Last month I posted my blog earnings for the first time in an attempt to encourage other bloggers to follow suit, so that we can all learn from each other and improve our blog earnings. I think many of you will find this month’s report interesting as there’s $100 at stake!

Thilak and John Chow also posted their earnings last month, and based upon their successes I picked a few areas that I wanted to try and work on in March:

• I noticed that Thilak was making a killing from TribalFusion with $420.68 in February, so I made getting accepted by TribalFusion a priority. After numerous emails and phonecalls I finally managed to get approved and up and running mid-month
• I was determined to try and generate some income from ReviewMe given the successes of Thilak and John Chow, who undoubtedly is the ReviewMe king
• Understanding why I was making less from Feedburner than Thilak, even though I have more subscribers and site traffic
• Selling more direct advertising given John Chow’s success, where direct sales are his biggest income stream
• Generating some referral income, particularly from Text Link Ads

So how successful was I with my goals? Here are the scores on the doors for March 2007 (February numbers in brackets):

• Google Adsense: $3485.34 ($2,775.5)
• Direct Ad Sales: $3236.00 ($150.00)
• Intellitxt: $625.30 ($75.82)
• Feedburner FAN: $533.17 ($240.77)
• Text-Link-Ads: $351.94 ($319.37)
• Tribal Fusion: $214.46 ($0)
• Blogads: $149.37 ($100.42)
• Vizu Polls: $180.65 ($118.9)
• ReviewMe : $50.00 ($125.00)
• Chitika : $31 ($0)
• Robert Sherman $50 ($0)
• Advocalcano $6 ($0)
• Adbrite: $0 ($1.83)
• Grand Total: $8,913.49 ($3,907.67)

My blog earnings this month were way beyond any of my targets, increasing by a whopping 128%, and judging by the majority of competition entries way beyond what any of my readers expected. Anyway, congratulations to Mark from www.bloglyne.com who pipped Sanketh by one dollar. $100 in Amazon vouchers are on their way to you.

In both dollars and pounds I still feel a bit giddy about last month’s performance. In dollars, if I could maintain this run-rate it would turn me into a six figure blogger. In pounds, it equates to £4.5k per month - nearly twice the average salary in the UK.

Successes For The Month

Direct Ad Sales

Obviously the biggest single success for the month were the direct ad deals I managed to close. I tried approaching a few companies directly without any joy - all of my sales actually came from approaches. The majority of the income came from Ciao who signed a long-term deal, so it is unlikely that I will repeat a deal of this size in April - but who knows! I also managed to find a sponsor for my theme for a month. I actually managed to do another deal with another site for 6 months and took a deposit, but they pulled out. I’m confident though that I’ll be able to find another sponsor before the current deal expires.

Intellitxt

This month was my first full month of running Intellitxt, and the numbers improved from around $16 a day to $20 a day making it my 2nd biggest ad network after Adsense, which I was very happy with. If you have over 200K impressions a month and want me to refer you then please drop me a line in the forum. You can of course apply directly but they are ridiculously slow, and at least I can add your site to the ones I chase Intellitxt about a few times a week.

Feedburner

I realised that one of the reasons why my Feedburner income was lower than expected last month was because I hadn’t implemented the code on all pages. I actually realised about a week ago I still hadn’t done it properly, so hopefully next month I will see the full benefit. Even still my Feedburner numbers went up 121% this month so I’m very happy.

Text Link Ads

My actual income from Text Link Ad sales dropped because I removed 8 of my advertisers as they were only paying $40, whereas the going rate was $150. Although I only managed to sell one new link in March, I managed to make up the difference with 3 affiliate sales. Hopefully, in April I will sell a few more links which will validate my decision to remove old advertisers, and hopefully I’ll do a few more affiliate sales. I also managed to sell 5 links in the forum, which bodes well given that it is predicted to get a PR of 6 this month. If this does happen I will also list my directory, which is also predicted to go up to PR6.

Disappointments For The Month

Adsense

The biggest disappointment for this month has been my Adsense income. Although it was still by biggest earner and I broke for the first time the psychological $100 a day barrier, the monthly increase was only 13.4% over February which was my lowest for a long time. For some reason I knew March would be a tough month, but I didn’t expect the source of the problems would be adsense themselves not traffic driven. The poor performance was driven by an unstable CPM rate which on some dates halved. I spoke to a couple of other sites about this and they had similar problems in March, so hopefully whatever is causing the problems will be sorted in April.

ReviewMe

I didn’t write one ReviewMe review in March, although strangely I did mange 2 signups. I think the problem I have with ReveiwMe is that compared to other sites including the ReviewMe King John Chow, my Alexa rank is low even though strangely my stats according to Google Analytics are higher. Unless my Alexa Rank corrects itself I don’t expect to sell any reviews, so I’ve given up pushing ReviewMe for now.

Plans For April

• Try and stabilise my adsense income at the same time as continuing to reduce my reliance on this scheme
• Find a replacement sponsor for my theme and new direct advertisers
• Get the handful of Intellitxt referrals I have submitted accepted
• Check that I have finally added Feedburner properly
• If my Pank Rank does increase, review my TLA prices
• If the Directory’s PR does go up to 6, start selling links in the directory
• See if there is any way I can improve my Tribal Fusion CPM
• Find ways to improve affiliate income
• Improve my Alexa Rank

I hope that the amount of information I have shared here will encourage you to do the same (An alternative way is to tag your post ‘MyBlogEarnings‘ so that your details can be found easily on Technorati), or provide you with food for thought. The more info we share with each other, the more we will all hopefully make.

Update: Thilak and John Chow have posted their earnings for March