AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

Following on my report ‘How I Earned $700 Online in 15 Weeks‘ I now present my update. In the ten weeks since that report I have earned just over another $300. Overall my average weekly earnings are remaining steady in the forties (currently $41.78).

The sources of my income have changed somewhat. While sponsored posts are still the largest component I currently find that PayPerPost and PayU2Blog are the only two networks that are providing me with income. The others that I’m affiliated to - Sponsored Reviews, ReviewMe and Smorty have not been making me money for some time now. In fact I had to go back to December 20 to find the last time I earned money with any of them (ReviewMe).

To be fair, Smorty has been offering me work but the opportunities have been for online casinos and shopping cart software which haven’t fitted in with the themes of the blogs they are available for. The other two, Sponsored Reviews and ReviewMe, simply haven’t had anything for me.

PayU2Blog has been providing $15-25 per week on a regular basis up to now. In fact there was only one week, the first week of January, when I didn’t earn anything with them. PayU2Blog requires you to complete every assignment they give you. This works for me because the blog I post them on is very general. It wouldn’t be so good for a niche blog. My earnings with PayPerPost fluctuate more, anywhere between $0-50 per week at the moment, mainly because I am more picky about what opportunities I select with them. As with Smorty I am selecting jobs that fit in with the theme of the blog that I have with PayPerPost. It would be easily possible for me to earn more than $100 per week with PayPerPost on it’s own if I were prepared to write the maximum number of opportunities (three) per day but this would severely damage the quality of the blog that I post them on.

(Note: As you are probably aware there is currently an issue regarding loss of PageRank for people who write sponsored posts. If this happens to you it will have an impact on your earnings. You are better off researching this before starting to write sponsored posts on your site as it will help you increase your earnings.)

I have been trying a couple of new things in the last couple of weeks. One of these is Pay Per Click (PTC). These are similiar to traffic exchange sites in which you earn credits by surfing other sites with the difference being that instead of credits you earn money. Payment is usually 1c per site visited and, because the reward is monetary rather than surf credits, the number of sites you can visit is limited.

I signed up with my first PTC last week and since then I have signed up with another three. They are all largely the same. The advantage to signing up with many of them is that you can have them open in separate tabs and visit them all at once meaning you are earning with all of them at the same time. The amount of money is small but it is adding up quicker than I expected and between the four of them I have earned $2.34 in the last week.

Because there are so many PTC sites, most of which require you to earn a certain minimum amount before you get paid, there is always the danger that you will not get paid when you do reach the cash-out point after a month or two of clicking. The four PTCs that I am currently with - Bux.to, Adbux, Clixsense and EuroCentBux - all appear to be trustworthy. I will sign up with others as I find out more about them.

Another new thing I’m trying is earning money in virtual worlds. I also joined Second Life last week. This is a virtual reality world which is populated by tens of thousands of people. Like the real world it has its own economy and its own currency. This currency is exchangable for real world currency. So far in the last week I have earned around $3.27 in real world currency from Second Life. The possibility for much more is very possible once I learn the necessary skills. The earnings from SecondLife at the moment are from completing surveys and signing up for offers. If I manage to learn some useful skills in design, animation or scripting I could earn a lot more.

So anyway, here now is my breakdown of how I earned just over $1,000 online in 25 weeks. PayPerPost and PayU2Blog are far and away the two best earners. Bear in mind that I have only been using PTC and Second Life for the last week so obviously those figures are low. Also remember that the earnings from Sponsored Reviews, Smorty and ReviewMe have all but dried up at the moment. For me at least:

PayPerPost $481.50
PayU2Blog $272.50
AdSense $63.97
Sponsored Reviews $58.50
Smorty $49.20
ReviewMe $27.50
WidgetBucks $25.01
Irish Opinions $24.44
Commission Junction $15.82
Posting Direct $6.10
Amazon.com $5.59
Helium $5.00
GlobalTestMarket $4.00
SecondLife $3.27
Bux.to $1.31
Clixsense $0.49
EuroCentBux $0.35
Adbux $0.19

Total: $1,044.74

We all know that it’s possible to make some money from blogging. Some people even manage to make a very comfortable living from it. Since October last I’ve been trying to achieve an average income of $400 per week. I haven’t reached that yet, having achieved an average of $60 instead.

I was interested to read a recent post on Problogger.net by Darren Rowse where he mentions the Wall Street Journal article that said he earned $250,000 per year and says they’re in the right ball park.

The same Wall Street Journal article reported that the Mongabay.com was making approximately $200,000 per year, mainly from Adsense.

