Blog Income Report – August 2008

Well, once again it’s Blog Income Report time again.  It seems like ages ago since I’ve written my last report.

The month of August definitely proved to be a challenging month for me.  Having a tonne of projects on the go at the same time is something I normally enjoy the challenge of, but this month I’ve really felt a bit overwhelmed just due to the sheer volume of things happening in my life right now.

I finally ended up selling my old house this month, which meant I had to spend some extra time there finishing off all the cleaning and moving of some left-over items I still had over there.  This is great news of course, so I’m not complaining, but it did mean that I had a lot less time to attend to the Blog.

In addition to that, I also had to do quite a bit of research and finally decided on launching a new company I incorporated, called Ignite Vision Marketing.  I plan on using this company to do the majority of my Internet Marketing and especially Affiliate Marketing efforts through, keeping it seperate from what I do for this Inspired Money Maker project.  I finally got the company incorporated at the end of last week, just before the end of the month, so now I’ve got a lot of work on my hands getting the rest of the things setup for it like bank accounts, affiliate marketing network accounts etc.

In conjunction with launching the new company I also decided to launch InspiredAffiliate.com which will be my second active Blog which I’d like to keep more focused on the topics of Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing and anything else ‘Make Money Online‘ related.  This will allow me to keep InspiredMoneyMaker.com more personal development oriented and focused on the topic of “How to Make Money Doing What You Love (Online & Offline)”.

RSS Subscribers

My RSS subscribers this month have been growing quite steadily and I’m approaching the 1,500 mark.  I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do to celebrate hitting 1,500 but I’ll definitely have to do something once I top that milestone.

Here’s what my graph looks like this month:

The giant dip there for a few days I think was related to a malfunction with my AWeber account for a couple of days which disappeared once I fixed it.

Blog Income Report

Although it’s been a lot of fun watching my income from the Blog grow significantly every month since I started reporting my income back in April, this month my income actually decreased.  I’ll explain why in a second, but firstly let me report the details.

My total income earned from Blogging for the month of August was $1,601.51

Here’s the breakdown of how the numbers tallied up:

• Direct Ad Sales: $67.00
• Affiliate Commissions:  $147.00
• Blog Coaching / Consulting:  $1,350
• AdSense: $11.16
• Text Link Ads:  26.26
• Kontera:  $0.09
• eBook Sales:  $0.00
• ReviewMe:  $0.00

Ok, so what happened this month to drop my income?

Well, a number of things.

Changes to Direct Ads

Firstly, I completely changed my strategy for how I’m selling my banner ads.  I wrote about it in a “Save Money on Advertising” article at the beginning of the month.  Instead of setting a price based on the going rate in the marketplace, I changed my philosophy to offer my banner ads on a sliding scale starting at as little as $5/week for a banner spot.  I’ve done the comparisons in the marketplace and I believe my rates offer some tremendous value for a low price.

How has this worked out for me?  Very well actually.  Now, at first glance you can see that my actual earnings from direct ad sales has actually dropped from the previous month total of $180, down to $67 this month.  However, the great thing is that I’ve significantly diversified my direct ads income which came from five different sources in August, compared to just one source in July.  Not only that, but shortening the cycle down to a week instead of a month, I am allowing people to test their banners on this site for a much shorter period of time which allows them to track whether they are getting a return on investment that is worth renewing a lot quicker than before.

What’s awesome about this is that it creates a much better win/win scenario for both my advertisers and me.  Out of the available 6 spots, 4 are fully booked and people continue to renew week after week.  So, I’m going to stick to this way of selling direct ads because I think it represents a much more stable source of income than trying to sell much higher priced spots to a smaller audience.  Of course as the ads continue to sell, I’ll be raising my prices slowly to meet market demand, but I’m not just going to bump them back up to “going rates”.

Changes to Coaching / Consulting

The coaching / consulting income I’ve made in the past few months has been great, but it really wasn’t something that I anticipated was going to be taking up so much of my time and energy.  One-on-one work with people can be some of the most rewarding work out there because you get to directly see how you make an impact on someones life or by working on a project with them.

However, with the tight squeeze on my schedule this month, I really started to track just how much time I’m spending on coaching and consulting and I realized that the opportunity cost has been too great, so I decided to make some changes to my arrangements with the people I’ve been coaching / consulting with and to cut back.

This of course will have a negative effect on my income short term, but I’m not concerned as my intuition tells me that doing this will be for the greatest good of everyone involved.

What’s On the Horizon?

Well, there are a lot of things in my personal life right now that are coming to a close and they do and have required a bit more of my time to get things finalized and wrapped up, but once that’s done I’ll have a LOT more time to dedicate to this Blog and my new InspiredAffiliate.com project.

This is super exciting for me as I really love and enjoy what I’m doing with these projects and there’s no better way to make money than by doing what you love.

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