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Two Years In – My Blog Earning Report

Dec 1, 2016 | 18 comments

There is a newer income report out. Read it here: Half-Yearly Blog Income Report, Dec to May 2017

I have a very exciting announcement to make. This blog now makes a full-time income. It makes the same as a graduate working in London. That’s crazy!

Since the last earning report six months ago, the blog has averaged over £3,000 a month. I can’t really believe it. After my first six months report, I remember some friends taking the piss about how little it earned (£213 total). “drinks on Sam” and that sort of thing. And now it’s making almost 100 times that amount.

Here is a graph of the monthly income for the last 18 months. (I’ve removed the first six months as they made almost nothing)

Well if that doesn’t encourage you to start a blog, I don’t know what will! Here’s my quick guide on how to start a blog. It’s pretty easy, requires no programming skills and takes less than an hour.

Now let’s dive into the details and see exactly where that money is coming from.

I don’t have any advertising on the site and I don’t take sponsored guest posts (where you get paid to write a post on something). All the income comes from affiliations. That means that I earn a small commission on some of the items I talk about on this site.

For instance, if you read my ‘how to start a blog post‘ and go on to sign up for BlueHost hosting, I will make about £40 in commission. If your blog then does well and you get to the point you need to upgrade, you might read my post on supercharging my blog and sign up to WP-Engine, which will earn me another $200.

It’s a pretty basic way of making money from a blog. After I write a post I will Google each product I talk about and along with ‘affiliate scheme’. If there is one I will sign up and see if it makes any money.

I like it as it allows me to have complete quality control over the content on my site. I get to write exactly what I would anyway. If on the other hand, I put adverts on this site using something like Google Adsense, I wouldn’t get any say in what companies are displayed.

Now, onto the monthly breakdown.

June 2016

Total: £2,856.61 ($4,150)

July 2016

Total: £2,909.18 ($4,250)

August 2016

Total: £2,439.01 ($3,512)

September 2016

Total: £3,059.69 ($4,037)

October 2016

Total: £3,794.24 ($5,006)

November 2016

Total: £3,205.44 ($4,035)

Six-Month Total: £18,264.17 ($24,990*)

Two-Year Total: £24,850.44 ($34,535*)

* The recent currency nightmares with Brexit probably mean that these estimates are almost certainly substantially off.

What Next For The Arbing Blog?

After this blog earning report, it is going to be hard for me to justify continuing to treat the blog like a hobby. I think there is a lot of potential still left in the site. I don’t really do much marketing, most of my posts aren’t monetized, and I ignore most of the ‘best practices’ that other bloggers bang on about.

If I decide to start treating it like a real job that will all have to change.

But, I don’t want to create a job for myself! Plus I have plenty of other projects that I am working on.

I need to decide what to do and what direction to take this blog in. What do you think?

Would you appreciate more frequent posts or do you think it would detract from the quality? Would you like to see some guest posts? Written by experts on the most popular topics, such as Amazon FBA and Matched Betting?