Table of contents for Blog Stats and Earnings 2009
Click on image to view the Excel spreadsheet.
This month’s theme: “Automation.”
Here are the textual results:
Postcards from the Funny Farm – PFTFF
9,651 Backlinks
8,630 Visits (in June ‘09)
Dynamite Lesson Plan – DLP
3,123 Backlinks
2,030 Visits (in June ‘09)
Damien at the Speed of Life – DATSOL
5,376 Backlinks
1,422 Visits (in June ‘09)
Net for all blogs= $207
Sources:
Backlinks-Yahoo
Visits-Google Analytics
Net-PayPal
Notes: Last month I used this word: “automation.” I suppose if I were putting out a CD I’d call it that. That’s the name of the game these days for my blogging life. I have just about everything automated to produce money and traffic. Backlinks are a little harder to produce that way but I’m working on new ideas every day. As a teacher who is getting more responsibility at work every day, I don’t have the time I used to devote to blogging.
Automation methods:
Backlinks: The only automation I can think of for these is submission to Article Avenue and the like. Many of my backlinks however are the result of people linking to my articles or blog because they like them. This would lead to the ultimate automation technique: “Write good content.”
Visits: In my experience, Stumbleupon and other social media has produced the largest increase in traffic. Find classy ways to ask people to read your work through social media. The following sites are the ones I am leveraging for traffic-
- Ping.fm – Choose the services you post statuses to and send a status and a link to your blog out to all of them with one click.
- Twitter – Ping.fm can take care of this one.
- Facebook – This is often a small group of a hundred or so friends. I usually use Ping.fm to drive my Facebook statuses but there are other features you can use on Facebook other than statuses to promote your blog.
- MyBlogLog -
- Blogcatalog – Send bulk messages to members of your community.
Net: Automation methods are Text-Link-Ads. I am making over $20 a month with my 3 blogs with this service. Google Adsense has made me very little money, but it is always increasing. Getting Adsense on a site is a good idea. The more traffic I get, the more Adsense will make for me.
These are the automated methods I use to make passive income. It is a small percentage of the total I make monthly but they are a substantial chunk. The rest of the pie consists of hard work writing and doing sponsored posts. I never do 2 paid posts in a row. Every other one is a rule I have for myself.
I encourage you bloggers out there to use the services and methods I have talked about. Also, remember that each blog is its own animal. What works for mine may not work for yours. The thing that makes bloggers great, in my opinion, is their ability to create and innovate ideas that work for their blog. I will continue to look for ways to automate my backlinks, visits, and net. Your comments are warmly invited.
10 Comments
Damien,
Thanks for the heads up about blogging. I would like more traffic and am glad to know you have figured it out for yourself and enjoy sharing the Riley Method.
I was listening to “Thought It Was You” and think that our talents could still produce some more great works if we could only find the time to get together.
Eric
@Eric: Thanks bro. I can show you what I’ve learned about getting traffic. As far as music goes, I’d love to do it. I finish Summer School July 16th and then I have three weeks off. Let’s do something then.
I’ve been reading thru your CAN method posts for tips! Got quite a few! And……I aenrd my first $10 through blogging the other day. Have to start somewhere, I guess, right? Let me ask you something…did you feel funny about writing paid posts at first or is this just some odd thing with my psyche? LOL
@Jessica The Rock Chick: Thank you for the compliment. Good question on sponsored posts. I think my “voice” and “style” in doing them has evolved.
For that reason, I don’t want to give you a canned answer. I will say this: Your sponsored posts should not be more than every other post at the most and they should reflect your core values for why you blog.
My readers, I hope, would know by now I value cash for my family as a trade-off for time I spend blogging. Therefore I have no shame in doing sponsored posts. Last, I am ALWAYS honest in what I blog. I say that in my disclosure page.
I don’t like automating anything. It’s cheap and spammy. Quality over quantity. I would rather have 70 of 100 twitter friends visiting my blog when I make one post to twitter instead of 7 of a thousand “friends” unfollowing me everyday because they think I’m just a spammer.
This is a quality post, though. You have an amazing number of backlinks. How do you do that?
@Jobless: I want to thank you so much for your excellent comment. As with many words in our language, “automate” can be interpreted multiple ways. I thank you for illustrating exactly what I do not mean when I use the word.
In my blogging work, automation means something like this: “Organization and routines that produce income streams.” I would never do a mass Twitter scheme, I would never create or use a “bot.” If you read the things in this post that I refer to as “automation” they are: Social Media, Text-Link-Ads, and ADsense. I do not support or promote software or code that illegally creates automated income. Thank you for prompting me to make that important distinction. As a teacher I have methods of automating parts of the day through routines, that is another example of what I mean. I hope that gets me out of the doghouse!
As far as the backlinks: Have you checked yours on Yahoo? It is a pretty good counter but all the engines are different numbers. You may be comparing say your Google popular number with my Yahoo! comprehensive one and they are vastly different. I decided to use Yahoo! because they had the widget I use in all three sites.
The way I actively get backlinks (and have gotten them for 3 years fairly competitively) is through writing for other sites. I routinely write stuff for about 8-10 other blogs and sites as regularly as I can. Another way is through joining Social Media and entering my link there. Those are just a couple things I do. The most important and most rewarding is to write stuff people link to.
Hi Damien
I don’t know if you can help me but I’m hoping you can – I seem to gain traffic and then lose it again what can I do to try and keep it going?
Han
@Hannah: Traffic building is a process every good blogger challenges her/himself with. Most the buttons and widgets on this site are geared toward traffic building. The biggest source so far for me has been Stumbleupon but I have multiple traffic sources that work well for me. I list and link them in the article above.
You will see huge traffic anomalies, if you find yourself using Entrecard, Stumbleupon regularly one month but then stop using it the next, these services account for way to much “fake” traffic where you need to almost constantly promote just to maintain “Visit” numbers. That being said, I gain a few extra readers each month from stumbleupon but 99.9% never leave a comment or mention anything about my blog they visited.
@Dragon Blogger: I’m sort of boorish on traffic these days. I just want a number. Perhaps as I master more nuances of this “biz” I will pay attention to bounce rate etc. Since I’ve dropped Entrecard I’ve seen increases in visits. I have 30 or so friends on Stumbleupon that will Stumble whatever I send them because we have built trust. The bottom line is trust. I have another person upset with me because I out an “Epoxy” ad in the middle of my teaching blog. Perhaps he doesn’t need extra money. My wife and I do. So …. the point is this: advertisers like traffic and so traffic is good. Stumbleupon works better for me than anything so far, but it us not all I do and I am always open to new sources. Thanks Justin!