I have worked on different websites for almost 20 years. I’ve worked on many websites that never earned a dime. Through the years, the way I was paid changed. At first, I was selling products. I didn’t have the products nor did I ship them out.
Back then, I would order them from distributors who would send them out. Then, I started ordering them from Amazon, and earning by marking up the cost of the item.
It changed through the years
A few years later, with some of my websites, I earned money two ways:
I had links to Amazon products
If someone clicked on the link and bought anything from Amazon, I would earn a commission from it. At one point, commission could have been as high as 8 – 8.5%. It was based on how many items I sold a month.
What was also great was that no matter what the person bought, I would earn commission. It wasn’t just the product they clicked on.
I had other affiliate links
A very small portion of my revenue was through affiliate partnerships with companies. Sometimes they would send me a product to write a blog post about. Then there would be a link for someone to buy. I’d earn commission when people clicked the link and bought something. This wasn’t as lucrative as Amazon used to be.
I still had a lot of websites that didn’t earn anything
My issue has always been that I had too many very small websites. I was the master of none. I used a lot of time trying to build websites (like this one) only for it to never earn money.
How I earn now
A few years ago, I had some traction with one of my websites. We applied to a company that places ads on the site. Once we qualified (I think we needed 25,000 sessions a month), we needed lots of traffic to the site.
No one needed to click; I just needed them to spend time on the blog. I was paid/am paid per 1,000 views with some complex formula that includes lots of things. It’s the niche, how much the advertiser pays, the season, if the person viewed the ads/blog from a cell phone, a tablet, or a desktop computer, and so many other factors.
This may have been a mistake, but because we wanted people to stay on our site, we removed the Amazon ads. (Amazon had also cut commissions a few times by that point. They are Amazon! They didn’t need blogs sending traffic to them like they used to.)
Four blogs with ads
I have four small blogs that are all monetized with ads. Two of them make cents a day. They were approved for ads right before Covid. They were making between $20 and $30 a day each. But then all the ads stopped. None of the websites were earning. Those two websites never recovered. If I make a $1 a day from each of them, that’s “good”.
There is a third site I started from scratch that is very, very niche. It makes between $3 – $5 a day. A good day a few times a year is maybe $10. It was more of a passion project than a moneymaker.
The fourth site is the site we first put ads on. For years there was lots of traffic but we didn’t monetize it. While it initially got hit with Covid, once advertisers started paying again, we started earning on it.
Expenses to run the sites
At one point, we earned $200 a day. This was my full time life. Writing posts. We also paid content agencies for blog posts which I used a lot of time editing.
We also had expenses. Some of them were:
- Content – We paid writers to write articles.
- Developers for tech stuff
- Monthly subscriptions: Ahrefs, some courses
- Assessments, site evaluations: This was thousands of dollars some years.
- Hosting fees
- Images – Pay monthly for subscriptions to access copyright-free images.
Mistake #1: Wish I scaled with systems
Looking back, I wish we scaled the site better and produced systems and more content. It was just me handling the sites, and I got very caught up in tasks that took a lot of time. For example, it could take me a week to write one blog post.
I was too busy working in the business (on all the websites) instead of on the business.
Mistake #2: Wish we bought smarter
My husband and I made so many mistakes. One of our biggest was purchasing websites that had no way to earn revenue. We bought them from a credible agency but they weren’t good purchases. At the time, we were brand new to websites and ecommerce. We spent a lot of money on them. It was bad.
Through the years, we also bought smaller ones $5,000K – $25,000K.
Google’s Helpful Content Update
The Google Helpful Content Update (HCU) in September 2023 crushed the primary moneymaking site as well as the first two niche sites. Additional Google updates also negatively affected the number of views (and consequently the lower ad revenue) as well.
As of today, it is hovering around $23 a day. Nothing like the $200 of course, but it more than I’m making with anything else.
This is an example of a non-revenue-generating website
I am writing on here (socialmum) in the hopes to get lots of sessions so I can qualify to put ads on it someday. Thanks for reading and following along!
It’s hard to know if it will ever happen as everyone consumes content now on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and all the others.
I think I need 50,000 sessions a month to qualify to put ads on here. Right now, I have a few hundred! Again, thank you for being one of them!
Who reads blogs nowadays? (I do but that’s because I don’t like social media!)
This is the perfect example of me using time on a site that isn’t earning vs spending time on the sites that are earning. Thank goodness, all the other non-earning sites are gone. So I am down to these five.
I will write about my other (sad, pathetic) income streams tomorrow. In the meantime, check out day 30 to learn about my friend’s four income streams.