I love reading posts where other Pro Bloggers talk about their earnings. It’s really exciting and inspiring to see how others make their living from blogs and is always a great source of ideas.
John Chow (you might know him from his AdSense advertising here on ProBlogger where he says ‘I love Darren Rowse – very clever) has given some insight into his January earnings at Making Money From A Blog – January 2007 – as with most bloggers who go full time John’s experienced growth from a number of avenues over the past few months.
The main reason he’s been able to keep increasing his earnings have not been traffic increases (they’ve been up and down a little) but as a result of his diversification of income streams. He’s increased his focus upon direct ad sales (banner ads, text ads) and has also been experimenting with a variety of affiliate programs and ad networks.
There comes a point for most blogs where traffic does tend to stagnate a little (particularly at this time of year) and the main way to increase earnings is to ad income streams or optimize current ones. I suspect John’s also getting better at his ad placement and design too.
The only danger for bloggers diversifying is that they can end up with more ads than content. I don’t think John’s at this point – but there is always a temptation to go a little too far with ad placement and numbers.
PS: the only question I have for John is ‘where’s the Chitika (aff) figures’ in his earnings? I know he has them on every individual page – but there’s nothing about them in the post.
My own experience with Chitika on a blog like John’s (and ProBloggeR) is that it tends not to perform too well as it’s not directly product related. I took them off ProBlogger pretty quickly and left them on the sites where they worked best.
Update: Oops – John doesn’t use Chitika – as is pointed out in comments below they look like Chitika ads but are in fact his own type of ad.
