promobloggers

 

 

                        John Chow dot Com Income Report

                         written by John Chow

 It’s the start of a new month and that means it’s time onc  again for  the highly anticipated blog income report. I have tell you know, sometimes I need to pinch myself to make sure all this isn’t some kind of dream. Way back in September of last year, I started a little case study to see if it was really possible to make money by blogging. Before that time, John Chow dot Com was simply a personal blog for me to ramble about whatever was on my mind. Luckily, one of those rambling topics was about how to make money online so it seemed logical that I should teach by doing instead of reciting from a text book.

The blog made $352.94 in it first month as a monetized blog. One year later (last month) it pulled in a record $20,512.17. And it shows no sign of slowing down.

Total Blog Income for October 2007: $23,448.59

I have to wonder how long I can maintain this level of growth. In a little over a year, the blog’s monthly income has grew by over 6,600 percent. Here is the income breakdown.

• Private Ad Sales: $11,888.79
• Affiliate Commissions: $5,131.27
• ReviewMe: $3,000
• Text Link Ads: $2,296.74
• Kontera: $1,000
• TTZ Media: $80.58
• Subscription: $40.00
• ShoppingAds: $11.21
• Grand Total: $23,448.59

Blog traffic held steady at 330,339 page views from 180,291 visitors, according to Google Analytics. If you take the blog’s page view and divide that by the income it will give you a site wide eCPM of $70.98. That means for every 1000 page views, this blog makes over $70, or 7 cents per view. Most blogs would kill for this eCPM rate. How much would your blog make if you could get $70 for every 1000 page view?

RSS subscription hit an all time high thanks to the competition between myself and Shoemoney. At the start of October, the FeedBurner chicklet showed 8,585 readers. It now shows 13,517 readers.

Private ad sales continue to be the blog’s biggest money maker, accounting for half of the blog’s monthly income. Commissions from various affiliate programs continue to do well. The best performing affiliate program for October was Text Link Ads, accounting for $1,750 of the $5,131.27 affiliate income. TLA has been a consistent money maker for me and I highly recommend them. Check out my recommended moneymakers to find out more about all the ad networks I use to generate all this cash.

Blog expense for the month include $526.85 for Google Adwords advertising and $25 for a private ad. Hosting for John Chow dot Com is sponsored by BlueFur Web Hosting. Use coupon code JohnChowRocks for 15% off any BlueFur hosting packages.

Ashley Qualls and WhateverLife.com: Case Study of a Teenage Millionaire

Her numbers are indeed impressive. 17 years old high school dropout. Made more than $1 million. Earns as much as $70K a month. Owns a website that attracts more than 7 million monthly visitors and 60 million page views.

Her first Adsense paycheck was $2,790 and she has already rejected a $1.5 million buyout offer. I’m referring to Ashley Qualls, the founder of Whateverlife.com, a free MySpace layouts website.

Fastcompany recently published a fascinating feature article on Ashley, a teenage entrepreneur from Detroit who has made a substantial amount of money online by targeting a niche market (girls on Myspace/social networks) and fulfilling their needs.

Ashley is evidence of the meritocracy on the Internet that allows even companies run by neophyte entrepreneurs to compete, regardless of funding, location, size, or experience–and she’s a reminder that ingenuity is ageless.

She has taken in more than $1 million, thanks to a now-familiar Web-friendly business model. Her MySpace page layouts are available for the bargain price of…nothing. They’re free for the taking. Her only significant source of revenue so far is advertising.

Inspirational, no doubt. And a clear example of the massive potential that the web has when it comes to generating substantial and consistent income. The amount of money she currently earns would be difficult to replicate offline, although what is really important here is that her online income is very scalable.

What she is currently earning can be exponentially increased through the development of business models which make use of her influence within the specific demographic. In this article I’ll take a quick look at her website and offer some general suggestions on how she can improve her income and reach.Monetization Strategies: How Whateverlife.com Can Make More Money

Like other high traffic websites, Whateverlife.com runs CPM ads by Casale Media and Value Click, alongside Google Adsense and Nabbr, a revenue sharing video widget. The integration for each ad type is relatively well done and not too intrusive. The main problem is that Ashley doesn’t seem to be selling ads directly, which is a huge loss considering the amount of traffic she gets.

Currently, a site like Techcrunch makes $10K per 125 x 125 ad block and that’s with 4.0 million page views per month. Whateverlife gets 15 times more pageviews and I’m sure an aggressive direct ad campaign will bring in at least $10K more per month, even after one takes into account the variance between technology and lifestyle/teens-oriented advertisers.

According to the article, Whateverlife.com has a larger audience than the combined circulation of magazines like Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and CosmoGirl!. This is something remarkable, that should be taken advantage of in full.

the ability to delve into parallel or adjacent industries that might require your services or skills.

Entrepreneurial Strategy: How to Branch Out for Greater Income and Reach

I like the fact that Ashley has branched out into a magazine, a shop and has set up a forum. It’s important to direct the attention you receive elsewhere, particularly into areas which will spread your brand. Let’s say a visitor arrives at Whateverlife.com and downloads a free layout. Do you want her to click off and visit another website?

