~$20,000 Made Online Blogging the First Half of 2009 - I'm surprised...

~$20,000 Made Online Blogging the First Half of 2009 - I'm surprised...

Since today is July 1, 2009, it felt like a great time to ascertain how much money has come into my accounts from all the different ways I use to make money online.


I totaled up everything that came in the first six months in 2009 (realizing that some of this stuff is attributable to sales I made in 2008) and this is what I got:


AMAZON ASSOCIATES Total $7,500.09
BUY.AT (Selling TicketMaster tickets) PERFILIATE TECHN PAYMENTS Total $134.25
CJ (Referring various products, like Apple Store stuff) JANUARY 2009 EARNINGS Total $605.63
KONTERA Total $1,651.69
LINKSHARE Total $945.99
GOOGLE ADSENSE Total $7,453.38
Associated Content (Writing articles online) Total $867.05
Text Link Ads, Inc Total $433.38
Niche Blog Media Total $11.98
LinkWorth Total $50.00

Grand Total $19,653.44

I'm kind of surprised it's nearly $20,000 -- about half of what I brought in during 2008 from blogging, which was $44,000 for that year.


The reason I'm surprised is because my main money-making site WatchFreeEpisodes.com got totally banned by Google (never try the WP-o-Matic plugin to auto create posts from other feeds that aren't yours) and even CPTimes.com got banned too, right after I started building that up in the other site's wake of a demise. (Never use FeedList plugin to pull in Amazon's best-selling feeds with the descriptions of the products as well. Guess it was too much duplicate content!)


So anyway, I turned to the only sites I had left with any good standing and PageRank -- Thank Jesus for multiple domains! -- and just kept plugging away at blogging, and thankfully the Google Adsense monies started increasing, the Amaazon Associates sales are stable, and more stuff is growing.

Making Money Online Can Take a Lot of Work...

Despite what some scam sites say about making money at the drop of a click -- and your credit card number, of course.


Of course some people would say 20 grand in six month is nothing -- heck, John Chow makes 40 grand per month -- but I'm still grateful.


Watching John Chow's latest video about how he made that much money online solidified some things for me: I like his marketing techniques, but it showed me certain directions I don't want to go.


At this point I don't want to delve all deep into writing ebooks or making videos showing bloggers how to make money online and charge them a hefty penny for it. There are plenty of excellent bloggers out there like John Chow and Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net and Yaro Stanek of Entrepreneurs Journey who do that very well.


All I want to do is write tips for free on this blog you're reading of stuff that works for me and stuff that doesn't work.


As for the paying career, I'm headed in a whole 'nother direction: Back to the creative side of writing that involves pitching and selling and hawking my writing wares like I used to.


I love blogging -- I still wake to my news junkie self some days and plan to keep that up for now. But underneath, I see an entirely different future of how my Provider will bring in the $6,000 to pay Uncle Sam for this year's income thus far, and much more to come.