RenaisNet

JPratt made $16,000 online in 2007 and tagged me to disclose my own online earnings. I wouldn't normally be writing about this, as I'm not primarily in the «make money online» blogging business. But, since a few people are apparently curious, I will write about it. Also, the per click value paid by the CPC networks for finance, mortgage and real estate related keywords dropped compared to 2006.

My 2007 gross was $7,938.05. Google Adsense accounted for $3,264 of this. Text-link-ads.com accounted for $4,406.49. Yahoo Publisher Network and BlogAds accounted for the rest. These numbers should have been higher. I had very low growth from 2006 as I let some sites lapse due to other obligations and dealt with some problems on others. (One entire site got banned from Google because the information I was publishing appeared to be keyword spam. It consisted of bank and government owned home listings and it duplicated city names hundreds of times a week. It was all legitimate information, but the duplication got picked up as spam. It didn't help that I was selling text link ads on that site, I'm sure.)

My expenses were probably higher than average as I added unlimited wireless internet from AT&T midway through the year ($50/month roughly) and the cost of a DSL connection in this backwoods area is $65/month.

I also purposely pay for multiple web hosts for a couple of reasons:

• Multiple IP addresses may marginally improve search engine results
• Redundancy. I've been burned three times now by very good web hosts suddenly turning to crap. I'm now using the highly recommended A Small Orange for one site, Daily Razor for another site and GoDaddy for the balance.

Finally, I've plowed a lot of money into long term domain registration during December. That should mean lower expense for a few years and it should also increase the earnings as longer term registrations reportedly get a higher authority from at least one big search engine that starts with G.

My advertising expense on the other hand is fairly low. I ran a couple of BlogAds - basically spending the money I made selling BlogAds - and that's it. I have year old unused credits for AdWords and Microsoft's advertising network. Guess I ought to use those...