August earnings
by Sapphire (September 1, 2007)
My earnings took a bit of a dive this month - from $355 in July to $291 in August. The difference was almost exactly what I made in July doing a couple of Sponsored Reviews.
The BlogHer ads are still performing well on B-2 Bomber, and I’m adding them to this blog and hopefully another one (still waiting for approval). I didn’t count that money in with “my earnings” this month (if I did, I earned $216 last month) because if it becomes a reliable income source I’m going to start doing some profit sharing and payments to my other writers on that site. And yeah, I’ve got some serious research ahead on that: eventually I may need to incorporate and make a real business out of this. With employees/freelancers or something. It’s weird even thinking about it. 
My earnings have been more or less at a standstill this entire year - averaging about $310. Things were steadily progressing before Google pulled their paid link crap and too many people fell for it. But that was to be expected - I knew text link ads were not going to be reliable forever. I think BlogHer could be - certainly, the CPM model is doable. And so far it looks like they’re doing it well with every intention of expanding.
I’ve started a new technique with affiliate ads: if I have a page that’s performing surprisingly well in the SERPs, I stick an affiliate ad into the page somewhere. Clever, huh? 
Not really, but it’s the sort of thing that’s so simple and sensible, it might just work.
Posted in Affiliate Marketing
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September 7th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Have you tried to sell any direct ads? The owner of SiteFever.com is doing a little case study on making money without any ad networks and seems to be having a lot of success.
September 8th, 2007 at 8:33 am
Yes… a while back I did actually sell a sidebar ad for $100/month. For three months I believe. After that, not a nibble, at any price. I still have an ad for text link ads in the sidebar, at slightly less than what TLA charges… I’m guessing more people find me through TLA’s database than come directly to this site.
Most of my sites are well under 10k visitors per month - I think you probably need at least that much to sell ads directly (?). I have one site that’s at 15k, but it’s a tight niche that most marketers undervalue, which is why it’s a hard sell. (But ads perform rather well on it, ironically.)