Staska.Net

January was the first month that I resumed my active blogging and moved into online money making activities fulltime. Although my online earnings remained more or less constant at $300/month through second half of 2006, with my blogs lying dormant the traffic was dropping fast and Christmas out of the way, earnings were heading that way too.

I dusted off two of my main blogs and started posting there, averaging 4-6 posts a day. In the beginning things moved rather slowly and during the first two weeks of January I made $110.

Still, I was renewing my research/reporting skills, traffic started picking up, I was getting some links, got some stories featured by the biggies (Engadget, Gizmodo) and everything pointed to a slow ramp up, just like it was last year. My goal for January was to keep my online earnings at the same $300 level.

Then I got my first scoop. I found a new, unannounced gadget by a major vendor. That got me quite a few links and a nice traffic boost. At almost the same time I was approved for Chitika RPU’s (it was in closed beta then) . I almost couldn’t believe it when I checked my Chitika stats on the first day with RPU. I earned almost the same amount that I did with AdSense! Even without increased traffic, one ad unit almost doubled the income my blogs were generating.

Then I got another big scoop and this one made it to Digg front page, got 2000+ diggs, brought in about 40K visitors, earned tons of backlinks and made about $80 in Chitika and AdSense earnings that day.

The second half of January really boosted my spirits in this blogging thing. I kept posting regularly doing 4-6 posts a day. Kept getting various newsy/scoopy posts linked by the other blogs in this business and it’s pretty much what I am doing now.

Q1 2007 Online Earnings Recap

As for the earnings recap, here’s my results for the first quarter of 2007:

The March results are not final and will go down a bit, since they include unaudited Chitika earnings as well as unconfirmed comissions from Linkshare and CJ. My February earnings went down by about $80 after all the audits.

Still, I’m pretty happy with the progress so far and I look forward of what April will bring.

We have Google PageRank export coming up, quite a few new money generating programs opened for small publishers, I’ve got a brand new blog to grow, so one thing I’m sure of - it’s that April will be definitely not boring.