Has anyone ever asked you that question? I’m not talking about getting rich online, or get rich quick schemes, I’m talking about simply explaining how you are able to earn some extra income online.

I’ve been thinking about this topic over the holidays for a couple of reasons. One was a twitter comment the other day suggestion that my site was about some get rich quick schemes online.

If I haven’t been clear about that, this blog is not about getting rich quick. It takes time and effort to make money from a blog.

In my case, I would describe blogging as a profitable hobby, since I work full time and run this blog on the side. Nonetheless, I have found some ways to make this blog support itself and generate spending cash for myself.

Although, I’m not making tons of money, I am happy with the progress I’ve made in the few short months.

A Christmas Dinner Conversation

What really prompted this post is a conversation I had with a friend over the holidays.

Earlier this week, I was blogging on location with my family, visiting relatives and friends for the holidays.

So, it was that one evening, we ended up having dinner with a few friends. After dinner, I was chatting with one of our friends about our respective hobbies.

My son was having a blast running around with the other kids, and my wife was engrossed in conversation with her other friends around the dinner table. Desserts were being passed around and the conversation was lively.

At one point, my conversation turned technology: our respective gadgets, video games, televisions, and then to blogging.

Though my friend was more tech savvy than I, he found it interesting that I was running a blog. Questions turned towards how a blog can generate money.

So I told him a few of the methods that I had discovered.

This is a summary of our conversation:

Starting a Blog

One of the first things he asked was what platform I used to run my blog. And specifically, he asked if I used wordpress.

I find that almost everyone who has even considered running a website has heard of wordpress. It has really become a pillar for the blogging community.

I myself do run wordpress. There are big advantages to using a popular platform. There’s a lot of support for the platform in the form of upgrades, bug fixes, and plugins. All of which help in running a blog smoothly.

Hosting

Of course, the questions about wordpress naturally turned to how I host my blog. He mentioned that he had tried out blogspot a while back, and asked if I used that platform.

While, I started out on blogspot, I found that there are many more advantages to self hosting.

The two advantages that outweigh all others are that you have complete control over your website and that you can have your own domain.

These two features are invaluable and well worth the small expense of self hosting.

You can read more about some web hosting options here.

How do I make money?

Now came the big question. How do I make money with a blog?

Affiliate programs

I started by explaining that there are many services and products that have partnership type programs. These programs will pay out a portion of revenues that you generate for them when you promote their services.

Google adsense

Of course, he had heard about adsense and asked me about whether I use this program.

Actually, I don’t use adsense on Riches Corner. My feeling on this is that adsense has the affect of taking visitors away from my blog for a few cents. I would rather people stay and read my content.

For the sake of diversity, I do use Chitika. My reasoning being that Chitika displays far fewer ads than adsense, since it only shows up to targeted visitors that arrive at my blog from a search engine.

My feeling is that this diversifies my income stream, while being minimalistic at the same time. Also, Chitika also provides tiered revenue from my sub-affiliates, which allows another passive income stream.

At this point, since I’ve set up Chitika to default to a collapsed mode, my revenue is very minimal.

My Job Board

One of my favorite incomes streams is my job board. My job board provides a valuable resource for my blob readers by providing a source of work at home projects.

At the same time, it serves as a consistent source of passive income for Riches Corner.

I am very happy with the features provided by Donanza for my job board. It aggregates a large backfill of projects from reliable sources, so the board is always populated. The search engine allows users to filter and search for jobs that meet their own criteria.

I can set my own prices for users to post projects on my board. In addition, I have full control over offering promotional deals.

Finally, this was one of the few services that pays out when someone posts a job, as well as paying me a small referral fee when users apply for jobs through my board.

The first month of this blogs existence, I did not see much income from the job board. However, this resource does bring in traffic to the blog. In November, I saw a jump in my revenue, and I can see a consistent rise in people using the job board.

This is my revenue so far in the couple of months of running the job board:

As you can see, this is revenue entirely from clickthroughs as I have not received any project postings as yet. This is to be expected as this is a new blog. As I get more traffic and more people applying, I anticipate the revenue to increase.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the progress of my job board, as it’s only been implemented on this blog for just over 2 months.

This is where I signed up to get my Donanza Job Board.

Twitter

My third source of income, I will put in the broad category of twitter and social networking in general.

Twitter is an invaluable resource for me, as I tweet out my new and old posts, bringing visitors to my blog.

In addition, I can route my job board’s rss feed to my twitter stream, broadcasting all the work at home project opportunities to my followers. I would say at least half the clickthroughs for my project opportunities come from twitter.

Also, a little used resource for amazon associates, I can route amazon rss feeds tagged with my associates id to my twitter stream. This has vastly increased the amount of clickthroughs that I get on my amazon associates account.

Now, more directly, I’ve also joined some twitter advertising programs such as Sponsored Tweets and Mylikes. Both programs pay out whenever someone clicks on an ad that you tweet out.

At this point, Mylikes is my most consistent source of income. Mylikes pays out directly to my paypal account every Friday. At this point, I’ve been using Mylikes for exactly 1 month. I’m looking to earn about $35 in this first month. Averaging just under $10 per week.

While it’s not a lot of money, it’s consistent. So far, I’m very happy with my results from Mylikes as it’s only been one month and I’ve made money with their program.

Am I going to get rich?

As you can see, these aren’t mind numbing numbers.

The first month of blogging, I didn’t make any money. However, I came into it expecting that it would be slow in the beginning.

The second month, I saw a few dollars trickle in and I began to see some search engine traffic.

However, by my third month, I’m seeing more of an upturn in traffic. This was due to more consistent traffic to my blog and my job board. Also this was the month I joined Mylikes, which helped a lot in terms of consistency. In this month, I’ve recouped my initial expense that I paid for a year of hosting and I’ve made some extra cash.

Based on the pattern, I anticipate that my passive income streams will increase in revenue over the coming months.

In addition, I have some product ideas in the works, and hope to see good results from them in the coming months.

Is that all? Then why Blog for income?

Some of you may ask, why blog for $50-100 a month? Well, the answer lies in the process.

As I mentioned, I’m basically doing this on hobby time. I spend a little time after work and on the weekends. In layman’s terms, I’m basically doing this on a 4 hour work week. In addition, so far, I’m looking at consistent upturns in profit each month.

Look at other businesses. Statistically, 90% of businesses fail in the first year. Yet, look at the outlay of cash and the monthly expenses it takes to run a traditional business. If I decided to go out and open up a shop and pop in for a few hours a week, I would be bleeding thousands of dollars.

However, I’m can enjoy the time I spend on this blog and my expenses at this point is going to be $42 a year for web hosting. I can essentially cover a year’s worth of expenses in a single month.

Finally, the answer is even more simple than simply earning money. I enjoy the process of blogging.

I’m learning a new skill and gaining knowledge. At the same time, I’m offering a resource that can help out others.

If you follow along with Riches Corner, you’ll notice that the majority of the programs that I discuss are free to join.

I could earn more, pushing more paid products, but I enjoy providing value to the community much more.

So am I going to get Rich Online?

Maybe some day. But right now, I can say that I’m profitable. I’m earning income from this Riches Corner.

Along they way, I can pass on what I’ve learned, help my readers create a profitable blog, and help some find some good work at home freelance projects along the way.