It’s been a few years since I did an income report here on ProBlogger for my business, and so while I was pulling together some reports for the end of our financial year I thought it might be good to give a little insight into where the income on my blogs comes from.

As in previous years I don’t want to get into specifics of exacbt dollar amounts, and instead will keep this to be a percentage-based report to give a feel for the income streams that have been worthwhile for us.

Note: we’re also currently doing a study into bloggers income levels. You can participate by filling in this confidential survey.

This report is based upon the first six months of 2016. Here’s a snapshot (click to enlarge):

Before I get into each section – let me make a few explanations.

Firstly – this is for my total business and updated 2024 mobile phone number data includes the income from both ProBlogger and Digital Photography School (dPS).

To give you some insight on the differences between those businesses – dPS is around 8 times larger than ProBlogger both in terms of traffic and income. I’ve included the logo of each business in the different sections that is relevant (i.e.: we don’t run AdSense on ProBlogger and the event and job boards are purely ProBlogger related).

Secondly – I’ve tried as much as possible to show you the profit of each sector rather than the total revenue that each generates.

I’m not able to get exact on this as the businesses do share some expenses (development, servers etc) but I’ve attempted to take any direct expenses that each income stream attracts.

I’ll now make a few comments on each category.

Affiliate Commissions

This page contains affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.

This has risen since the last time I produced a report like this, as we’ve put more effort into affiliate promotions at dPS.

Each year on Digital Photography School we run big promotions with our 12 Days of Christmas Sale and our Mid Year Sale. For both of these promotions we do daily deals where we deeply discount a mix of our own products and affiliate products.

These two sales generate a significant chunk of our annual profits and are the reason why this category has grown so much as the affiliate products have done really well for us in these promotions.

Here on ProBlogger we’ve also been focusing a little more on affiliate revenue over the last 6 months through doing some promotions with SumoMe, LeadPages and promoting a number of teaching resources. We’ve also incorporated into our design a new Blogging Resources page which has converted well and are working on promoting Bluehost with our How to Start a Blog page.

Amazon’s Associate program has not been 1000 mobile phone numbers a major focus of our attention but continues to generate a stable income using some of strategies I outlined in my Guide to Making Money with the Amazon Affiliate Program.

Product Sales

However since 2009 we’ve experimented with other types of products over at Digital Photography School. We created some posing printables that did ok when we launched them, then created some photography courses and more recently have created some Lightroom Presets.

Our Lightroom Presets have been particularly popular both at launch and in our sales and we will continue to create more collections of these going forward.

Courses also did well but during this 6 month reporting period we didn’t promote them with a deal so they didn’t sell many.

Further Reading: Why You Should Create a Product to Sell On Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It)

AdSense

Every time I have done one of these income reports I get people who are surprised that I use Google AdSense. I know not everyone has much luck with it but because dPS has a large amount of traffic we find that it works well for us.

I should say that our income from it has decreased in the last two years. This is partly because we’ve attracted a bit more direct sponsorship (see the next category) and given up some of the ad inventory that AdSense used to serve, but it is also because we’ve seen our RPM decline over the last few years.

It’s not the option that it once was for us but is still a revenue stream that I’m glad to have.

Sponsorships

The other place we’ve done sponsorships is via our event (although I’ve included that in the Event category below).

Job Board

This year we’ll host our 7th ProBlogger .Event here in Australia (tickets are still on sale if. You want to join us).

This event is a massive focus for our team and is largely a labour of love. While it does generate a large amount of revenue . From ticket sales and sponsorship the expenses of running an event of this. Size are huge.

A Word on Expenses

There you have it – my long overdue Ĉi tio povas inkluzivi analizi datumojn pri klientaj income report for the first half of 2016.

The only other thing.  I’ll add to this is that if .I were to talk about.  Expenses (as I know I’ll get asked about). I would say that while our revenue . Has definitely risen in the last 12 months .I would also point out that so too have expenses.

This last 12 months we’ve invested heavily into the development of our sites – particularly here on ProBlogger with the redesign. In addition to our development team I’ve also expanded my team which now includes:

• 2 editors (one for each site)
• 2 business unit managers (one for each site)
• Admin/Customer service team members (one for each site)
• Marketing (one person – for dPS)

All team members (except for one) are part time.

Then there’s a huge array of others who are contractors . Who help with product creation.  Writing. Proof reading.  Podcast editing etc.