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?

Related articles

• In This Post We’re Going To Be Checking Out The Auto Traffic Buddy Program (ronmedlin.com)
• Can The The Auto Traffic Buddy Program Increase Your Blog Traffic? (blogpronews.wordpress.com)
• AdSense Profits Interview: SimonBlog.com (dailyblogtips.com)
• Marketing know how: Blogging – why it matters to your company and how to do it (premierlinedirect.co.uk)
• 6 Ways To Make Your Blog A Success (socialmaximizer.com)

This is a really short post on Real Ways to Make Free PayPal Money:

There are just a few ways to make money online that pay your Paypal account.  The more of these you do the more free Paypal money you can get every month straight into your account. Here are some of the money making websites that pay out via Paypal:

1) SquishyCash – I get a Paypal payment from them every month for what I make which is usually between $20 and $50. You can see my first SquishyCash Paypal payment which was for $80.00.

2) FusionCash – They pay by Paypal as well and have an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau.

3) Project Payday – You need Paypal for this one as all the payments you get will be through Paypal

Right now, these are the only ways to make money using Paypal that I know about and have tried. They are great because you don’t have to wait for a paper check every month and you can turn around and use the money to buy things on Amazon, Ebay, or other online shops.

Technically Speaking, it’s always good to read more …

MyContextualAds has an easy way for you to add a few bucks to your paypal account with their “Twist & Tweet” contest. You just have to tweet like I did here and here.

To participate in this contest, all you need to do is include the #mycontextualads tag in any tweet on Twitter. You can be creative with your tweet or re-tweet our message, it’s entirely upto you!
Don’t forget to follow @mycontextualads to find out if you’ve won!

You can tweet #mycontextualads as often as you like. Each of these tweets will be eligible and the winners chosen will be the top four highest tweeters! It’s as simple as that!

But please, no bots or automated scripts please! This is purely meant for fun and lets keep it that way!

Rules:
1. This competition is offered by Zytes Technologies Inc. (“Zytes”) and is open to anyone with a Twitter account who is at least 16 years of age. Employees and agents of Zytes and/or its affiliated companies and family members of such employees are not eligible to enter.
2. The competition starts on Dec 22nd 2009 and will continue till February 14th 2010
3. To enter the competition you must send out a tweet from your own Twitter account and include “#mycontextualads” in your message. The rest of the message is up to you, and you are welcome to retweet our competition tweet URL. Or just say whatever you feel like. And you don’t have to be a user of MyContextualAds to enter, so no purchase is required.
4. You can tweet as many times as you like (though entries using automated tweets will be disqualified).
5. Winners will be chosen at the end of the contest. Winners will be announced after the close of the contest from the MyContextualAds Twitter account and official blog.
6. 4 grand prizes will be available, one each for US $25
7. The prize money would be sent to the winner’s PayPal account – no other payment mechanisms would be entertained
8. Entrants’ personal details will be used by Zytes strictly in accordance with Zytes’s privacy policy.
9. Neither Zytes nor its affiliated companies shall have any liability for (i) any technical failures of any kind, including but not limited to malfunctions, interruptions or disconnections in phone lines or network hardware or software; (ii) technical or human error which may occur in the administration of the competition; (iii) any malfunction of or damage to the prizes; or (iv) any restrictions or delays imposed by any customs authorities or any import or other taxes of any kind imposed by any taxation authority in respect of the prizes.

Technically Speaking, it’s Friday, why not?