Comments on Saving to Inve$t: Blogging Becoming a Serious Money Business

I think about $20 CPM is credible for a financial ...

2009-05-02T10:39:00.000-04:00

I think about $20 CPM is credible for a financial blog, which is a lot higher than for nearly all other kinds of blogs.

Every wondered why there are so many financial blogs out there? :)

On the other hand, getting 100K readers per month is harder than ever, for the very same reason.

As some of you may know I'm based in the UK, which means exchange rate issues too. Adsense is paid in dollars, but the exchange rate is $1.50 to £1. (It was 2:1 a year ago).

Good thing I don't blog for money! :)

Miranda - That's excellent. How many hours a week ...

2009-04-28T22:27:00.000-04:00

Miranda - That's excellent. How many hours a week do you spend around blogging. I see your presence in a number of places so I am sure it is a lot. Yes, moving away from Adsense is important, but still to find a source as reliable (or easy).

DGI - I am in the same boat as you. Full time job (which is getting busier) makes in hard to blog as much. Used to write 4-5 articles a week, now down to 2 or 3 at best. Definetly affected my traffic levels. I agree, you need to like and have an interest about what you write about. The money will follow. I got your email - about INO right? I'll look into it.

Pinyo - Glad to see we are on the same page. However your site is much, much more professional than mine so I am sure you are nearer the higher end of things. I need to find more time (or move to wordpress) to make make site improvements. Time is the biggest limitation.

Watchyastep : Thanks for the kind words. Hope they help you out and do read some of the other comments here - some great advice from other top bloggers.

SGM - I would have thought you would be easily be bringing in more than 15K given your popular and well read site. 75K is a pipe dream for me as well right now. One can aim for these lofty goals though.

Darwins Finance - thanks for the great and detailed comment. Some excellent analysis and I will take some of your points on. As I said above, have been looking at moving to Wordpress, but need to find the time to do a site redesign. I'll check out your blog a bit more though to get some ideas and may contact you to get some tips.

Four Pillars - I have to agree, search engine vistiors are the likely to provide most of the revenue. We are all google slaves after all. However I did notice a little bit of revenue from my feedburner feed ads. Not much though, but enough to keep me interesed. While I know RSS and email readers will probably not bring in much revenue, it is motivating and a nice feeling to have a number of subcribers.

I think that 30k-40k is fairly realistic for 100k ...

2009-04-28T21:03:00.000-04:00

I think that 30k-40k is fairly realistic for 100k visits per month.

However I think it's important to note that a good portion of them have to search engine visitors - they are the only ones who create income.

Great post, and it's really impressive that you've...

2009-04-28T10:36:00.000-04:00

Great post, and it's really impressive that you've pulled this off on the blogger platform. As painful as it is to switch at this point, have you considered moving to WordPress? The plugins and SEO benefits have been enormous when I switched from EverydayFinance on blogger to Darwin's Finance as a self-hosted WP blog. Feel free to check out some of the ways I'm monetizing or drop me a line. Not that I'm raking it in, but for such a new blog (a couple months), I was able to jump right to page rank 3 and I'm over 10K visitors/month with only ~50 articles posted. I have over 500 at EverydayFinance and the site's probably only about 2x on the profits right now. With the following you have now, it would probably be pretty easy to convert readers and advertisers to your new blog and have the extra stream of income.

On the numbers - I think estimating based solely on ECPM and views is the most reliable (IMO). Here's my thinking:

When adding Adsense, some affiliate ads and a few direct placements, if you assume a total ECPM of say, $25 (Adsense ranges from $10-$20 for me and I'm adding a bit for the other services), at 100K visits/month, that's 1.2 visitors/yr. Invariably, people tend to do 1.5 page views on average. Oddly, it seems to be the magic number, perhaps a bit higher if you're really good at keeping people glued to the site, but we'll assume 1.5 for now. So, that's 1.8mil page views/yr.

1.8mil*25/1000 = $45,000.

So, I think you're right on, or pretty close to where a blog should be performing with decent monetization. I think the article might be assuming some sort of corporate deal with partnerships or a multi-author blog network, etc like SeekingAlpha or something. Straight conventional advertising with an ECPM of over 50is probably not realistic for normal individual bloggers.

$75K a year from blogging? Wow, that would be pret...

2009-04-27T10:50:00.000-04:00

$75K a year from blogging? Wow, that would be pretty nice. I'd be happy bringing an additional 15k from my blog.

I read and really appreciated the points that you ...

2009-04-25T19:04:00.000-04:00

I read and really appreciated the points that you brought out. They are some points that I will keep in mind and that could possibly help me out the future. Thanks

Based on my own experience, you should be able to ...

2009-04-25T07:58:00.000-04:00

Based on my own experience, you should be able to get $40,000 a year from 100k visitors. I think $75,000 is doable, if you have really lucrative affiliate programs to work with.

Andy, Great article. Between my job, my investmen...

2009-04-25T03:51:00.000-04:00

Andy,

Great article. Between my job, my investments and my blog I have very little time to do other stuff. But if you enjoy your blogging topic then you are pretty fortunate. One thing I would add is that if you go into blogging just to make money you won't make it past the third month.

PS Andy I sent you an e-mail but it got rejected. E-mail me at dividendgrowthinvestor at gmail dot com if you haven't received it.

I make close $75,000 a year blogging -- but I do i...

2009-04-24T12:00:00.000-04:00

I make close $75,000 a year blogging -- but I do it professionally for companies. If you do corporate blogging for clients, you can make more, without having to rely solely on visitors and AdSense and advertising earnings.

MA - See my other "blogging category" posts for my...

2009-04-24T11:38:00.000-04:00

MA - See my other "blogging category" posts for my different rev stream. Apart from Adsense I use affiliate programs from CJ, Commission Soup and Kontera. These are quite variable and make up about 40% of my revenue.

ME - Read your post. Great article and your observations on the variability of income are so true. But it is nice to have a decent amount of income, though dealing with the taxes and admin is becoming a hassle.

Weakonmist (love the name!): I wrote a piece a while back, correlating RSS readership with blog revenue and estimated that $0.15 is the correlation. I think it is a bit higher now. From a visitor perspective, I would use $30 as a more realistic guide. So if you average 100K vistiors a month, you get about $40,000 of (pre-tax) revenue over the year.

Depending on what kind of ads you serve, it could ...

2009-04-24T10:27:00.000-04:00

Depending on what kind of ads you serve, it could be even less. I'm rejecting at least a couple of offers a month now for services and products I can't stand behind.

My formula for income is each daily visitor is worth $1 per year in income. So if you're getting 100k a month, you're looking at $3333.33 in income each year.

Again though, it all depends on your ads and readership.

Yes, I read the original article too. I agree tha...

2009-04-24T09:50:00.000-04:00

Yes, I read the original article too. I agree that blogging needs to be treated as a business. That means budgeting time and energy spent. A post I wrote yesterday talks about my own blogging story. It involves uphill periods, then plateaus, just like you've said here. Finally I'm breaking out of another plateau.

Great observations you have here. What other ways ...

2009-04-24T05:12:00.000-04:00

Great observations you have here. What other ways do you monetize your blog aside from adsense? Where do you get your direct advertisers?