Make money onlineWell I can hardly believe it but it’s that time of the month again. It’s February 1st and while I hadn’t had much time to work on this post before today, mother nature cooperated and dumped about 8 inches of snow on the area, giving me the day off work. Anyway, if you recall the goal for this month’s income was set at $1,500. That would represent a 50% increase from December when the blog brought in just over one thousand dollars. Also, with only 6 months left to reach my goal of $5,000 a month from the blog, I needed to start making serious strides towards that total. So how did I do?

The Results

Alright, let’s jump right in. Here is the income BloggingExperiment.com generated for January, broken out by source. Just like last time, I’ve put the previous month’s earnings in parentheses so we can easily see where gains and losses were made.

ScratchBack: $130 ($26)
Private Advertising: $310 ($510)
Sponsored Reviews: $621 ($100)
Theme Sales: $1050 ($375)
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Total: $2111 ($1011)

That’s right ladies and gents, not only did I meet my goal of $1,500, I blew it out of the water! The total of $2,111 more than doubled last month’s income and puts me just $400 short of being half way to my goal. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about it.

Expenses

For the first time since the Blogging Experiment began, I spent a decent chunk of change promoting the site. I purchased a stripe ad at the top of JohnChow.com for $250 and linked it to the theme sales page. Then I laid out another $250 to have BloggingExperiment.com featured in the Problogger Community Consulting project. Not only did I receive a LOT of great feedback about the site, it also drew a lot of attention to the fact that the Blogging Experiment theme is for sale. We received more than enough orders on the first day of the Consulting project to pay for the price of the review. As you can see from the Theme Sales totals, both sources paid for themselves with ease.

February’s Goal

Despite easily hitting my goal for the month, I’m going to be a bit conservative when setting the goal for February. Sales of the theme made up about half of the income for the site. I’ve often discussed why it’s never good to have too many of your income eggs in one source basket and I think I’m getting quite close to that position with the theme sales. Also, a large chunk of the income from Sponsored Reviews came from one single review. While there are good and bad aspects of that (which I’ll discuss in a post next week), it might not be something I can duplicate moving forward. And last but not least, February is a shorter month as well, which gives me less time to generate income.

However, RSS subscriptions are continuing to climb, as are my rankings in the search engines. I have two new advertising options set to come online this month, and we’re working on two major developments involving the theme (one of which could help you make money). Also, with my new relaxed posting schedule, I have a couple of guest posting gigs lined up on a couple popular blogs. I’m hoping all of this will combine to allow me to hit $2,500 this month, despite the concerns I mentioned above.

(image source: sehgal asad)

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