How I earned $1,000+ in blog revenue last month

May was a record-breaking month for How To Make My Blog. I had the most-visited day ever, the best month in terms of unique visitors and also the highest revenue ever.

25126 unique visitors total and I sold 20 copies of the Thesis WordPres theme and 17 copies of my Twitter Marketing E-book during May.

WordPress Thesis Theme happenings

• Thesis Theme – 20 sales – $726.66 revenue

Thesis released an upgrade in late April. That always attracts attention. Also Thesis really stepped up their promotion this month. Several videos were published on their site and that makes it easier to promote it via the Thesis affiliate program.

I also published a video review of Thesis 1.5 on the last day of April. That got a bit of attention while my old Thesis design tips articles still get decent amount of traffic.

In total 816 people have clicked on my Thesis link during May. Sales were pretty much evenly distributed over the month. If you use Thesis, then selling it via the affiliate program is the most organic way you can monetize your blog.

See more on how I monetize my blog with Thesis affiliate program.

Twitter Marketing E-Book sales

• Twitter Marketing E-book – 17 sales – $339.15 revenue

I released my first ever premium product, an e-book about marketing on Twitter, on May 19th. Until the end of May I sold 17 copies of the e-book and I received a lot of great feedback on it.

As I suspected, creating products is a great way of monetizing your site. I only charged $19.95, but imagine if I created a couple of videos along with the book and charged $39.95 for a premium version or created a membership site, as some probloggers suggested, and charged $29,95 per month for a minimum of 3 months. Then you can understand why all these membership sites are popping up all over the bloggersphere.

58 bloggers signed up for my book’s affiliate program, where I pay 50% of all sales, but unfortunately none had much success yet.

Monetize by carefully choosing products to sell

One important lesson is that you do not have to sell every product there is. I see many bloggers who post generic promotions for different membership sites regularly.

You might be able to “scam” couple of readers with the fake personal recommendation and you might get some money out of it, but it will not work in the long run. Your readers are not stupid and you will lose their trust.

I hope this article inspires you to try to go a different way than just having Adsense, banner ads, or a generic promotion on your blog. Find couple of items you use and you love and concentrate on them. Be an evangelist of a product you love to use or consider creating something yourself. It is a great learning experience and your readers will appreciate it.

Conclusion

Very satisfying month. I think it will be hard to repeat such a high number of sales via Thesis affiliate program in next couple of months. A new upgrade and a lot of buzz about the theme is needed for so many sales from a small blog like mine.

I hope to continue selling Twitter Marketing E-Book though. I have already sold 3 new copies of the book in the first 3 days of June so it looks promising. Make sure to check it out if you want to learn about how to use Twitter to promote your blog.

Image by Sburke2478.