Can I Make Money from My Blog?
Posted by David WhitehouseWell I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently, I’ve decided that 2010 is going to be the year I get good at monetising websites, starting with my own. So here is the big question – can I make money from my blog?
Image curtesy of geek and poke
I went through the John Chow website with a fine tooth comb recently, I went through all the ads he sells and how much in total he could take home (if all his ads are bought), its something like $14,000 per months just from selling his ads direct. I read some of his old posts about how he calculates what he charges for private ads, basically he doubles eCPM from AdSense – which makes sense to me.
So I started looking into monetising with AdSense and other ad networks, and I’ve realised I am highly inexperienced – hence the reason for wanting to learn.
My aim is to be making £1,000 ad revenue from a blog per month (not sure which one yet – perhaps you can help me on that – see questions at the end). I’ve read a few posts and I reckon an eCPM of £5 should be possible – please let me know if I am wrong here as it largely comes down to this number!
I know from my stats that I can get at least 50 visits per month per post, and at least 4 page views per visitor, if I write my blog posts correctly. So here is the break down:
£1,000 in earnings at £5 eCPM would mean I need 200,000 impressions per month
200,000 impressions with an average of four page views per visitor would mean I need 50,000 visitors
Each article brings in an average of 50 visits per month, so I would need a total of 1,000 articles writing.
If I write 3 articles a day for the next year I might just achieve my goal.
Your Opinions…
Ok I’d love your opinion here guys, I’ve got a number of queries:
1. What niche should I choose? I know about Modern Warfare 2 (but I’m quitting games), Internet marketing and thats about it.
2. Internet marketing is quite a competitive niche (obviously) If I were to choose Internet marketing, should I use this blog or Site Juicer?
3. Is eCPM of £5 a reasonable amount – does anyone think this isn’t achievable?
I’d love to hear your opinion here guys and gals! 
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I’d rework your figures with the potential of getting more than 50 visits per post …. and building up the sources of traffic like twitter etc to send more visits in.
I’d also focus the blog on commonly searched terms that are not in the SEO industry. As an example a post that I did last year on “How to make Yorkshire Puddings” has had 1631 visits so far and my post in October on “When do the Clocks Go Back” had 4064 visits over the course of a week.
Then the difficult thing is to work out what adds to show with each post to get the best conversion. For instance on my Yorkshire pudding post I perhaps should have some Jamie Oliver cook books or something?
Comment by Becky — January 13, 2010 #
Hmm, some very good points there Becky, especially about focussing on the non SEO terms that are commonly searched, I think I need to concentrate on finding myself a potential “niche” that I can carve out for myself.
I guess with the ads I’ll probably be doing Google AdSense to start with – then maybe progress from there…
I’ve got little experience monetizing so I’m not sure whether CPC or CPM or CPA would be the best source of income – I could test all of them and see I suppose
Cheers for the good advice
Comment by David Whitehouse — January 13, 2010 #
Just found a very interesting post on ProBlogger about AdSense optimisation: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/08/16/split-testing-how-to-increase-your-adsense-earnings-94-overnight/
It seems £5 is doable, as long as I do a lot of testing, and my market pays high enough…
Comment by David Whitehouse — January 13, 2010 #
I don’t think it’s so easy to make a decent amount of money via ads on the web anymore, unless you’re Google.
I think whatever subject you choose you have to offer something more than just the article to keep them on site and then clicking on the ads.
I’d avoid any blog subject within the Internet Marketing field as most in the industry are blind to ads and banners so you’re potential of having ads clicked on will be lower.
I think Gaming would have been you’re best route as it is something you know a fair bit about and you can utilise stuff like video to add something extra to the site. Plus could you not gain ad revenue from your videos on Youtube.
Comment by Kean — January 14, 2010 #
Hmm some good points Kean, especially with the Internet marketing field.
Gaming is definitely easy for me to blog about, perhaps I should try and better optimise my current Modern Warfare blog as a test, see if I can raise the eCPM a bit (a lot).
My worry with gaming though is that I’m trying to quit LOL…
Comment by David Whitehouse — January 14, 2010 #