Most Profitable Blog Programs of 2011

In 2011 I experimented with over 22 online earning programs for bloggers and social media entrepreneurs and spent the last few weeks compiling my top list. My top list is based on earnings for my own blogs (DragonBlogger.com, JustinGermino.com and WandererThoughts.com) as well as from my Social Media accounts.

So here were my top programs in various categories of earning.

2011 Sponsored Blog Review Programs Used

Programs used: SocialSpark, PayPerPost, ReviewMe, BlogsVertise, SponsoredReviews, Teliad, LinkWorth

Winner: SocialSpark

It wasn’t even close, SocialSpark brought in earnings of over $800 by itself in 2011, this program has earned me more than $2000 since I started up doing reviews with them back in September 2008. IZEA SocialSpark cares about the quality of reviews and advertisers genuinely want reviews not a “dofollow” link. All links are nofollow in reviews, full disclaimers are required so no hiding or non-disclosures and you get to review high quality advertiser products or services that match your blog niche. I have reviewed quality software from Carbonite to Microsoft OneNote as a result of SocialSpark.

SocialSpark depends heavily on your blog niche and traffic to get advertiser opportunities, I see around $15 opps on my personal and poetry blogs, with around 2500-7000 unique visits per month. Personal blogs, mommy blogs tend to get more opps due to the type of advertisers. Tech blogs get far fewer offers but they are generally good when they come in. On occasion there may be a blog post that fits with the blogging/Wordpress/social media bloggers, so SocialSpark is worth signing up for no matter what your blog niche.

2011 Social Media Programs Used

Programs used: MyLikes, IZEA SponsoredTweets, Magpie (now SponsoredTweets), BuySellAds

Winner: SponsoredTweets

Consider this, an average sponsored Tweet takes about 40 seconds to write and I get about $2.00 per sponsored tweet. If you do the math this would be a $180 dollars per hour if you had enough sponsored opps to write tweets for an hour straight. Now I don’t have a huge following at 12.5k Twitter followers, and I know entrepreneurs with 100k plus followers who make $70+ per tweet.

SponsoredTweets is a high profile earning program with many celebrities joining and they even launched SponsoredTweets India which is specific for Indian entrepreneurs to help monetize their Twitter networks.

I am picky about what I Tweet and I have turned down far more opps than I accept, this is why I have $311.50 in lost earnings compared to $201 earnings from my Twitter profile. MyLikes lost a lot of traction in 2010 and the quality of opps seems to be very poor, which is a shame since MyLikes was a really good program back in 2010. I still think it could have life again if the system gets a higher amount of quality advertisers. To date I found no great programs to monetize your Facebook / Google+ social networks. MyLikes will allow you to promote on Tumblr, Facebook but the CPC ratio is fair and though some make decent earnings it isn’t a program I highly recommend anymore.

2011 CPC Programs Used

Programs used: Luminate, Google AdSense, Infolinks, LinkWorth

Winner: Google AdSense

AdSense was single handedly the largest money earner for my site in 2011, with most of the earnings coming from this tech blog. Over $2,200 for the year with an average of just under $200 per month in 2011, AdSense alone earned almost as much as my entire 2010 year in earnings. Luminate I started late in the year and wound up averaging $8 – $20 per month but it was still new and unstable with them having an outage almost an entire month. LinkWorth, Infolinks I had put on smaller blogs and had very little earnings due to my blogs not really getting above 5k traffic per month.

2011 Affiliate Programs Used

Programs used: Clickbank, CommissionJunction, Amazon Affiliate, LinkShare iTunes Affiliate, CommentLuv Affiliate, Formidable Pro Affiliate, WP Touch Pro Affiliate, Blog Engage RSS Syndication

Winner: Amazon Affiliate

2011 was the first year I really started making decent earnings with the Amazon Affiliate program. This was in part because I bought the EasyAzon plugin and started using it on all my blogs to help easily insert product images, details pages and affiliate links. You will also see that my personal blog which gets less than 7k monthly traffic accounts for almost 1/2 of my Amazon Affiliate earnings.

