Apr 5, 2012  •  In Blogging, Bloggy Thursdays, Finance, Personal

Bloggy Thursdays: (Not) Raking in the Moolah

Welcome to this installment of Bloggy Thursdays, where I share with my fellow bloggers tips and tutorials to maximize and better your blog. While I do not consider myself an expert, I do like to think that after 10+ years of blogging — in addition to my technical knowledge — I know more than the average blogger when it comes to making your blog more appealing to readers.

Do you have any comments, questions, or topics you’d like to see covered here? Please send me a message via my contact form. Enjoy!


Today’s Bloggy Thursdays will not feature a tip. Rather, it will answer a question…

The second most popular question I get asked about blogging is: “How much money do you make from blogging?”

Last August, I had posted my revenue from the first month of monetizing this blog. (If you are too lazy to click over, the figure was $307.24.) The sum should have gone way up since then, right?

Wrong.

Well, not entirely. The actual answer is more complicated than that. Because, in a nutshell, life happens. Page views will not always go up. Advertisers will come and go. Your life outside of blogging may make an unexpected turn and you may not have the time or resources to devote to your blog as you did before.


What good is a blog post about making money from blogging without a clichéd picture
to accompany it?

Since August, the money I have made from blogging has gone up and down. I think that if I had to state a number, I would say that I made, ON AVERAGE, $250/month.

There has also been a month when that number has gone down to $150. There was also one month when I made over $700. Yes, $700 is a lot of money (at least to me). But when I think about it, it’s way less than what I made in one week when I worked full-time…and back then, I would blog while at work!

The last person who asked me this question was genuinely curious, because she was thinking about becoming a full-time lifestyle blogger.

I relayed the above information, and added, “Don’t quit your day job.”

Disclaimer: I am fully aware that I *could* be making more money if I could devote more time and energy to this blog. But as the situation stands, I can’t. And while I know that my blog has been suffering some as of late, I continue to blog because it provides me some semblance of order, in addition to some WORK I can control, in my chaotic life. And, as with all other nuggets of wisdom (or stupidity, depending on your POV) I share about blogging, please take this with a grain of salt because I am by no means an expert.

I bet that you are now wondering what THE most popular question I get asked about blogging is…and for that, you will need to wait for a future Bloggy Thursdays. 😉

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8 Responses to “Bloggy Thursdays: (Not) Raking in the Moolah”

  1. Wow. To me this seems like a lot. I’d love a lesson from you in google Adsense! I am a tiny tiny blogger and a year after monitizing I am nowhere near the threahold to get paid. I think I have maybe $30. I kind of think I’ll never actually see that money!

  2. I really appreciate your honesty and willingness to talk about this topic. I think it’s so important for fellow bloggers to know. I think people who are are long time followers of your site will continue to follow. Even readers have ups and downs that change their viewing habits. So it may be a reflection of the reader and not necessarily of you. I’ll continue to read even though life prevents me from reading each and every post 🙂

  3. cindy says:

    Hey there,

    Just a small thing…i sometimes just click on your sponsors for the sake of it…but i was just wondering, would it be better to get those pages to open in a new tab rather than let people click away from your website?

    • This bothers me too, and unfortunately I can’t change the code to do so because it is against my ad networks’ TOS. 🙁 But thank you so much for clicking!

  4. Kira says:

    I took an online workshop a few weeks ago about monetization, and it seemed like the bottom line was: if you want to make money from your blog, you need to contribute to other blogs. The bloggers I spoke with suggested it as the best way to move to “full time blogger,” and that she made about 75% of her wages that way. That said, I have yet to make one single dollar from my blog yet (because I haven’t put in the effort), that’s just what I hear ; ) Thanks for sharing your experience!

  5. amy says:

    This is inspiring. I always thought that blogging cannot earn me much. But I will continue to write blogs and hopefully earn from it. I really like this. Thank you.

  6. Divya says:

    hmm..I wonder about this all the time because I get only $20-30 a month and my links never seem to get clicked even I when I place them in the most strategic places. I also read an article recently about how people aregrown used to seeing ads in prominent spots in blogs that they are now actively ignoring them

  7. Stéphane says:

    Wow. To me this seems like a lot. I’d love a lesson from you in google Adsense! I am a tiny tiny blogger and a year after monitizing I am nowhere near the threahold to get paid. I think I have maybe $30. I kind of think I’ll never actually see that money!

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