December's Blog Income ReportHappy New Years once again to everyone. Can you believe that it’s actually 2008? Not only that, but in a few days time there will only be 6 months left in the Blogging Experiment? Wow…

Anyway, even though it’s New Years Day, it is also the first of the month and that means it’s time for an income report. If you remember, last month was a bit of an off month for me. I had set a goal of making $1,000 from the blog and only came in at $556. While that was still a decent month, it wasn’t anywhere close to my goal so I decided to once again try for the $1k mark, and set that as my goal for December. How did I end up doing?

The Results:

Here is December’s income, broken down by source. I’ve included last month’s figures in parenthesis for easy reference.

Private Ad Sales - $510 ($245)
Theme Sales - $375 ($0)
Sponsored Reviews - $100 ($266.50)
ScratchBack - $26 ($0)
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Total: $1011 ($556)

That’s right, I nearly doubled my income from last month and made my goal with $11 to spare!

The Bad:

In a month when you hit your goal you might think there weren’t any negatives. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

While $510 from the sale of private ads would seem like a major positive, that number is a bit deceiving. Don’t get me wrong, selling out the available 125×125 ad spots like we did in December is a great thing. However, $240 of the $510 came from a one-time ad buy that will be very tough to replicate. So, if I hope to continue my climb towards my $5,000 per month goal, I’m going to have to figure out a way to replace that income going forward.

Another negative this month was the drop in income for Sponsored Reviews. As I said last month, I think this is due in large part to my lack of Google PageRank. I am going to spend some time this month trying to remedy that, however, I’m not going to hold my breath.

And finally, you may have noticed the absence of Affiliate Sales on this list. That’s because, for the first time in several months, I didn’t make a single dollar as an affiliate. This is definitely an area I’ve been neglecting (to my own detriment) but it is also one of potential growth and might help me offset some of the one time income I mentioned above.

The Good:

The most obvious positive this month was the $375 in theme sales. I first put the theme up for sale on the 7th but quickly ran into a bit of a road block. After getting all of that sorted out, we were back in action and sold 5 copies of the theme over the course of the month (with another order coming in today, just a few hours too late to be counted in this income report). Even though the theme was for sale most of the month, I’m VERY pleased with these totals because I really didn’t do much promotion for it, other than the posts on this blog. I think this is an area for potentially a lot of growth and something I’ll be spending a bit more time on this month.

Also, the introduction of Scratchback onto the site I think will prove to be a steady source of income for the future. We already have one advertiser (thanks Big Sky Blog!), and as the site continues to grow in popularity, I think it will begin to fill up fairly quickly.

The Goal:

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we’re closing in on the half way point of this experiment. While it’s a great feeling to finally hit 4 figures in income for a month, I’m only a fifth of the way to the goal. With that in mind, I’m going to set the target for January at $1,500. I’m going to re-focus a bit on affiliate offers, and will begin to spend some time and money marketing the theme sales as well. I’m also considering introducing a couple of new monetization methods, but those will be posts of their own.

(image source: sehgal asad)

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