I had over $14,941.10 in sales from Amazon Affiliate related purchases in 2011 which yielded nearly $800 in commission. I broke down my channels also but one thing I don’t have is separate tracking ID’s for my social media efforts. From my own estimation I would say about 20-30% of my earnings come from promoting Amazon products like Android apps and such on my social media accounts. This technically would make Amazon Affiliate the best program to earn money on Twitter/Facebook.

Note, I sold many copies of Formidable Pro in 2011, this is my favorite WordPress forms plugin and I love it. I use it on all my blogs and I thought it worth promoting to other WordPress bloggers. I did make several hundred dollars from referral sales of Formidable Pro but not nearly as much as Amazon Affiliate. Though at $11.10 average per sale the commission per sale is much higher than Amazon Affiliate average.

I also made over a hundred dollars as a Blog Engage RSS Affiliate which is a great program that allows bloggers to auto submit their articles to the BlogEngage network. These commissions are recurring every month since it is a subscription so you can get a ton of repeat income.

2011 Ad Selling Programs Used

Programs used: BuySellAds, AdvertiseSpace, Komoona

Winner: BuySellAds

I earned over $300 in banner ad sales through BuySellAds which was far more than any other advertising program. This is largely due to the BuySellAds market which allows advertisers to find your blog to advertise on easier. Komoona had a nice feature where you could give away ads with a coupon code and also allowed you to replace unsold ads with AdSense ads, but ultimately did not have a lot of conversions to banner sales. AdvertiseSpace had only a handful of sold ads on one of my smaller blogs in 2011.

No doubt if you have a blog with a lot of traffic you can make some big bucks with BuySellAds, but this network favors sites that get 100k to 1 million+ impressions per month if you want to make thousands per month from selling ads. You generally also need over 20k Twitter followers if you want to monetize your Twitter account.

2011 Programs that Sell Links

Programs Used: Intellilinks, LinkWorth, Teliad, LinkVehicle, PayPerPost, Backlinks.com

Winner: Intellilinks

I am constantly experimenting with ways to make money online and even though Google frowns and penalizes blogs that sell links on their website, I vested time and effort into testing programs and took the risk. I was appropriately penalized for it as well. When I had a PageRank 4 on DragonBlogger.com in 2011 link offers came in mass, Intellilinks was the easiest and best system to use for earning money from hosting some links in a sidebar or footer section on your blog. I earned hundreds of dollars for doing nothing but hosting a link, but it comes at a price. I received a message in my Google webmaster tools from Google that paid links were detected and that my site would be penalized. As a result I lost my PR4 status and was downgraded to a PR0 in 2011 from testing services which pay bloggers to host links.

But hey, sometimes you are curious and you have to know. In the end, it didn’t hurt my blog traffic when I lost PageRank nor my earnings in any other platform, but it did cause the paid link services to stop offering paid links. If you really are looking for a passive way to earn on your blog, this is something potentially to try and I did make some with LinkWorth, LinkVehicle and Teliad, but Intellilinks pays the best and had the best offers. If you want to reduce risk of penalty then I suggest you host no more than 1-2 links at a time. The higher your PageRank the more you can get for your links too.

Summary

This was a summary of my top online earning programs for 2011 and my blogging related income came to $9155.59 which was higher than my previous 2 years of blogging combined. This was my 3rd year running my blogs and my momentum was going strong. There were 2 months in 2011 where I exceeded $1000 income in a single month.

I did however have a lot of blogging related expenses with hiring on site writers and experimenting with programs, marketing and such. As a result about 40% of my gross income went to expenses, so my net profit was actually about only 55% of the total income shown above.

In 2012 I continue to look to optimize AdSense performance as well as develop stronger affiliate earnings with Amazon.com. I don’t really see any new paid blogging programs popping up, but if any do I will test them out as well. SocialSpark is probably still going to be the leader for sponsored post reviews in 2012.

-Dragon Blogger

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Written by Justin Germino (1524 Articles Published)

Working in the IT Industry for over 10 years and specializing in web based technologies. Dragon Blogger has unique insights and opinions to how the internet and web technology works. An Avid movie fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.

