Blogging for a second income - does anyone else here do this?

Happylittlecomper

I get sent products to review rather than money most of the time with my blog, but some months the products can total over £200. It took me over a year until it started becoming semi-successful and even now, sometimes it has 'low reader periods' but I love doing it because I love writing. Anyone considering this option needs to know its a big commitment.

EndlessStruggle

I've decided to put Adsense back on my blog, I get 20,000 views a month so hopefully fingers crossed I'll make a few pounds.

MyWealthDesire

I just started blogging, yet small amount of euro per week. Hoping someday this can generate income to replace my day job. Please give me any tips on how to earn more in adsense. Thank you.

Emuchops

Just a quick one-I have found that promoting blog site via Twitter has increased my views a great deal. Still not making much from Adsense, but it's heartening to see the views going up.

AshW

I started a blog at the end of last year and now have a price comparison site (for a niche product: Lego) that goes with it. Initially I hadn't really thought in terms of making any income from it, maybe enough to cover the hosting costs, but it's been doing pretty well.

Combined they average around 150 visitors a day. I make next to nothing from adsense (about £10 a month) but a bit from Amazon referals (about £100 a month US/UK combined). It's taken a lot of work to get to that point though. For several months it was get home, put kid to bed, eat dinner, work on the site until midnight. Now it's a little less because it's fine tuning and writing blog updates.

I have a few ideas for updates and additions, so it will be nose back to the grindstone soon though.

I'm terrible at promoting the site though. I think it could do really well with a bit more traffic but I don't really know how to go about it and am not really good at the SEO side of things (and don't do well on Google, I have no idea how anyone finds me!). Any tips for this are welcome!

One thing to keep in mind, and I haven't seen mentioned in the pages of this thread I've read, is that if this is a second income, or your main source of income and you're earning over the tax free threshold, you're going to need to start declaring these earnings.

To cut a long story short..... that's the main reason I was posting. Does anyone know of any resources or have any information about declaring this stuff and what is deductable. If you're making a few pounds a month HMRC aren't going to care but at some point they will. So if you are planning to build a small blogging empire you need to be keep track of this stuff from the start.

I haven't been, so I'm playing catch up now. I would have thought there were resources for this out there as a lot of people are doing it, but I haven't found any.

gildius

I'm a book blogger and my blog has been going since February of this year. I've recently moved to being self-hosted and my readership totally dropped! Now I'm part of the Penguin book bloggers group, which has really helped and they send me free books to review. I've also been planning out my posts for the next few months, so I'm being organised about it.

I'd love to really build up my readership though (I promote my posts on Twitter and Google+, and I'm gradually building up networks there), and I'd love to earn some money through it!

At what point would it be wise to start considering AdSense? Are there a minimum number of views per day that would be a good idea to have before you do it? (I'm sure I'm WELL below it anyway).

Also, I'd like to write guest posts for other blogs - does anybody know of any sites that list blogs accepting guests posts?

Thanks!

AshW

Adsense is based almost entirely on volume. I don't know what the average clickthrough rate is, but mine is like 50 clicks from 20,000 page views. I think it works best for high traffic sites. For me (a couple of hundred visitors today) it makes next to nothing and I'm thinking of dropping it as I'm sure I could put the space to better use!

If you don't all ready you might be better off with targeted Amazon affiliate stuff so people who read a review can then go to Amazon to buy a book.

Feel free to PM me your URL and I'll check it out anyway! I like books.

spiritus

I can only echo what Ash has said.

Most people will only make pennies per day with Adsense.

There are two main ways to make serious money with Adsense.

1/ Your website needs a LOT of visitors each day. You will still likely get only pennies per click but if you get thousands of visitors then those pennies add up (24 hrs a day, 7 days a week....)

2/ Write about topics which Adsense pays a higher rate per click.

This may seem contrary to what many people do i.e. write about something you're interested in and THEN monetize the site.

To make a living our of it you need to "reverse engineer" the whole process.

Identify the topics or keyword phrases that Adsense pays high rates on an obvious example would be "credit cards", "mortages" etc and then write your blog around that. That way even if you don't get thousands of visitors to your site you should still be able to make over £ 1 a click.

The other part of that strategy is to then find a niche within the high paying topic that is not saturated with competition.

EndlessStruggle

I put adsense back on and seem to be making about 30p a day average. I'm sure it will increase, my plan is to finish the blog and then work on making it more visible etc. I get an average of around 1000 visits a day.

ThinkingOfLinking

I have about 10,000 views a month but have not made a single penny from Ad Sense so have removed it.

I am also yet to make any money from Amazon Affiliates despite having had it for over a year.