{"id":17781,"date":"2024-02-09T15:40:54","date_gmt":"2024-02-09T15:40:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webmonkey.com\/the-road-to-a-500-month-blog-how-to-grow-a-money-making-blog\/"},"modified":"2024-05-24T19:39:18","modified_gmt":"2024-05-24T19:39:18","slug":"money-making-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webmonkey.com\/money-making-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"The Road To A $500\/Month Blog – How To Grow A Money Making Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"
One of the most popular posts I have ever written on WebMonkey was my post on The Road to a $100\/Month blog.<\/p>\n
That post was an amalgamation of everything I learned in my first 8 months of blogging, and I highly recommend starting out with that post if you are relatively new to blogging.<\/p>\n
However, if you've been stuck in the $100-$300 range of monthly blogging income like I have been for the past few months, I hope that this post will provide some insight into how I managed to get over the hump and continue to grow.<\/p>\n
Let's get to it!<\/p>\n
I've always focused on growing organic traffic as a means to generate revenue on this blog.<\/p>\n
While Google's landing page environment is changing and pushing organic search results lower than ever before, the point remains: quality content that provides an incredible user experience is key.<\/p>\n
Since writing my $100\/month blog post, most of my time has still been dedicated to content creation.<\/p>\n
Back then, I had written a total of 34 posts and roughly 93,000 words. Since then, I have written an additional 39 posts and essentially doubled the total word count on WebMonkey.<\/p>\n
Here is how my traffic has broken down:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Between a mix of algorithm updates that both benefited and hindered my position in the SERPs, I experienced a fair amount of traffic fluctuation since August.<\/p>\n
However, with the exception of January (my best month ever), I've struggled to generate the same sort of monthly traffic as I did in August.<\/p>\n
Solid content, some basic SEO, and obtaining new backlinks has kept organic traffic numbers fairly steady, but it is clear that things will have to change moving forwards.<\/strong><\/p>\n However, while things have been fairly stagnant\/the same in the traffic generation department, I've made some major changes in how I make money by blogging, and this will hopefully open up opportunities to grow WebMonkey at an even faster rate.<\/p>\n I've always relied on Adsense to generate most of my blogging income, with affiliate income, sponsored posts, or other revenue streams mostly taking a back seat.<\/p>\n If you've read my Yearly Blog Recap or latest Quarterly Income Report, you'll see the formula has been fairly consistent…make $100-$150\/month from Adsense, and maybe make another $50-$100 in affiliate income from random links on my blog on a good month.<\/p>\n This was a great strategy for monetizing a fresh blog, but after doing some reading\/thinking I decided to really step things up in the income department.<\/p>\n The main changes I made over the past 2 months include:<\/p>\n Here are the results:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n April saw approximately $372<\/strong> in revenue, and May is on track to easily do $600<\/strong> or more.<\/p>\n Time to break down the changes!<\/p>\n At the start of April, I decided to start the process to move from Adsense to Monumetric (formerly The Blogger Network) with hopes of increasing my blog advertising revenue. I plan on writing a more in-depth Monumetric review in a week or two that breaks down the platform in greater detail, but I'll briefly discuss Monumetric right now.<\/p>\n Monumetric is an advertisement management platform. This means that publishers who are part of Monumetric can focus on content creation and marketing while things like advertisement layout, split-testing, optimization, and reporting are all taken care of.<\/p>\n Monumetric naturally takes a cut of any ad revenue, like all other ad management platforms, but the commission ranges from 15-30% which is low for the industry.<\/p>\n Anyway, here are the available tiers publishers can apply for in the Monumetric network:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Each monetization program has varying requirements, and publishers with more monthly pageviews obviously get more support and are prioritized.<\/p>\n However, even the Propel Network (which I have joined) has provided an exceptional on-boarding and supportive experience, and the RPMs I am seeing have absolutely crushed Adsense.<\/p>\n On Adsense, I was seeing page RPMs of about $10 on a good day, and despite my split-testing efforts, I really had no idea what I was doing.<\/p>\n Here are my results with Monumetric after less than 30 days:<\/p>\nMaking Money With A Blog – How I Ramped Up Revenue:<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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1 – Switching From Adsense to Monumetric:<\/strong><\/h3>\n