Follow Justin Germino on Twitter @dragonblogger

PrIyAnGsHu 5 pts

Hi Justin, your revenue stats for the year - 2011 looks pretty awesome ! You have really made a decent amount of income from different earning sources ! I have tried SponsoredTweets but haven't made a single penny yet, how much do you get paid for each sponsored tweet (Averagely) ? And, what about SocialSpark ? How much do they averagely pay for each sponsored post you write on DragonBlogger ?

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Dragon Blogger 145 pts moderator

PrIyAnGsHu For my personal blog and poetry blog I get about $15 per post, for DragonBlogger.com they "recommend" my blog for $150 per post, but I set it down to like $75 per post. I get an average of $50 - $100 per post on DragonBlogger.com but only get 1 opp per month or every other month for my DragonBlogger.com site.

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Dean Saliba

I liked this post Justin. SocialSpark is a site that I have found frustrating because since the yupdated to the new version I haven't been able to earn a single penny.

Did you hook up your site to Google Analytics? Do you allow for direct publishing? What are your monthly stats? I made about $850 from SocialSpark alone in 2011 according to my 1099 from IZEA.

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aatif 7 pts

My likes is very very bad now .. 0.003 !! What r they trying to do when they started it was 0.2 , 0.3 after the lacun of cpc in sponsored tweets they are going down and down . Sponsored tweets is best for twitter monetizing .

aatif I agree, their videos' are the only thing that pay decent. You can try eBuzzing.co.uk for videos' though I liked them better. SponsoredTweets doesn't have as many CPC opps but they do still have offers in the $2 per tweet range.

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Jacko 6 pts

I think if you took 5 years and tried to master all these "programs" you would be better off developing your own content that you can resell or license for profit. I am weary of all these fly by night programs they seem to profit off of spam type ads that people don't like. Now they have ad blocking built into browsers, etc.

Jacko You make a good point, that is why most bloggers / affiliate marketers create their own products / programs that they sell. I however don't want to go that route, I primarily want to be a tech blogger and not a direct affiliate marketer. I don't really have any drive to create/sell my own product and support it because blogging is a hobby for my and not likely to ever replace my day job. If I were to create a product to sell, I would have to provide support for it and I don't have the time to commit to something like that. I also don't really have anything to sell that is any better than other bloggers in same arena, if I can get my site to hit 10k per month income and I have a clear business model I used to get there, I may package something up to help others. But my preference would be to build a site based on tech product reviews and get advertiser income from site popularity than from sales of product to readers if possible. The exception is occasionally linking to a tech product or game reviewed in Amazon.com and getting the referral.

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benwaynet 5 pts

thanks for sharing Justin.

My adsense has increase over the last few months and I've always had great luck with linkworth.

benwaynet Linkworth isn't too bad, I don't get many review requests but was getting link offers when my blogs were above a PR3

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JamesW 6 pts

great article, I also use komoona, and I must say it's really easy to use, and it's profitable too, buysellads was one of my biggest earners on one of my blogs, it's really amazing website and marketplace.

These are nice statistics, thanks for sharing.

JamesW The only negative about Komoona is they are Flash ads so don't display on most mobile browsers.

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Michael Aulia @CravingTech.com 6 pts

Great write-ups, Justin! I haven't got much offers from SocialSpark lately (there were some but the payment was low). I used to get private offers from them a couple of years ago. Hope they can boost their advertisers rating and campaigns

AdSense + Amazon are the best combo on my techie blog. Tried BuySellAds for a while but banners were always empty. Might try again when traffic is higher

Michael Aulia @CravingTech.com Yeah, I had some months where all my BSA slots were full and others not so much. I am considering whether CPM ads may convert better where advertisers buy # of impressions instead of slot for a month, can have .75 charge per thousand impressions instead. It works for larger slots but not the 125x125 ones. SocialSpark has some great months, but others are dark for my tech blog. Fortunately I run 3 blogs so my personal blog and even poetry blog sometimes get SocialSpark opps.