My monthly blogging income jumped in April as all five blogs started making real money

Monthly blogging income climbed to a new record again in April on increases in both book sales and affiliate income. I passed a milestone of $3,000 in the month and have made over $16,000 in the past year from blogging. There’s been ups and downs but I love my (kinda) passive income stream and am excited about a few new projects.

I’ve decided to stop doing separate self-publishing income reports, instead just making the monthly blogging income posts more detailed. Self-publishing on Amazon has been a great source of income and about half of the total blogging money but it’s such a natural fit for blogging that everyone should be doing both. If you’re running a blog and not self-publishing, you’re missing out on a huge income stream and the content is already there. Check out my resource guide on self-publishing to see how to convert your blog posts into a passive income from book sales.

I’ll break down the money from blogging first, then self-publishing sales and wrap it up with some new projects that you might want to check out to boost your work from home money. Check out all the blogging and publishing income reports here.

Monthly Blogging Income Jumps 52% in April on Affiliate Sales

My blogging income from Google Adsense and affiliate sales jumped to $1,443.93 last month from $942 last month. Affiliates from sites like Prosper and Lending Club continued to do well on my loans website but I started to see some real traction on the two new blogs, My Stock Market Basics and this site.

The two new sites have really helped to increase the number of affiliates I work with each month. I saw affiliate payouts from 11 companies last month versus an average of just seven over the preceding few months. Your website is probably going to rank for a limited range of topics on Google search. This will limit your affiliate options unless you build massive traffic over several years. There’s quite a bit of overlap in running two or three sites rather than just one so it’s not like it’s three-times the work. Having five blogs opens up my affiliate blogging income tremendously.

I’d still recommend you start with one blog at first, something you’re really passionate about and wouldn’t mind posting to for a while without much income to show for it. Most blogs go at least six months without seeing much traffic or making much money. The money will come though if you stick with it and it really starts to build after that first year.

Check out this 10-page resource for how to start a blog that makes money.

I took most of the Google Adsense ads off the sites a few months ago to improve the reading experience on the blogs. I put a few ads back on my Crowd101 blog to make a little more money off the site but their still pretty limited. Since affiliate sales and your own products will make the most money, these ads are pretty low value.

The blogs made a total of $0.06 per page view in affiliate sales and Adsense income in April. Page views increased to 22,500 (after removing some of the obvious spam visitors) which was about 8% higher than in March.

Self-Publishing Income up 17% in April with over 600 Copies Sold

Publishing books on Amazon and other sites brought in $1,574 in April on sales of 646 copies. I sold a total of 217 paperback books, 234 audiobooks and 195 copies on Amazon Kindle during the month.

What’s been so great about self-publishing is that it is much more a passive income source compared to blogging. It takes some time to repurpose blog content, add detail and organize it into a book but there’s much less ongoing work to keep seeing the money come in every month. Stop posting on your blog and your traffic will start dropping off, taking your monthly blogging income with it.

By comparison, I did absolutely no promotion on the seven books last month. I schedule regular tweets and Facebook posts but social media is a very small part of sales. Ranking for the books has been fairly consistent on Amazon and having multiple formats really helps to get the books in front of more people. The dividend book did almost $500 in sales with five of the seven books making over $100 last month.

So if you don’t need to do much to keep your self-publishing income going, is there anything you can do to increase it? Having landing pages on your blogs is critical to self-publishing success. Amazon will drive a lot of your sales through its own marketing and the people searching the site but using your own blog traffic to push a few more sales will really help kickstart your Amazon ranking. Check out my landing page on my investing blog for an example.

There are also a few promotion strategies that can help boost your publishing and blogging income, things like Facebook groups and special discount pricing. I’ll cover my complete strategy for book promotion in an upcoming article. Make sure you sign up for the email list so you don’t miss it. Click through to get your 6-Month Blogging Cheat Sheet and join the Work from Home community.

How I’ll Meet My $4,000 Monthly Blogging Income Goal

So the regular blogging income is really growing and was actually more than my freelancing income last month. The problem is that affiliate sales can be really erratic for a smaller blog, just take a look at my February blog earnings. I’m still confident I can hit my goal of $4,000 in monthly blogging profits by the end of the year but it will take some work to make it consistent money.

I finally got off my butt and started some link-building strategies last month. Google has said that content and inbound links are the two most important factors in getting your blog to rank in search. It takes time to build up a lot of quality content on your site. You’ll get links over time as well but there are also a few strategies that can jumpstart your blog. I posted my three favorite link-building strategies in a post last week.

I’m starting to storyboard my Udemy courses this month and want to have at least three to five courses done by the end of the year. The online video learning site just changed its pricing policy to be a little more straight-forward. Instead of the outrageous prices you saw before, now courses are priced between $20 and $50 each. Course providers get 97% of sales for people that come from their blog and 50% of the sales for students that sign up from the Udemy site.

More than anything else to grow my monthly blogging income, I’ll just be working hard and posting lots of quality articles. Across the five blogs and a few freelance clients, I write from 35 to 45 pages a week. It’s not what most people think of when they hear blogging or ‘be your own boss’ but I love the control I have over my own sites. I’m excited about growing my Work from Home income stream and hearing your ideas for your own work at home success.