Monthly Blog Report

Hello Jake and Dannie readers. It’s about time for me (Jake) to discuss what’s been going on here on the blog over the last couple months. Since we had a slowdown on blog activity over the last couple of months I’ve once again opted for a double dose of blog report rather than publish two shorter posts. Of course a slowdown doesn’t mean there wasn’t any excitement.

If you haven’t read one of my blog reports before, we have been executing an experiment in blog monetization. Our goal is to one day create a blog that will be useful enough on it’s own that it will become a secondary source of income and not just a tool for enticing clients (though hopefully it will still be enticing). In these monthly - and sometimes semimonthly - posts I catch you up on how much money our blog has made through ads or other income sources, what hurdles we are facing (making time for writing blog posts), and how we are overcoming them (or not). And since we donate 10% of our blog’s income to Operation Smile, we tell you how much they made as well. Well, here’s how we did over the last couple of months… Read More

Hi, this is Jake with our monthly report on our blog monetization experiment. Ok, so this month it’s not quite so monthly. This post is a twofer since I didn’t publish one for September. But setting that aside I’ve got some interesting stuff here.

Just to get us all on the same page, though we make our livings taking photographs, Dannie and I thought it would be fun to see if we could make a little side income from our blog by putting up a few advertisements and writing posts that we think our customers and followers might be interested in. Before you start getting bitter about that ad over in the sidebar, just remember that like the rest of our income, one tenth of the money we make from the ads goes to Operation Smile, helping provide free surgeries to kids born with cleft lips and pallets.

Now let’s get down to the Nitty Gritty… Read More

Hello again. This is Jake with the monthly financial report for August, 2014. This is the second month of our experimental attempt to make money directly from our website. August was a pretty good month for our photography business and our blog. We booked a lot of clients and we did a lot of exciting photo shoots, and blogging about them was a lot of fun. We even did quite a bit of traveling, including family trips to St. Augustine and Cedar Key.

Monetizing our blog went well too. I know that one generally tries to increase the number of income sources for their blog, but this month we actually reduced ours by getting rid of Shopsense, which was not generating real income (as I said in last months financial report, I suspected that the clicks it got were actually Dannie testing the links). So this month our only source of income was Adsense. We decided to monetize our blog two months ago, and we are hoping that it will one day earn us enough to become a second source of financial support for our household. We also donate 10% of our income from our business and our blog to Operation Smile, so please do come back frequently to see how we’re doing. Here’s how we made our money in August: Read More

Hi there, this is Jake, bringing you our first monthly report of the earnings we generated directly from our blog. You’ll recall I mentioned last month that we had decided to monetize our blog, hopefully generating a little extra income.

To help incentivize people to root for us we are donating 10% of the profits from our blog to Operation Smile, just like we do with our prints and photo sessions.

Our first month of this experiment yielded modest but more or less expected results. Here’s how our blog earned money: Read More