The true independence in life is achieved when you are earning money on auto-pilot. Money is not everything, but it’s quintessential to get on with your day-to-day life activity. Six years back, when I started blogging, I never knew that blogging can be one such profession that can give financial independence. On an average I earn about $7000/month from my blogs and this was the first time in last 6 years, from 1st December 2014 to 28th December 2014 ( almost one month) that I was away from blogging and any online work.
I was busy with my wedding and post-wedding events, and I comprehended that this is a good time to evaluate if an idle blog can make money for me.
Most of the profession/business I know of, requires your presence in one form or another. In most of the jobs, you can take leave for a limited number of days but after that it’s always an unpaid leave. Full-time blogging is same as a business and one month of blogging vacation gave me enough data to evaluate blogging in the terms of making money on auto-pilot.
Do consider the fact that this blog (ShoutMeLoud) is a six years old blog and with a community of more than half a million users. In this article, I will share about how much money I earned in the month of December 2014 without any work and how it affected the blog traffic. I will also share my observations and learning in the appropriate section below.
Traffic effect on the blog after one month of inactivity:
I stopped working on ShoutMeLoud from 30th November 2014, and I was getting decent traffic back then due to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. What I was really interested to see, how traffic will go down after the Cyber-Monday as there will be typically no action ( including no comment moderation) on the blog.
Here is the breakage on the Weekly Traffic:
Week 1: 138,478 views
Week 2: 133,035 views
Week 3: 129,781 views
Week 4: 123,322 views
As you can notice, traffic decreased over the time but it was not as high as I expected. On 29th December, I had published this post and traffic again went back to normal. The major reason for the change in traffic was due to the loss in social media and returning visitors traffic.
Overall one thing that is clear now that traffic drop will not be so high for an inactive blog with evergreen content.
Now, let’s look at the income report for December 2014.
Blog income report after one month of inactivity:
Unlike my other income report, here I’m reporting how much total sales, ad revenue I generated into my account in the month of December. The final figure may change, and I will get an exact report in the month of March 2015 (When I will be paid for all affiliate sales).
The majority of ShoutMeLoud revenue comes from Affiliate Sales , Direct advertisement and a chunk is from Google AdSense or other ad networks revenue. Here is what my December income looks like:
Affiliate income: 5822.30
ShareAsale: $109
WP Social Pro : $15.72
Dreamhost affiliate Program: $314
Aweber affiliate program: $59.40
TweetAdder Affiliate Program: $197
Elegant Themes Affiliate Program: $19.50
SwiftTheme Affiliate program: $46.01
Direct ads: $1450
Viglink: $20
AdSense: $550
—————————–
Total: $8602.93
In Indian currency that’s about five lack 43 thousand. I ignored few other small affiliate transactions in the above report.
This month I missed out mostly on services such as Blog consultancy, WordPress SEO service and few more (check here) due to my inactivity. If I have to compare this income with other businesses, I’m satisfied with the income my blog generated without being active.
There is no denying the fact that income will drop if I keep the blog inactive for a couple of months. Overall, taking one-month complete break hardly affected the blog revenue (October income report was $7788).
For me, this data is valuable as I feel it would encourage you and others to jump into blogging and take it as a serious career options.
I was busy with my wedding and post-wedding events, and I comprehended that this is a good time to evaluate if an idle blog can make money for me.
Most of the profession/business I know of, requires your presence in one form or another. In most of the jobs, you can take leave for a limited number of days but after that it’s always an unpaid leave. Full-time blogging is same as a business and one month of blogging vacation gave me enough data to evaluate blogging in the terms of making money on auto-pilot.
Do consider the fact that this blog (ShoutMeLoud) is a six years old blog and with a community of more than half a million users. In this article, I will share about how much money I earned in the month of December 2014 without any work and how it affected the blog traffic. I will also share my observations and learning in the appropriate section below.
Traffic effect on the blog after one month of inactivity:
I stopped working on ShoutMeLoud from 30th November 2014, and I was getting decent traffic back then due to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. What I was really interested to see, how traffic will go down after the Cyber-Monday as there will be typically no action ( including no comment moderation) on the blog.
Here is the breakage on the Weekly Traffic:
Week 1: 138,478 views
Week 2: 133,035 views
Week 3: 129,781 views
Week 4: 123,322 views
As you can notice, traffic decreased over the time but it was not as high as I expected. On 29th December, I had published this post and traffic again went back to normal. The major reason for the change in traffic was due to the loss in social media and returning visitors traffic.
Overall one thing that is clear now that traffic drop will not be so high for an inactive blog with evergreen content.
Now, let’s look at the income report for December 2014.
Blog income report after one month of inactivity:
Unlike my other income report, here I’m reporting how much total sales, ad revenue I generated into my account in the month of December. The final figure may change, and I will get an exact report in the month of March 2015 (When I will be paid for all affiliate sales).
The majority of ShoutMeLoud revenue comes from Affiliate Sales , Direct advertisement and a chunk is from Google AdSense or other ad networks revenue. Here is what my December income looks like:
Affiliate income: 5822.30
ShareAsale: $109
WP Social Pro : $15.72
Dreamhost affiliate Program: $314
Aweber affiliate program: $59.40
TweetAdder Affiliate Program: $197
Elegant Themes Affiliate Program: $19.50
SwiftTheme Affiliate program: $46.01
Direct ads: $1450
Viglink: $20
AdSense: $550
—————————–
Total: $8602.93
In Indian currency that’s about five lack 43 thousand. I ignored few other small affiliate transactions in the above report.
This month I missed out mostly on services such as Blog consultancy, WordPress SEO service and few more (check here) due to my inactivity. If I have to compare this income with other businesses, I’m satisfied with the income my blog generated without being active.
There is no denying the fact that income will drop if I keep the blog inactive for a couple of months. Overall, taking one-month complete break hardly affected the blog revenue (October income report was $7788).
For me, this data is valuable as I feel it would encourage you and others to jump into blogging and take it as a serious career options.
