Two long time readers recently emailed me with questions about advertising and revenue on this blog. After responding to their inquiries I decided to write a post about the subject. First let me say that I never started this blog in the hopes of making money. As I’ve mentioned before I started this blog during a dark period in my life. I simply needed an escape from every day life and began writing this blog to help me think of something other than pain and illness.
During the first few years I didn’t accept any advertising and I didn’t accept any products for review. Over time I softened my stance and decided to add text advertising in my right hand menu. Eventually I also added Blogher ads. Over the years I’ve made anywhere from a few dollars a month to a few hundred. By the way I make much more from text links than I do from Blogher.
Honestly I think it depends a lot on the economy. My blog doesn’t receive an enormous amount of traffic. I usually peak at 4,000 to 6,000, so my advertising and product reviews seem rather sporadic. I’m sure if you really love blogging and really want to write posts every day your ad revenue will rise greatly. I write this blog primarily when I am inspired to talk about money, so I don’t blog regularly and thus don’t earn as much money as I probably could.
I used to make a chunk of change through Ebates referrals. Ebates is an online shopping portal that provides cash back when you shop online. I don’t know how the program works these days, but I used to receive $5 for every referral that signed up and made an online purchase. Shop At Home has a similar referral program. If you haven’t signed up for either of these programs feel free to sign up via the links above. Programs like this typically provide $5 to the new user and $5 to the referrer. Cash 4 Books has a similar model. If someone signs up and sells books through my link I’ll receive $5.
This doesn’t provide me with a mind blowing sum of money, but a few $5 transactions do seem to trickle in each month. I provide these links in my menu and also include them from time to time as links in my blog posts.
Lately I’ve also been earning referral money from sites like Groupon, Tippr and Social Living. These sites don’t actually pay me cash, but they do provide credit toward future purchases. I’ve been buying up cleaning services from these sites for the last few months and I pay for my purchases in part with these credits. Again this isn’t a mind boggling amount of money, but since I buy from these sites anyway, every little bit helps.
Hey Thanks – this additional information is always helpful. Also thanks for the great e-mail response from before.