Reinvesting Income into Your Business is Important

Fastcompany reports that Ashley doesn’t do any paid advertising of any sort. I’m not sure how she reinvests her income into Whateverlife but I do think that some of it should definitely go back into the promotion of her online empire.

Such a substantial monthly income ($70K) will allow you to play around with various paid advertising programs, particularly for your business models or spinoff websites which are not prominent in their niche. Her lifestyle magazine is an example of a site that could do with more promotion outside of the design/layout crowd.

God is a hot niche category on the Internet right now. Long ago we covered GodTube, a YouTube for Jesus types. More recently News Corp bought BeliefNet, a news and community site for Christians.

So the timing for LifeInTheFishBowl is spot on. It’s a social network and content site for Christians. It’s still in development but you can sign up for the site on the home page, read their blog and watch an overview video, below. By the look of things, they really need a web designer.

You’ll enjoy the site if you want to hang out with like minded people and debate Darwin v. the Bible, etc. But even better, these sites tend to attract women in droves. Sure, Facebook is almost 2/3 women, but Christian focused sites tend to be even more women dominated (BeliefNet’s audience is 70% women). So if you are Christian, or want to pretend you are Christian to date women, sign up for LifeInTheFishBowl now.

Also, if you’re Lutheran, you can get on the board of directors of the company. Founder Joe Burnham writes “I’m writing because I’m looking for young Lutheran (http://lcms.org) geeks who might be interested in being part of the projects Board of Directors. We’re not asking for a huge commitment time wise, but we’d like to have some younger, tech savvy input as the project continues to develop over time.” Not sure why you have to be Lutheran as opposed to one of the other Christian cults, but those are the rules. And since God is backing this startup, those stock options just might be worth something some day.

Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel Does Things A Little Differently Michael Arrington

We’ve now had five 2008 presidential candidates on TechCrunch: Senator Obama, Senator Edwards, Governor Romney Senator McCain and now Senator Mike Gravel. As always, we are posting this simultaneously on TalkCrunch, where you can subscribe to the RSS feed and get the podcasts as enclosures.

Senator Gravel is a far left Democrat. In many ways he’s to the Democrats what Ron Paul is the the Republicans - he keeps them honest and frustrates the hell out of them by being vocal about issues that they’d rather not shine a spotlight on. For his views on mainstream political issues, see the video of his talk at Google a couple of months ago. He’s anti war, but he’s also in favor of, for example, selling marijuana at the local liquor store (yeah I know, that’s awesome - make a donation to his campaign here).

But in our talk we focused only on technology policy issues. And on these issues he’s surprisingly mainstream. In general he’s a supporter of Net Neutrality and fair rules in the spectrum allocations. He wants to help bridge the digital divide and he wants to support alternative energy science - in fact he’s the only candidate so far who’s said explicitly that he’d like to see a tax on carbon emissions. And if you’re in need of engineers you’ll love Senator Gravel - he’s in favor of eliminating the quota on H1B visas. Actually, he’s in favor of wide open borders and free immigration, but we got off topic in the podcast for a bit.

On a lighter note, Gravel is the first of the five candidates who says he’s a Mac guy. He switched this year and loves it. He’s also embraced YouTube and other user generated content sites. In one video he looks silently at the camera for a minute or so, then goes and throws a rock in a lake (see the transcript for his explanation). In another he actually raps, talking about the fact that the Democratic party is trying to keep him quiet:

So, yeah, he’s a little crazy. But the man speaks his mind and leaves little doubt about his position on issues. I enjoyed the conversation immensely, which went on for more than forty minutes, and I’m glad it was recorded to share it with TechCrunch readers. Listen to the podcast below or on TalkCrunch, and the transcript is at the end of the post.

 Mashable.com

Take an app sale Kristen reported on today, GoodWidgets.

We took a first look at GoodWidgets over a year ago when the site first launched, and we haven’t heard much about it since. Catching the first major wave of widget-sharing tools for social networking purposes, GoodWidget let you create sophisticated and slick slideshows that let you import images from photo-sharing sites like Flickr.

Its a worthwhile venture, GoodWidgets.  It clearly was never designed to take the world by storm, it was simply a decent set of utilities geared to fill the perceived need created by the Web 2.0 machine to share widgets of various variety.  Now it’s on the auction bloc for $10,000, and will likely sell for something near that price.

Granted, when we first covered GoodWidgets last year, it probably looked as if acquisitions would be made in the widget world by the big-boys.  As it turns out, most of the big-boys decided to build their own rather than buy up the small-fries.  That isn’t always the case.  When a market is truly hot, and when there is a clear cut possible revenue stream from the app du jour, it isn’t rampant over-valuation to pay, say, a billion or two for a YouTube.  Buying market dominance in an industry that’s going to inevitably end up making money hand over fist isn’t stupid or destructive, it is smart.

the hand