This is the first real monthly earnings report since this blog was resurrected at the beginning of this month from an 8 month hiatus. Year to date income for WallerBlog dot Com has averaged $47.03/month. Blog income for May was down from the YTD average, but has increased from April’s $34.13.

Total Blog Income for May 2008: $37.32

Here is the breakdown:

• PayPerPost: $20.00
• Private Ad Sales: $7.00
• Google AdSense: $5.40
• TNX.net: $4.92
• Grand Total: $37.72

Blog income has decreased since the beginning of the year. This is primarily due to Google’s PageRank update. My blog went from a PR 3 to a PR 0. This has effectively killed all income from Text-Link-Ads and LinkWorth. Before this month LinkWorth was my biggest money maker. That loss has been mitigated by the addition of PayPerPost.

Traffic Stats

Traffic this month is up to 1,294 page views from 608 visitors. The top traffic sources were:

• Google: 138
• Direct: 119
• StumbleUpon: 125
• Entrecard: 95

As usual the big G was the top referrer. The biggest surprise though was the 125 visitors from StumbleUpon. The Blogging Tips Carnival was Stumbled and received more traffic than any other post this month.

Determination is the key

Determination is the only thing that will make your small blog a success. Determination to write good content, determination to research monetization opportunities and determination to network to drive traffic to your blog. This month I am determined to work to gain quality backlinks in order to gain more green on my PagerRank. This will give me many more opportunities to increase this blog’s income and get me closer to my goal of earning a full-time living via the internet.

When I resurrected this blog at the beginning of this month, I decided to redesign the whole site from the ground up. One, I wanted a fresh start. It feels good to have a new design. If you don’t like the way your blog looks why would you want to put your efforts into it? I also wanted to ensure that this new theme would be better from a monetization standpoint also. Who doesn’t like more money?

In my search for a new template, there were a few key things that I was looking for. If you decide to change your theme too, make sure the following is true if you want to grow your blog and make more money!

Make sure your RSS button is visible

Until you have thousands of pages indexed by Google (and even when you do), your best bet for having an active organic blog is by having an active community of subscribers. The best way to grow this is by consistently promoting your RSS feed. Throw it in people’s face…

Subscribe to my feed!

…you can also accomplish this by having a subscription button in a prominent place. On WallerBlog dot Com you can see it proudly displayed on the top right. My RSS subscribers have increased 50% in the last 15 days that this template has been live. Make sure your RSS button is in a visible place.

Make sure the majority of your advertising is above the fold

Whether you’re monetizing your blog with Adsense, affiliate programs or private ads, all will earn you more when they’re above the fold. These ads will have greater click through rates. This obviously earns you more money on CPC advertisers like Adsense and gives you a better chance at making some cash on an affiliate sale. It will also earn you more on private ad sales. Advertisers that get good traffic from an ad are happy advertisers. Happy advertisers are more likely to renew the ad on your blog. Keep your ads above the fold.

Make sure your new theme is sticky

Let’s face it, the majority of us live and die by the traffic sent via search engines (read Google) and this group is a fickle bunch. When searching for something, 75% of people will spend no more than a few seconds glancing at your site to see if it has whatever they were searching for. What they see in those few seconds has to grab their attention. This does not mean to blind them with your amazing color scheme. (Here’s another incredible use of html.) Make sure that your site loads quickly, is easily navigable and, most importantly, is readable. This keeps people on your site longer which increases the odds of you either gaining a new subscriber or making more money! (That’s the whole point, right?) Make sure your theme is sticky.

If you’re just starting a blog or you’re thinking about remodeling, be sure that you pick a theme that will help and not hinder your blogging. The design you choose has a tremendous impact on your ability to gain new subscribers and generate revenue.

When I started this blog a year and a half ago, I didn’t really have any intentions of making any money with it. Though, I guess you could say I’ve had a change of heart.

There’s lots of opportunities out there, but few that will work for low-traffic blogs. One of these programs that does work, however, is payperpost. Back before I went AWOL on my blog, I did a few PayPerPost opportunities and made a little cash on the side. For a blogger that’s making pennies on programs like Adsense, PayPerPost can be a goldmine.

How Much Money Can I Make?

The majority of PayPerPost opportunities pay between $5 and $20. In fact, I’m getting paid 20 bucks to write this now. Some people will say I’m whoring my blog out. I say, I don’t really care. I’m getting $20 for 30 minutes of my time. If you’re an active blogger, these opportunities can really add up. Blogger Robert MacEwan made $2,500 in one month from PayPerPost alone!

Most of PayPerPost’s more lucrative opportunities are reserved for blogs that have a PageRank of 3 or better. This tends to be somewhat of a flawed system as greater page rank doesn’t always equal greater blog. This really gets out of hand with some of the top paying posts. As I type this, the top paying post nets the blogger a cool $135, but requires a pagerank of 7. 7? Problogger.net, with over 45,000 RSS subscribers is currently sitting with a pagerank of 6. So you’re telling me that a blogger with hundreds of thousands of visitors making a six-figure blogging income doesn’t qualify for a $135 opportunity on PayPerPost? A little ridiculous. But I digress…

The bottom line is that PayPerPost is great for the low-traffic blog, but can quickly be outgrown as your readership increases.

If I didn’t just talk you out of it, check out the button at the top of this post to sign up for PayPerPost.