How I make my Money

It occurs to me that I’ve never really said exactly how my money from my websites comes to me and that some of you might be a little bit curious about it. So, listed below in order of magnitude, or how much I make from each, are the current sources of income for my websites.

• Text Link Ads: I’ve been using TLA since about August of last year and I couldn’t recommend a better income stream. If you’re using wordpress, as I am, it’s extremely easy to insert their plugin and code to throw the links up. It is a little difficult to get into the program if your blog is new, but once you do, it can be very beneficial. Currently, about 2/3 of my income comes from this source.
• Google Adsense: I honestly don’t remember a time when I wasn’t using Adsense on my sites. It’s fairly easy to implement, needing only the insertion of code into your template and the payout is probably the easiest as it’s self customizing to your site. That being said, the eCPM or earnings per 1000 viewers, is rather low in comparison with some of the other streams I run. Even so, Adsense comes in at just under the other 1/3 of my income.
  
• AuctionAds : These guys are a relative newcomer on the market. I’ve only been using them for a little under one month and already they have passed my lowest income generator. I think as time goes on and I find new ways to integrate the ads into my sites, I should begin to see this number climb and possibly pass adsense.
• Commission Junction: CJ is one of the largest affiliate networks and has a really decent system for signing up and getting the links for the affiliate companies. They’ve got some pretty high profile clients and I can’t complain about anything they’ve done. Unfortunately, I’m not much of an affiliate marketer just yet so am not making much of anything through them.
• Amazon: You’ll notice that I have an amazon banner on the left hand side of this page and I usually try and insert the affiliate code whenever I talk about a book. I don’t push it nearly hard enough to make any decent income off of it, but I do make money from it. Enough to receive a check about twice a year. Which isn’t much.

At the moment, those are the main income streams for my websites. I’ve got a few others that I run on a couple of sites that I either haven’t made any money with or haven’t gotten a check from so I didn’t count them as an income source.

Of course the first thing you’ll notice is that four sources isn’t as diversified as I could/should be. I completely agree. If either TLA or Adsense dropped out on me, it would make an impressive dent in my income. I don’t count on the income, but it is nice to have so I would rather not lose any of it. For that reason, I’ve been attempting to learn more about affiliate income, but so far have had little to no good results. I also am thinking of making a few changes here on thatedeguy in those regards. I make little to nothing off of adsense here so I may begin trying to implement an auctionads block instead and see if that does any good.

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