Contrary to most popular belief, you don’t need boat loads of traffic to your site to continually make money on your blog. This site is living proof of that. I won’t go into details on how badly the traffic here is, but let’s just say, even the statistical tracking tools I take with a grain of salt says one thing: Traffic here SUCKS.

It seems like it’s been forever and a day since I have written anything on this blog. The funny thing is that while my statistics on this blog are like bottom cratered, I still continue to receive real money into my PayPal account monthly. In fact I think back to when I started blogging, and had no clue what I was doing or why I was doing it, this blog is making more now then it did back in the day.

Even back in the day when I was manually putting up ~+400 posts in a month (did I really do that?!?), I still wasn’t making much on this blog. Hell, not making much is a nice way of saying – I wasn’t making any money! When I think back, the traffic on here was not that great back then either, another nice way of saying – it was crap on a stick – but I certainly had more traffic on here vs my recent analysis of traffic.

What works on small blogs? It appears either direct ad sales (sweet plug for where I am working at now :) ) by being a premium publisher or using contextual text link advertising is the best bet. Sadly, I don’t qualify to eat our own dog food. While text links seem to be annoying, they do pay off. I’m living proof of that (as well as this blog). Many of you are skeptical, but I always say a picture is worth a thousand words. Since I don’t have the time to type out a dissertation or even a decent blog post in excess of 500 words, here are some pics that prove I’m not lying.

Now that is just for one month, so that doesn’t tell you the whole story. I decided to grab like a screenshot from December ’11 to now, and that tells you a bit more.

You are probably going, well that isn’t that much money totaled up – $192.36 – but let’s break that down. Traffic here has been bottomed out, nil, pretty much bots I figure – with a smattering of live viewers, which are most likely comment spammers. Also coupled with the fact that off the stats I do have, that money came in at no real investment cost to me personally. I haven’t done any blogging here, my other related sites scrape most of their content, auto piloted draws of traffic, and I basically use that money to buy music off of iTunes, rent movies on my Apple TV, and pay for the hosting and domain fee.

Could I push and make more money blogging? Sure, if I really wanted to write all the time and wanted to make my words a vehicle for monetary compensation. For now I figured I’d share with others out there with small blogs, that are sitting around gathering internet dust, that you can still at least make iTunes money with them. Even if you rarely post anymore or even draw much traffic. Making money online isn’t rocket science and it’s basically like anything else, the more you put in, the more you’ll get back out.

I haven’t put in much time to getting my blogs to make a ton, but they basically pay for themselves on auto pilot. That in itself is a nice thing, and coupled with the facts I work in Silicon Valley at a cool startup – can life get any better?

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