OurTour.co.uk Blog Income – May 2015

We LOVE passive income. We love each other more, but all the same, the feeling of being paid without having to go sit in the office is extra-ordinary. Over time we’ve built up a few income streams from investments, one of which is this blog. Yup, we’ve invested in this here site, big style. Not so much directly in cash, but in time. I’d estimate 1500 hours have gone into it since we started.

At minimum UK wage, that’s about £10,000.

How motivated were we to write this blog just to earn money from it? Nowhere near enough. Our motivation came from the fact we loved doing it. Wherever we found ourselves, deserts, mountains, rivers, forests, beaches, out came the 3G dongle, an SD card full of the day’s scenes and our trusty, if battered, laptop. Each day we’d take it in turns to get together an update and post it, which in turn forced us to spend far more time that day focussing on what was around us. The 900-odd posts serve as an ongoing reminder of a fabulous part of our lives.

Anyway, back to the subject. This blog’s four years old. After a year or so we decided to try a few ideas for making some money from it, dirty capitalists that we are… I worked out the other day how much income we’ve received from it in the past 12 months. The site was effectively dormant in that time, as we were busy with other good old fashioned work. The number of unique visitors to the site has remained fairly static at around 10,000 folks per month since we came back in September 2013 (source: Hostgator AWStats):

How much did the site pop into the old war chest in that time? Summary below:

• Google Adsense. There’s a square ad in the sidebar to the top right of each page, which should show ads relevant to the reader and the subject on the page. Whenever someone clicks on an ad, we get paid, sometimes a fair bit – 30p to 80p seems typical. Adsense paid out £233.90 in the past 12 months.
• Amazon Associates. These are links to useful Amazon products. They work differently to Adsense. When someone clicks on a link on the site, Amazon register that we sent them the potential customer. They then pay us a small commission if that customer buys anything in that session. The commission is typically 3 to 7% the value of the transaction. Associates paid out £329.65 in the past 12 months.
• We also use the site to advertise our books, for sale on Amazon. Although not strictly site income, these threw in a further £384 in the past 12 months.

Totalling the lot (before taking the tax and hosting costs off) we’ve earned £947 for the Freedom Fund, thanks folks!

Cheers, Jay