My online income dropped to $3740.12 this year from $4644.28 in 2008. There were two reasons for this. The first one is that in 2008 I made about $1500 from credit card referrals. I don’t think I even made $150 from credit card referrals this year. People were not applying for cards and many of the credit card issuers cut back or eliminated their affiliate sales.
The other cause of my decline in income was from decreased competition. The site Bankaholic.com sold for $15 million last year and that spawned a ton of new bank sites. My bank blog BankBonuses.info has been my main source of online income but its amount of search engine traffic declined this year due to all the new sites.
With the acquisition of MyRetirementBlog.com my income should go up in 2010 but I would like to increase the income from my other sites as well. I don’t currently break down my income by site but I am going to start doing that next year so I can get a better idea of where my money is coming from and hopefully come up with some ideas to increase my earnings. I will probably start breaking my income down by source also.
I know there are a lot of bloggers that read this site – Did your earnings go up or down this year?
Income? What income? LOL!
Seriously, mine is pretty level, but I’ve never put the time into developing traffic for my site and monetizing like I want to. Most of my income has come from ING Direct referrals and a little over $100 off of Google Adsense. Ultimately it is just enough to cover my hosting costs plus a little extra. The way my blog is it serves as a creative outlet for me and not much else.
At least you make enough to cover your hosting. It took me a couple of years before I started making decent money. Keep in mind that my online income figure is from several sites. I didn’t add ING referrals and other bank referrals to my total but that would have increased my income a few hundred bucks.