone for income generation. Seeing the wide variety of income generation methods from your chart does open my eyes to other areas that I was neglecting.
Thanks for putting this together!
Chat with you later…
Josh
Very nice.. I was expecting your big money to come from advertising,. but to see it from ebooks is pretty cool.
Proof ebook sales are not dead.
Hi Darren,
It is extremely fascinating to see that these different income/revenue sources differ from month to month.
For example, as you point out Adsense was your top earner in May but in June it dropped to 3rd place, while other sources moved up.
Also it shows that incomes are directly proportionate to actions like you Travel Photography eBook, which increased your eBook sales, and made it to the top spot in income.
Kindest,
Nabeel
Hey Darren,
I really appreciate the report. I know that e-books are becoming more and more popular, but you really put it in prospective with the comparisons to adsense earnings.
Thank you
Wow. I am totally shocked at your ebook percentage. I have only delved into ebook marketing a couple of times with decent results. You are now the second person I’ve seen cashing in big time still so I am starting to rethink my strategy. Ebooks are definitely not dead!
Ah! This is really great, and apparently I need to get some sort of ebook. Though how would someone like me acquire my own stuff?
Interesting. Now just come out with a new e-book every month and you’re set ^_^
Has your job board held that low of a share for a while now? Is it even worth keeping up anymore?
David, Scribnia
David Spinks – the job board is an interesting one. It looks pretty low down there but we do 40-60 jobs per month which at $50 a pop isn’t bad considering I’d put about 3-4 minutes per month into it.
Actually I’m hoping to expand the job board in the coming months as I think it’s been successful enough to justify further development.
In terms of an ebook every month – yes that could work, although I do find if you release too many too quickly you burn your readers out. I’d say they could probably sustain 1 every 2-3 months at this point.
But what if we do not have enough quality content to publish an e-book. I am still digging to find the best way to use AdSense. Your book was very helpfull but now I am trying to get to the next level in making money with my blog.
Darren, I think the charts are just fine without concrete numbers. I really appreciate when you do this, and I appreciate the way you do it.
cheers!
Hey Darren, it looks like you have had a very productive month online, and I will make a guess that the current trends will follow next month. As much as I like to see hard figures, like what Pat does at SmartPassiveIncome, these percentages are probably of greater use, and more transferable to just about any website.
When people see cash earnings there may be an expectation that they too should earn the same. In reality, I would imagine that proportionally they could earn the same.
With smart phones as the likes of the iPad on the market, ebooks would appear to be the way forward. It would be interesting to see how your ebook sales progress over the next few months to see what they will peak at, and eventually settle at.
Congrats on your great work!
Mark
I’d be interested to see a relative view of ProBlogger vs DPS.
fyi – not sure if it’s helpful to point out post posting but looks like there is an error in ya URL “…how-i-make-money-blogging-incoem-split…”
WOW! Big difference from the last few months. Ebook sales though the roof. I am currently in the works of my own and hope to have it launched soon about CPA.
Would you be willing to show in posts latter how you go about making money from a specific source and setting it up?
Interesting. I never thought your ebook selling takes up such a big part. Most of all I’m interested about the Continuity programs that you mention. Care to share it in more detail in future post? Thanks.
God dammit! I wish I could be doing as well as you Darren!
Then again, things are starting to take off a bit for me so maybe I might get my very first adsense check this month! That’s after a years blogging!!
so the key was eBook wasn’t it?
congratulations
Very interesting info, Darren. One question: what’s continuity?
I also noticed drop in visitors and I came to the same conclusion for the reason.
I am now wondering if my best shot currently is to put together an ebook while I work on the memberships site.
Mike
http://thisoldbrain.net
Darren,
Thank you again for sharing.
Indeed, e books can be sold in the hundreds or thousands but only as you have pointed out before Darren when the seller has established relationships with the readers who admire and value the seller’s work quality – quality that is offered consistently before the e book purchase is made (clearly something you do on problogger and dps)
I have met quite a few people who are trying to sell excellent e books but they have yet to offer future buyers any real content on line or in person to encourage them to see the value in a book before they buy it.
You have clearly built a trusted following and your readers are more than willing to purchase an e book from you.
On a personal note, I am delighted to say I just had two books sold to one person who had previous read my work and read a free e book by myself. They send me a compliment on my work and I responded with a recommendation and they bought the two books I suggested.
I hope what I am sharing makes sense.
Cheers,
David
http://www.TheWonderTechnique.com
How many ebooks did you sell during June? What about your hardcover books?
aritoni – I only get paid royalties from my hard cover book every few months (I think it’s twice a year) so I don’t include any figures on those in the months I don’t get paid.
i’ve never even heard of continuity programs before. can you tell us more about them?
Great display. I appreciate this more, as I agree that your figures would give a false sense of hope. Also, I agree with Carrie if you could elaborate of continuity programs.
Thanks,
Carlos
To those asking about continuity programs – basically they are membership areas/sites where people pay a monthly subscription fee to join and participate or get access to extra information or community.
