I’m partnering on a new blog with a close relative who is an eager, but very green, blogger. He’s been kind of hit and miss on posting and hasn’t seemed overly committed, until this past week when he dropped a few posts of rather good content on the blog. Recently, he sent me an email asking if a textual link to Amazon.com had brought any revenue and when we could expect to make some money. This post sets forth my response to him. I’ve edited some specifics to keep his identity and our new blog anonymous; however, I think my response is relevant to many new bloggers.
We’ve had 4 clicks to Amazon. No sales. Like I’ve said before, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. We will probably need 10k-20k hits per month before we start thinking about any income. We’ve been up for less than two months, and not many posts during that time. It just depends on the rate that we get quality content up on the blog. We’ll get out of it what we put into it . . . and, so far, we haven’t put much into it.
I worked on my primary blog and it’s predecessor for over a year before it took off. But, when it took off, it really took off. In January 2007, I had 350 hits on it. In January 2008, I had over 540,000. The difference? Lots and lots of posts containing quality content.
My goal for our new blog, is to make a couple hundred bucks in December 2008. That goal is realistic and something we can build off of. If, however, we start cranking out better content at a faster pace, it could be more.
The key to affiliate links on a blog is putting a lot of them in content over time. We’ve got a handful. We need hundreds. This will just take time.
When we started this idea, I told you not to worry about making money the first few months. Keep that in mind. Worry about content. This is not a get rich quick gimmick. It’s working smarter, but also working hard. I put 30+ hours a week into blogging (on top of my day job), but it’s paying off and I expect it to continue to grow.
In the mean time, keep learning about blogging and how to build up our new blog. Keep posting new content. I’ll do the same. I’ll be sure to let you know when we start making any money.
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what is the website of yours that got 540,000 hits? thats amazing!
@Tom – Thanks. One of the things I want to do with this site is talk freely about income, traffic and future objectives. Accordingly, I’m going to refrain from discussing other sites that I own. I will tell you, however, that the site is now quite established in its niche and one that I post to daily, many days with multiple posts.
That’s indeed amazing and I know that there really is big return to posting in a blog in a regular basis. does the 540,000 hits mean there is totally zero PPC traffic. I’ve had experiences of getting as much as 7 million hits a day just with PPC. Anyway, thank you for sharing and reminding me of the potentials of a niche if you just really as in really take good care of it.
You seem to have me really intrigued with that figure 540,000 hits. Would you care to share the blog? Anyway, just tried my luck and I bet you wouldn’t really because that’s how business works. I wish you more luck in the coming months as you go along.
See my first reply.