Of course most people don’t make anything like this. Surveys asking people how much money they make blogging are a popular item on many web-sites. The results from these surveys are usually along much the same lines (and don’t forget that the results exclude people who earn nothing):

Example Survey #1

How Much Money Do You Make Blogging? (easywordpress.com/…)
* Less Than $500 A Month (80%, 186 Votes)
* More Than $3,000 A Month (8%, 19 Votes)
* Less Than $1,000 A Month (6%, 15 Votes)
* Less Than $3,000 A Month (5%, 12 Votes)

Example Survey #2

How Much Money Do Bloggers Earn Blogging? (problogger.net/…)
Under $10 (26%)
$10-$29 (12%)
$30-$99 (13%)
$100-$499 (19%)
$500-$999 (8%)
$1,000-$1,499 (4%)
$1,500-$2,499 (3%)
$2,500-$4,999 (4%)
$5,000-$9,999 (2%)
$10,000-$14,999 (1%)
Over $15,000 (9%)

The results from surveys 1 and 2 are broadly similiar. Most bloggers (70%-80%), claim to earn less than $500 a month.

My own position (see graph above) is broadly similiar to the vast majority of people who try to blog for money. In my case I have just completed my first quarter (13 weeks) blogging during which time I have earned $786 or just over $60 per week on average. This would add up to an annual income of $3,144 from blogging. (See How to Make Money Online for a breakdown of programs I use to make money blogging.)

It’s been two weeks now since I earned any money on PayPerPost. Up until the Google-slap at the end of November PPP was the best of the sponsored post sites. Even after my PageRank was reduced to zero I was still able to make money on it, albeit at a reduced rate. When I joined PPP at the start of November it immediately became my number one means of making money online with an average of $60 per week for my first three weeks. Since then and the PageRank reduction the earnings dropped but overall it still added up to a total of $316.00.

For me the good times ended on January 3 this year. That was the last time I earned any money from the site. The problem is that the PageRank on the blogs that I use for sponsored posts has been reduced to zero while at the same time the vast, vast majority of advertisers who use PPP still have PageRank as a requirement to qualify for one of their opportunities. Meanwhile Google presumably continues to play its global game of tag and sends more and more blogs into the PR Zero sin bin.

It appears to me that the problem is that the pool of job opportunities with no PR requirement is unchanged whereas the amount of PR Zero fish is increasing. This means that the available job opportunities are filled up quickly. I have found for the last two weeks every time I log in to check on the opportunities that I have been looking at the same, solitary one; a 200 word post about bad credit mortgages which I refuse to do.  (Incidentially, this must be a boom time for those blogs who haven’t had their PageRank effected and are finding less and less competition for the PR job opportunities.)

I hope this is a temporary blip until PPPs RealRank becomes more accepted among advertisers. It may be a temporary blip but it could also be fatal. We’ll have to wait and see. I might have to rethink my plans about making a living from blogging in the meantime!

Incidentially PayU2Blog is now advising its bloggers not to link to external disclosure policy generating sites. It doesn’t give an explanation for this advice but it’s easy to assume that Google is using linkage to such sites as evidence that a blog is writing sponsored posts. Such a link might be enough to send a blog off for a manual review. While PayU2Blog doesn’t require its bloggers to disclose their sponsored posts its advice for those who do have such a policy is to write their own and host it on their own site rather than to link to an external site.

No, this isn’t the title of some ‘program’ which offers to teach you how to make money online. There aren’t a limited number of places and I’m not trying to scam you. This is simply me telling you how I made $700 in 15 weeks ($685.09 to be exact). It’s not hard but it does take time.

I started blogging for money in September last. Since this is a new year I thought it would be a good idea to start off my first post of the new year with a run-down on how I’ve done so far. I’ll start by listing where the money came from:

PayPerPost $301.00
PayU2Blog $132.50
Sponsored Reviews $58.50
Smorty $49.20
Adsense $30.94
ReviewMe $27.50
WidgetBucks $25.01
Commission Junction $23.38
Irish Opinions $22.01
Amazon $5.59
Posting Direct $5.50
Helium $3.96

Straight away there is an obvious pattern here: The vast majority - $568.70 - of the money came from writing sponsored posts. This is a combination of earnings from PayPerPost, PayU2Blog, Sponsored Reviews, Smorty and ReviewMe. I have my blogs signed up with all of these services and check each site at least once a day to see what, if any job opportunities are available for me. In the case of PayPerPost, which is responsible for 44% of my earnings, I check it several times a day.

The criteria for most sponsored post sites are pretty similar. If your blog is at least three months old and you write at least one or two posts a week you’ve met the main requirements.

