John Chow has released his August 2007 income report, and it is pretty amazing. The summer is usually a rough time for bloggers, as advertising income drops to record lows, but not for John Chow as August saw him bring in $17,828.61.

To put that into perspective, that is half a year of my income, generated by his site in one month.

Affiliate sales continues to be the blog’s biggest money maker. I promote a bunch of different programs, with an emphasis placed on programs that pays a residue income. The best performing affiliate program for August was Text Link Ads, accounting for $2,500 of the $7,244 affiliate income. Yes, I make more from the TLA affiliate program than I do from the TLA links.

Google AdSense posted its second worst performance ever. It now accounts for less than 3% of blog income. This month it will account for zero. Yes, the ad network that started John Chow dot Com will be eliminated from the blog. This illustrates the importance of spreading out your income sources.

There is only one John Chow, and so I doubt I will make that kind of cash from my projects seperate to my employer, but I can assure you that building one tenth of what he has done is achievable by anyone with persistence.

Originally posted on September 3, 2007 @ 3:09 am

Net Business Blog has a great post up entitled “Increase Your Profits Exponentially By Targeting Popular Bloggers” where they mention how Nate of Unique Blog Designs was brilliant by getting John Chow to use him for his new design.

Unique Blog Designs (UBD) landed Shoemoney as a new client. Shoemoney found out about UBD through John Chow. And Shoemoney has even more RSS subscribers than John Chow.

Shoemoney: 10,000 subscribers
John Chow: 8,000 subscribers

With these two clients, do you think UBD will have trouble getting more clients in the near future?

It has been said that Nate has already earned himself over $13,000 in client work thanks to his growing list of high profile bloggers using his designs. A very smart move, and a great article listing out the how and why of targeting popular bloggers.

Originally posted on September 11, 2007 @ 8:47 pm

I found out about The Huffington Post allowing some of their top commenters to switch and become bloggers for the publication thanks to Problogger.net.

Reading through the comments on our site, we realized that our commenters are a tremendous — and underutilized — resource. So we’ve created a process whereby we will choose one commenter a month to become part of our group blog.

Our decision will be based on how many fans a commenter has, how often their comment is selected as a Favorite, and our moderators’ preferences. Every comment now has an “I’m A Fan Of” link and a “Favorite” link, so start voting for the comments and commenters you like best. We will announce the first commenter-turned-HuffPost-blogger in the next few weeks.

My first reaction to this news was “wow, that is a great idea!” Quality commenters have some strong opinions, and rather than having them leave, and talk about what you have written on their own blog, or having their opinions be buried deep within a comments system, harnessing their power and having them work for you might just get your blog to that next level.

I don’t think that The Huffington Post needs more great writers as they are pretty much one of the top ten single blogs right now in the blogosphere, but what do I know?

If you have commenters that are absolutely amazing, maybe now is the time to extend a writing offer to them.

Originally posted on August 19, 2007 @ 6:58 pm

One of the things I hate the most is a newly launched blog with one or two posts. I like to see a fair bit of content on a blog before going there as it lets me know how consistently a blogger publishes, and thus if it is worthy to bookmark or even subscribe to via RSS.

Over on Blog Beat, there is a post about this analyzing it from the writer’s side.

Writer’s Block
10 posts is a good bar to set when evaluating your ability to continue to create more content for the site. If you struggle to get to four or five posts how can you expect to continue to create articles month after month? If you can create 10 quality posts in a short amount of time, you most likely have the writing skills and knowledge to carry your blog for months and years.

Check out the site for more reasons to get some initial seed content on your new blog.

Originally posted on August 26, 2007 @ 3:50 pm

I know this isn’t money, advertising or blogging related really, but it can effect bloggers greatly as even servers can crash.

Over on Freelance Folder there is a post about backing up your data, and some simple steps you can take. Also, in the comments there are some other great recommendations. Not all of the things listed in the post or comments might help you back up your blog, but make sure you do it. And don’t forget to back up your database, and not just your files. In WordPress and other blog software, the database is where all your posts are, as well as you comments and configuration, so without your database, you won’t have much of anything.

A snippet from the Freelance Folder post:

The first stage of a Disaster Recovery plan is simply backing up all your important data. And it’s never been cheaper to do so – you can hit your local computer store and pick up monster-sized external hard drives for less than a hundred dollars. They plug right into a USB port and are ready to go with little or no setup. I just picked up a pair of 320 GB external drives yesterday for $70 a piece, plugged them in, and was good to go.

Check out the full post on Freelance Folder.

Originally posted on September 4, 2007 @ 11:19 pm