It’s the turn of the year and Riches Corner is off to a good start.  When I started Riches Corner in September, I did not begin doing status reports.  Mainly this was because there was not much to report at the time.  The blog was in a state of flux with design, direction and income.

However, after these several months of running Riches Corner, I have information to share.

First a bit of history:

My first month in September, I was able to earn $20 for a review post from Blogsvertise.  However, this was not steady income from the blog as I did not get any more offers in that amount from Blogsvertise for review posts.  Though I still receive different offers to post banner ads and links, these are pay per click offers, and for the most part, I’ve chosen not to accept them because I did not want to bombard you with irrelevant ads for a few cents.

My first real steady income from my blogging endeavors came in December from Mylikes and my Donanza Job Board.

Mylikes is much more consistent in their payments as they pay out every friday at a $2.00 threshold.  I haven’t missed a Friday payment since I started with them.

Donanza has a $50 payout threshold they pay out at the end of the month after you reach their payout threshold.  In December, I had build up earnings over the previous 4 months to $62.  However, after Donanza calculates their portion of the commission, I didn’t quite make the payout threshold.

Back to the Present:  This January

This January, Mylikes and Donanza are currently my consistent earners.

Mylikes earned $13.73 for the month of January.  This may not sound like much, but in my experience Mylikes had earned as much as $40 during December.  I’m taking into account the post holiday slow down for the decrease in earnings, but overall I’m very happy with their program.  I enjoy getting the payola deposit every Friday and look forward to an increase as I gain twitter followers.

My biggest surprise came from my Donanza Job Board.

In January, I earned $63 from the Donanza Job Board.  This was more than the total from the previous 4 months combined.  I had over 600 visits to the job board during the month and an increase in people applying for freelance job opportunities.  I’m glad to see greater use from the job board.

I’ve also done some experimenting in the way of running some contextual, pay per click ads from Chitika.  I’m still debating the value of running these pay per click ads, as I don’t want to detract from the content on the blog.  However, Chitika did earn me a modest $0.01 for the month with a total of $0.26 cents pending balance.

I anticipate that this amount will increase over time as my search engine traffic increases.

Income Summary:

Mylikes:  $13.73

Donanza:  $63.00

Chitika:  $0.01

Traffic report

This month I did start to see an uptick in traffic, with 2,551 visits and 3,790 page views.  I’ve also started to see more visits arriving from search engines.

When I first started Riches Corner, almost all my traffic came from referring sites and direct traffic.  I still get the majority of my traffic from these sources.  However, during the last month, I’ve started to see some steady traffic arriving from search results.

The increase in search engine traffic is certainly heartening.  It also demonstrates the importance of continuing to add content to the blog.  With every addition of content I see more hits for long tail key phrases that I didn’t even expect.

Social Media

I’ve still been using the methods that I pointed out in my previous post about gaining twitter followers to increase my twitter presence.  At the beginning of the month I started with 15,354 followers.  Currently, I have 19,113 followers.

Here’s a graph of my twitter traffic from Twitter Counter for the month of January:

I can’t overemphasis the importance of social media to the blog.  Twitter brings in a steady flow of visitors daily.  In addition to twitter, I receive visitors from Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and other social bookmarking sites.

This month, I also received an increase in referral traffic when my post on promoting my blog articles was linked over at Smart Passive Income.  I received over 180 views to that article alone.  This really shows the value of making connections.

Upcoming Thoughts

I’ve been toying with the idea of starting up a premium section of the blog.  Recently, I found a service called Mediapass.  Mediapass offers a service that allows bloggers to essentially set up a membership paywall over virtually any content.

Here’s an example:

If any of you are looking to add a premium section to your site, you may want to take a look at MediaPass.

It is a free service that can handle all the technical aspects of setting up a membership section.  They earn their profits on taking a commission off the portion of the membership fees.

Philosophically, this is still up for debate for me.  I don’t want to make my readers pay to read blog posts while that might work for other types of blogs.  For example, I can envision a niche blog with multiple tutorials setting this system up and charging $1-2 for their tutorials, but I’d rather give my information out for free.

I want to keep a steady free flow of information on Riches Corner.  I enjoy supplying you, the reader with valuable free content.

However, with those thoughts in mind, I thought that a premium portion of the site with special content may interest the readers.  This may be a section where I place a repository of downloadable e-books, perhaps an interaction section with a forum or chat room, downloadable content such as  plugins or apps, etc….

What do you think?  What features would you like to see added to Riches Corner?  Is there content that you like to see that you feel would warrant a premium section?  How might you implement a premium content section on your blog?

I look forward to seeing your input on this subject, as I’ve seen many comments in the past discussing the merits of earning extra income through premium content.

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About Richard  (243 Posts)

Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.