Welcome to the February 2016 blog net income report! I know, I know, most of you have come to expect this publication at the beginning of each month. Unfortunately, I was hacked the first few days of this month so it’s coming a bit late. I have had lots of positive feedback from people since I started publishing these, but some recent unsolicited activity has caused me to rethink if I should continue to publish them. For now I will, in the future I will have to keep weighing the pros and cons. In the meantime, enjoy!
I have been watching many people around the blogosphere disclose their monthly online income, and quite honestly, I thought it would be a good idea to do the same. I am not disclosing any income from my day job as a Corporate Finance Manager. Instead, this will serve as a marker for the additional earnings I achieve as a result of my online endeavors and various side gigs.
Please understand that I am not disclosing this to make anyone jealous, only to serve as a very visual and tangible reminder that any of you reading this can achieve the same results…probably better even!
Category Explanations:
Advertising Sales: These are direct advertisements from various media companies. I have several sites which I own and have sectioned off that amount that I earn from those. I also place ads for clients of mine as well. These are other bloggers that I find advertising for, in which I keep a small percentage of the earnings for myself.
AdSense/Clickable Ads: These are the earnings I get from all of those banners you see spread throughout sites…they could be on the sidebar or even within the article itself. I actually keep the ads hidden and the only people that see them are the ones that find me through a search engine like Google or Yahoo. This way my more loyal readers aren’t bothered by the additional clutter and noise. This is an area I am always looking to increase.
Affiliate Earnings: These are the earnings you receive from selling other peoples (or your own) products on your website. Think of major players like Amazon Affiliates. If you put up their affiliate links people can buy items from Amazon from your site directly, which in turn earns you a portion of that revenue.
Misc Earnings: There will be always miscellaneous ways of earning income and racking up expenses! This misc. buckets is a collection of many items, some are recurring while others are one-off items. I might write an article for a major site and get paid $50 to do so. Or perhaps I help someone with organic link building. I also offer some minimal paid services for blog coaching and helping others start blogs…this earns me some additional income, but I haven’t widely publicized and advertised it to really grow that part of the business yet.
Summary and Conclusion
Like I kept saying month after month, at some point I couldn’t sustain the continued growth I kept achieving. That being said, I still made nearly $28,000 for the month of February. This was a significant decline from the $45,000 I made last month, but seeing as that was by far my best month ever I don’t feel that bad about it. My goal is to continue achieve monthly net income somewhere in the 20k’s each month. If I can do that then I will consider my goals achieved for 2016. I still have been trying to achieve better affiliate income, and for March I already know I accomplished that feat a bit, but I have a ton of room to grow.
Lastly, many of you may have read my journey of increasing my net worth $400,000 in just 4 years that I shared awhile back. I’ve been asking each month in these income reports if any of you would be interested in seeing a monthly net worth update as well. Well, if you were paying attention, I finally published my first net worth update for June, and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
If you are interested in earning online income, and making $200,000 blogging, trust me it can be done! I’m telling you, the internet has opened up possibilities that used to be non-existent. If I can start a website and earn money, then literally everyone else in the world can too! You just need to have a little patience, and a little persistence. If you’re inspired, I included a banner below for BlueHost, this was the Hosting company that I started with as well. They help you setup your site for free, and are one of the cheapest and more reliable hosting companies in the game!
Hey that’s a great income report and as the online space gets bigger so will the earnings. How many sites do you manage to achieve the bulk of that income? Do you need to have a page rank of 3 or better ? Good luck in March.
Wow, this is definitely aspirational for a new blogger like me. How many websites do you have in your third party network? Also, please let me know what are the criteria for someone to get into your network>
I have many, I usually dont like giving a specific number but I will say its over 1,000. You can contact me through my site with your site stats, traffic, pricing, DA, and what you accept and do not accept. Thanks!