Earning Money Blogging - Google Adsense or Amazon Affiliate Sales

I've been blogging consistently for about 1 1/2 years. During that time my Adsense revenue has accrued to only $78.00. I'm hoping that with a little luck, I will have enough to make payout of $100 this Christmas (2012). I've never had much luck with Google Adsense advertising on my blogs.

I have had luck as an Amazon affiliate though. I signed up as an Amazon Affiliate around 1 year ago. (I'd been blogging for approximately 6 months at that time.) Today, I went back into my Amazon account to get reports of my earnings for the past year. NOTE: This is my blog Amazon affiliate sales only. I also have affiliate sales through Squidoo that aren't reported here:

July - Sept of 2010, or quarter 3, I earned $3.49. I soon learned that Christmas is huge for Amazon affiliates. My earnings rose to $24.31 in the 4th quarter of 2010, or the three months prior to Christmas. I was surprised to see they stayed very high through the first quarter of 2011 at $44.43. Finally, the holiday cash stopped pouring in and I find my average blog affiliate sales at $16.12 for the quarter.

I can't report quarter 3 of 2011 yet, because it is still accruing. However, it is already at $7.78 for the month of July. Some rough estimating tells me that if I also earn $7 in August and September, I'll make $21 this quarter.

That is 6 times what I earned in Q3 last year, my first quarter as an Amazon affiliate. If I also have 6 times the earnings that I did last year in Q4 and Q1, it will renew my faith that blogging can be profitable with a lot of hard work and a little patience.

Can You Earn Money Blogging?

Some writers do well at blogging and insist it is profitable. It's my opinion that most writing could do better on an well-known established site than on a personal blog. Developing and posting to a blog is a lot of work and it's an on-going task. I am big on calculations, so I will tell you some of my personal experience with this blog. At Heather'sTelecommute, I earn .002 cents per view. This number is sometimes expressed as RPM, or $2.00 in revenue per each 1000 views. RPM stands for Revenue per Page Impression. That is pretty average. That is what I earn on most writing websites. Now the question becomes views. How many views do I get here? I've been contributing to this blog for one year and in that time I've gotten almost 7,000 views and written 75 posts. Some more calculating tells me that this blog has earned me $14.00 in a year.

Getting views isn't easy on a new blog. It's a lot of hard work. Why would someone do this when they could write for a well-established website? I do it in the hope of gaining PageRank for my blog. If I build up credibility here, by establishing viewers, I have my own site with good Google ranking and I'm no longer dependent on a website. If for example, every site that I write for tanked today, I could depend on my well-established blog. Well ok, it's not that well-established yet, but I'm working on it. The other perk is that it gives me a place to backlink my relevant work. Many sites want writers that have established an established audience following their writing.