For me these are ProBlogger Community – a members only forum for bloggers and Third Tribe which is a membership site for online entrepreneurs that I co-founded with 3 other bloggers.
E-books do sell and you can make some money, but that is not where the big money is.
Hi Darren,
Your break down is really revealing and helpful showing what works for you everybody can learn from that.
I like your graphs.
I don’t see any Adsense on this blog so is it just from your other blog or do you have many more?
Vance
Hi Darren,
Your eBook graph will now touch the sky.
:-)
The graph was very helpful in this blog post. I guess the earnings will be different for each type of blog depending on a bunch of factors, but thanks for sharing with us. In order to make money from Adsense you have to have lots of traffic and the ads have to be placed strategically. Testing is where you really need to try out different implementations and tweak the ones that work best for your blog.
in any one month how many times you make this ebook? and ideas to make it come from?
http://theidiotgame.com source
Was about to ask about the Contuinity program as well but a search on this page has answered it :)
Great figures as always
Having great content is a given, but I’m wondering what kind of promotion did you do to power the ebooks sales? Thanks for sharing!
Interesting report. I suppose eBooks are the better source of income provided you can make your own. I suppose if one has been blogging for years, one would have lots of materials to write about. What I found interesting about this is I didn’t expect most of your income would come from eBook. There really is money in eBooks after all.
Hey Darren,
firstly kudos and congratulation on such achievements,
For me, this is an inspiration and motivation for me to push forward further on my ‘exploration’ to make money online today.
I see different variations of how you obtain your income online.
I hope to achieve this sort of impressive results in times to come.. i do still have a long way to go, but I am getting on it.
=) cheers
keep it up, darren
Ha! for you and everyone Adsense tops in average, well adsense is powerful, its simple to implement, at least for me
Impressive. I can see that your ebook sales had made a huge impact in terms of revenue. By the looks of it, most of your readers are benefiting by a large extent from it. Higher success rate I suppose. Cheers.
Hi Darren,
This clearly shows that if one is aptly able to promote ebooks and other affiliate products,he/she can earn a higher amount than by PPC.Just depends on how much credibility you’ve been able to gain and whether your audience trusts your word or not.In your case,you have them both,so making money from affiliate marketing and ebooks is not a problem.
Otherwise for any newbie or even intermediate blogger,trying to earn cash by selling stuff is a difficult thing.
By the way,I read somewhere that this blog has been sold to Google ??
It’s really interesting to see the last three month’s income stream.Sudden surge of income from ebooks from the month of May.But still AdSense gives you very steady income.Which always was the case.
Hi Darren,
Its good to see your charts. My blog continues to lag me behind but truly I have started it not for money.
Continuity is a new topic to me. I think the sudden rise in the graph of E book was due to the new edition. Anyway thanks for all your posts.
Thank you.
Nice job, Darren!
It’s easy to assume that you are pulling six figures every single month, which is quite inspiring considering you don’t have a large staff around you. Why do I say six figures? Well, with an average of 50 job board spots sold monthly ($2500) and that equals only 2% of you June earnings, simple math tell us that you are running a million dollar business (actually, $125,000 per month x 12 = $1,500,000) from the comfort of your home. Amazing!
But like you said many times and I completely agree: you have to work your ass off to achieve this kind of success.
Cheers
Pedro Sousa
Just wanted to share that with your advice (pro blogger book) I was able to make my first $$$ from my blog. I sold on 250x250px ad space. I even think I may have sold to low since they responded so quickly to “buy”. Hopefully many more sales and more $$ to come.
E-books used to be something I purchased quite a bit and I’ve since stopped but I see it continues to do it’s thing here, okay, something to consider. Love getting your reports. Inspired me to put up site 15 last night on a topic that I can’t believe I even touched, very techy!
Haha, I think it would be interesting to see the figures.
This post proves once again to not put all of your monetization eggs into one basket.
Fascinating how different people get different things from the same information.
A few commentors touched on this but – there was a “launch” associated with this ebook, launches can make a lot of money but you cant do them every month and they take a lot of work.
We need to view the spike in context to the years earnings and the effort involved in the launch before we pick a winner.
Then we need to decide what our “goal” is – if its passive income adsense is still the easiest biggest earner.
I have long been an advocate of Adsense and too me this information only goes to show that its still a credible monetisation method – no “customers” no refunds one of the only true passive income methods online.
wooww.. ebooks sale has sky rocketed as you expected. one more to come this week? good luck with the new release.
WOAH!!! ebooks all the way!
It is interesting to read this post. For sure Problogger has diversified in many niches ads and optimized keywords on his blog hence six figure.
Interesting. EBooks sale is obviously better. But I was wondering, whether to sell my eBooks or give it out for free?. I will be releasing an eBook on blogging next month. And which affiliate programs have been worthwhile over the last three months.
Hi Darren! I have similar experiences. For me adsense is the stable background, everything else comes on top of that. Sometimes more comes in from other things than from Adsense, but you have to work more on the other streams.
Thank you for sharing this break down! It gives me something to continue to work towards and look forward to! :)
I always find such statistics interesting — and inspiring. Thanks for the update.