It seems like an aged domain along with good website development is a sure way to the bank for any blog owner. Comparing my other blogs with my gambling and sports blog here, I find out that Jimmakos.com generated revenue is significantly higher than what my greek betting blog or online trading blog makes per month. Even without updating that often the sports blog makes more money than blogs updated almost daily. And as far as picking up a good domain for your blog, Trading Graphs is by far a better name for a trading blog than… Jim Makos! Yet, Google Adsense monetizing that blog falls very short compared to jimmakos.com revenue, despite the encouraging Adsense earnings’ increase as the trading blog matures.
When I started up this blog in 2005, I never thought of monetization and actually making money out of writing my personal experiences in the gambling world. It took me 3 years to discover that blogging can be some sort of additional income, when a couple of advertisers contacted me for private advertising deals that averaged at about $30/month each. Since then I learnt how to post more efficiently and studied a bit about search engine optimization techniques. That led to even more advertising deals which put me off any affiliate programs I had joined reluctantly. Nowadays those deals have come and gone and returned keeping me busy selling off advertising space in the form of text ad links, banner placements and promotional articles. Starting up new blogs brought more revenue as some advertisers were willing to partner with those as well, but of course the prices were far lower than jimmakosdev.wpengine.com deals.
Given the gambling nature of almost every blog I own, I was forbidden to use Google Adsense. Some other gambling bloggers do business with Google, but there is always the risk to be penalized and even have your account closed. I prefer not taking that risk and following Google’s advertising service guidelines. Peculiarly online stock trading or currency trading isn’t considered gambling; therefore TradingGraphs’ blog monetization is done with Google Adsense, but after 150 or so published posts the revenue is close to nothing. Tradinggraphs.com is quite young in relation to Jimmakos.com proving that age has great impact in money terms, while picking up great keywords and building a WordPress (aka Google friendly) blog come second. Maybe when the content builds up to this blog’s extent, the comparison would be more honest.
Last but not least comes my Greek betting blog. I’m co-authoring that blog with some other friends of mine, bringing the total published posts to 500 in less than a year. We saw the quite welcome traffic’s spike in the beginning of that blog but since then the audience stayed pretty much unchanged, ranging between 150 to 250 visits per day. New content didn’t help although I kept receiving emails for 5 years to start posting in Greek! Greek visitors of Jimmakos.com seem to prefer my English-speaking blog! Anyhow, blog monetization is done through affiliation and some private deals but nothing extraordinary. The blog may be only 2 years old but it was almost daily updated, something that never happened with Jimmakos.com! Still, with 2 posts in the last 2 months, jimmakosdev.wpengine.com far outperforms comparing to more than 30 posts in the last 60 days at StoiximaOnline.com (betting-online in Greek). Besides, Greek advertisements are quite cheap, judging by another Greek blog I own about spear fishing.
Finally, I should mention that I have never done any special promotion for any of my websites, except one month of Facebook advertising for the Greek betting blog.