You should also note that the higher your PageRank the more you’ll get paid for writing sponsored posts but you should also be aware that Google frowns on most sponsored posts because they believe, not without some reason, that advertisers use them as a way to increase their search engine rankings. It could be argued that all advertising is a way of increasing your own position versus that of your competitor, and I frequently do, but nonetheless you should bare in mind that writing sponsored posts can affect your PageRank if Google decides to penalize you. But on the other hand . . . $568.70 . . . your choice.

If it wasn’t for sponsored posts my earnings would be pretty meagre. Without them my best earner is Adsense, where my current balance stands at $30.94. Considering that the level of traffic to my blogs is still pretty low this isn’t bad.

I signed up for WidgetBucks when it was launched several months ago. Until recently I hadn’t run its ads on any of my blogs simply because I didn’t have any blogs that were suitable for its ads, which are concentrated on technology and entertainment media. The $25.01 I have earned from WidgetBucks is a combination of the $25 sign-up bonus and the combined earnings of 1c that my referrals have earned between them! I’m still hoping that someone with a popular blog about digital cameras with a lot of US traffic with sign up for WidgetBucks under me!

I now have a blog which has content suitable for WidgetBucks ads and so I’ve started to run them so I’ll know soon enough how well it works.

My earnings of $23.38 from Commission Junction are incredibly disappointing. This is a case where I feel as if I have done everything right and my affiliate has let me down by either not converting my traffic to sales or by not passing the commission on to me. I feel disappointed because I have a CTR of around 2% every day from ads displayed on my site to my affiliate. The people who visit my niche gardening blog are looking for exactly the type of product that my affiliate is selling and I still have only earned less than $25. In the coming days I will be contacting my affiliate directly to see what is going wrong.

Irish Opinions, which carries out online market research surveys has so far earned me $22.01. I used to work in a market research call centre phoning up people at random and asking them how often they bought soup so I’m quite happy to take part in online surveys. I’ve found Irish Opinions to be a good one for me living in Ireland but look around and you’ll find a decent one in your own country. In the case of Irish Opinions the payment comes in the form of vouchers for stores like Amazon or Tesco but that’s as good as money to me.

While I’m unhappy with my Commission Junction affiliate I just don’t know what to say about Amazon. I have earned a grand total of $5.59 from Amazon which I find so difficult to accept. According to Amazon’s statistics hardly anybody even clicks on my ads to Amazon whereas my Commission Junction affiliate, which sells the same products has a high CTR. The result with both is the same: Sweet FA in commission. I’ll have to get to grips with how to make money from affiliates in 2008. I feel as if a lot of money is slipping through my fingers by not getting this straight.

Recently I signed up for PostingDirect.com which pays you to post comments on forums. The idea behind this is quite simple: When you start up a new forum, you will have the initial problem that you will little to no registered users, therefore little to no posts and therefore little reason for people to register and become active in your forum.

I have started visiting forums on a regular basis in order to increase visitors to my blogs. Putting links to your blogs in forum signatures is a good way of getting new visitors and SEO for your sites. Since I’m visiting a lot of forums anyway, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to get paid for them. The $5.50 I’ve earned to date includes a $5 sign up bonus. Payout is at $25.

Helium is a revenue-sharing site where you post articles on it and they share earnings with you. Payout is at $25 and as they currently stand at $3.96 and I usually get around 15c per week from it I still have quite a way to go. Nevertheless it is a nice site and I like it for other reasons.

The result of Googles clampdown on sponsored posts continues to take its toll on my weekly Internet earnings. Last week I earned $59.37 bringing my total internet earnings to $629.37. It is 14.84% of my target of $400 per week. This is the fourth week in a row that my earnings have dropped from my personal high-point of $150.

The difficulty with earning is due to my overdependence on sponsored posts as a means of making money online. I have found sponsored posts to be an excellent means of getting an income from blogging but it is undoubtedly going through a difficult time since Google launched a campaign, primarily directed against people who work with PayPerPost and reducing their PageRank to zero.

This has created a situation within PayPerPost where most advertisers continue to require PageRank as a qualifying requirement for bloggers. That leaves a growing number of bloggers who don’t have PageRank competing for the small number of jobs which don’t require it.

I can’t help but think that those bloggers who still have PageRank and use only a minimal amount of disclosure must be doing very well out of this!

Combined with the time of year, which according to veterans of last year is slow at best, and it is not a good time. If this keeps up I might be looking for another job early in the new year!

Here’s where the money came from:

PayPerPost $41.00
PayU2Blog $10.00
Smorty $7.20
Adsense $1.02
Helium 15c