My ultimate goal in life is to be a professional blogger, to work freelance full-time from home at my current blog (http://www.scifiwatch.net) and earn enough to sustain a healthy lifestyle. I started the blog in February 2009 with a free hosting service at 000webhost, free domain name, and free Wordpress theme. Unfortunately, the free web host only allowed 5GB of space, a limited bandwidth, and the wordpress themes left little to desired. So in June I made the decision to purchase a new domain name ($10), a new theme ($80), and a new hosting service ($12/month).
My plan is to gain enough traffic to eventually live off my earnings but for now it’s baby steps. Here are my ultimate goals with the blog.
1) Earn $1 With My Blog (Accomplished in Feb. ‘09)
2) Earn $10 With My Blog (Accomplished in Feb. ‘09)
3) Earn $100 With My Blog (As of Yet $62 Across all Affiliate Networks Jul. ‘09)
4) Earn $1000 With My Blog (TBA)
5) Earn $3000 A Month in Passive Income to an Work Full-Time as a Professional Blogger
Google Adsense
Adsense works by the number of people that click through the advertisements on your site (otherwise known as a ‘click-thru’ to another site). To date I’ve earned about $2.10 from 15 click thrus. Now if I were to have maybe 1000 viewers on my site a day (10,000 would be exceptional), and I could probably earn three figure cheques monthly. As of yet this isn’t the case. While some advisors discourage beginner blogs from using Adsense altogether I don’t see what the harm is.
Amazon Associates
If you create a link that directs a visitor from your site to Amazon, and that person purchases a product on that site (whatever that may be) you earn a referral fee of 4% on that item before tax. Now on large purchase items like laptops the most you could earn is somewhere between $25-35. Whenever I create a link it’s usually for small ticket items like books and DVDs which usually amounts to $0.30. To date I’ve earned about $22.11 across 30 ordered items. Not much by any stretch of the imagination. What’s even worse is that as a Canadian promoting items on an American site, I have to take a cheque which Amazon only pays out once I earn $100 on referrals. If my blog was operated in the States, money would instantly drop into my Paypal, or at least the cap would be much less (something like $15).
Ebay Affiliate
Ebay pays out fantastic and while I’m not exactly sure of the percentage on referrals I can tell you that it’s significant. Since the start of the blog, I’ve earned $46.50. While there’s no cap you have to meet into order to get a wad of cash dumped into your Paypal. The only problem is you have to wait a month before than happens. While I love Ebay as an affiliate I should tell you that the number of click-thrus I get to Ebay when compared to Amazon are significantly less, like 80% less (117 compares with 750).
Triond
The amounts aren’t much. I joined Triond a few weeks ago and earn an average of roughly $0.10 a day. Now this isn’t a lot of money by any stretch of the imagination. But take a step back for a second and realize that the $35 a year is passive income. I didn’t work for it, and I certainly didn’t earn it. Not to mention I plan to earn more than an average $0.10 a day. If that becomes a quarter a day that $87 a year, more than my current interest on my savings account pays. Eventually, I hope to earn $1 a day at $365 a year in found money.
Currently, according to Google Analytics I have about 10,000 visits a month, only if I could get 10,000 visitors a day then things would be so much simpler. Go to my blog Scifi Watch (http://scifiwatch.net)
While this is a very watered-down summary of my affilitates, I’ll update you on any changes in the coming months on how the blog is doing.
July 25th, 2009 at 8:37 am
TOTALLY AWESOME INFORMATION!
July 25th, 2009 at 8:39 am
I guess I have to find someone who is better with computers so that I can understand how to link my articles to other site etc.