Yaro Starak is a 28-year old professional blogger who makes about $7,000 per month directly from his blog Entreprenuers-Journey alone, teaching people how to make money blogging. He also has a subscription training program, called BlogMastermind.

How much does he earn?

With blog revenues of $7,000 per month and estimated 300 monthly subscriptions bringing in an extra $15,000 per month, it is likely that Yaro Starak is making more that $250,000 per year. He is a quarter million dollar blogger.

How does he make money?

There are numerous ways that Yaro monetizes his blog. He has a breakdown of his blog income on his site, but here is a rough summary.

Affiliate Sales

One of his greatest income contributors is affiliate sales. That is promoting and selling other companies products or services for a commission. Yaro seems to be particularly adept at this practice. He has mastered the technique of subtly promoting affiliate programs. Yaro says he earns between $1000 and $3000 dollars per month from affiliate income.

Advertising
In March of 2008, he made more than a thousand dollars directly selling advertising on his sites. $750 was for text link ads and $300 was for banner ads on two of his sites.

Google Adsense
Yaro made about $900 in March of 2008 off of adsense ads. However, these ads were not on his main site, entrepreurs-journey, they were on other sites he owns.

Text-Link Ads
He made about $560 in March from text link ads.

ReviewMe
He made $375 in March by reviewing other sites or services on his blogs.

Definitely, his largest income source comes from his BlogMastermind subscription coaching course. Here he provides more detailed instruction on how to make money blogging. He opens the course up twice a year to new bloggers. He said that the number of subscribers is 250+, and at $50 per month (The total price is about $100 but half goes towards an affiliate commission for the referring site.) He is likely making more than $15,000 from this alone.

Success Secret

Yaro Starak writes in a very down to earth style with out the heavy sales pitches of some of the other make money online gurus. He offers lots of valuable and free advice and has a constant stream of new content. His affiliate sales prove that he is very adept and promoting products and services. He is a master of monetizing web sites without making it feel like a hard sell.

Yaro Starak offers a free ebook called, Blog Profits Blueprint that you can download just for joining his newsletter. His newletter, ebook and web site are a great source of information for how to make money blogging.

What?

eo Babauta started the blog zenhabits.net in early 2007. It was started as a part-time hobby, but has since grown into one of the most popular blogs on the internet. It is one of the top 100 blogs in the world as ranked by Techorati. Leo writes about goal setting, simplicity and his personal experiences of improving his life. From the stories on his blog, it is clear that he is living is passion of self-improvement and simplicity.

How much does he make?

My guess is that Leo Babauta is making somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 per month. About 80 percent from selling his own advertising and the rest from ebook sales, using ad networks and donations. He is not a millionaire, but he gets to do what he loves, he is staying healthy and is enjoying time with his family. That is pretty successful in my eyes.

How does he make money?

Leo currently makes money by selling advertising on his site, selling ebooks,  displaying Google Adsense and Natural Path Media ads and he accepts donations. According to his site, he has more than 1.3 million page views a month and about 64,700 people subscribed to his RSS feed at the time of this writing.

He charges $1 CPM (cost per thousand) impressions for 125 X 125 size ads , and with three outside advertisements on his site, that would mean he makes approximately $3900 per month for the advertisements. [1,300 (thousands of impressions) X $1(ad rate) X 3 (number of ads) = $3900 per month.] This amount will most surely increase over time.

Leo also makes money selling two ebooks:

ZenHabits: Handbook for life. $6.95 Click here to view more details

Zen to Done: The Ultimate Simple Productivity System. $9.95 Click here to view more details

While it is hard to estimate the sales of his two books, given the popularity of the zenhabits blog, the quality of his writing and the number of RSS subscribers, it is certainly reasonable to expect that he would sell hundreds of books a month. For sake of argument, let’s say that 1 percent of his subscribers buy one ebook from him every year at an average price of $8.45.

1 percent of 64,700 subscribers = 647
Average sale ($6.95 + $9.95)/2 = $8.45
Divide by 12 for a monthly total.

(647 X $8.45)/12= $456 per month.

This means that he could be making several hundreds of dollars a month in ebook sales.

He also makes money by placing advertisements through Google Adsense and Natural Path Media. He only places one Google Adsense ad under his articles so it is unlikely that he will have much revenue from this, but he does have a lot of traffic so I am sure that he is making a little money from Adsense. The Natural Path Media network is focused on health oriented websites. Again, it is hard to make a guess but this would likely do similar to the Google ads. I don’t want to make too many assumptions about these revenues but I would guess that they would be in the hundreds of dollars per month now.

It is also likely that his most ardent fans would send him donations for all the great content that he creates, however I nothing to base any guesses on this as a revenue source.

Success Secret

Leo Babauta writes great quality articles with catchy titles that are likely to capture the attention of readers. When he was starting up, he wrote guest posts on many other blogs to help promote his site. He worked hard to build relationships with other bloggers, exchanging links and taking advantage of social book marking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and Stumbleupon. Basically, Leo works hard and smart. He puts out lots of great quality content, while at the same time developing the relationships and marketing needed to propel a blog into the top 100. He has done everything right. Kudos to Leo Babauta, a great example of living your passion and creating your own dreams.

What?

Alborz Fallah is the founder of the Australian car aficionado blog CarAdvice.com.au. He started the site working part-time in early 2006 and has now built a business estimated to be worth $5,000,000.  He now has partnered with a large company, and has a team of writers working on content. Alborz still keeps some of the test drives of new cars to himself, but it has turned into a pretty hands-off company.

How much money does he make?

He says he makes:

$20 grand a month, but that’s just for the advertising.
We get other sponsors and things and other stuff like that. Google is still running
on the site which gives us another couple of grand a month,

His primary income now seems to come from an advertising network which pays for unique browses, not pageviews. Alborz indicated that this is worth about 10 cents per unique browse, with an average of 16,000 unique browses a day ($1600 per day).

Key lessons to Learn.

He started out with several different blogs to test which would be most profitable. His passion for cars had him writing a minimum of two articles a day for the car site, caradvice.com.au, while working only occassionally on the other sites. Unsurprisingly, the car site took off.

He was reluctant to put Google Adsense on his sites in the beginning because he didn’t want to interfere with the user experience. However, with the urging of Yaro Starak of BlogMastermind, he tested some Adsense and immediately started making about $15 per day. It just started getting bigger and better from there.

His team of writers, creates original articles and rushes to beat the larger industry magazines and new sources to the latest car information. It is not just copy and paste work, they are passionate about cars and right honest opinions that readers really appreciate.

He was careful to create titles for the articles and car reviews that users were likely to search for. In the car industry, this meant the car model and year. This has enabled his blog to get top search ranking on many search terms. This is a key idea that is still not understand buy traditional magazines and other larger industry competitors. Alborz says, “the old media still has got very little clue as to how the internet really works”.

Plans for the future.

CarAdvice.com.au is embracing video and has plans to show video clips of all the cars they test drive. They are going to put all the clips on YouTube.

The source of this article is an interview by Yaro Starok of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. If you are interested in making money blogging, this is a great site to read. Be sure to download his free Blog Profits Blueprint ebook.

What?

John Chow is one of the most recognized names in blogging. He started the technology focused site, TheTechZone in 1999 and his blog johnchow.com shortly after. His blog covers topics ranging from making money online, to using wordpress, to technology to fine dining. The subtitle of his blog is, “The miscellaneous ramblings of a dot com mogul.” He certainly does ramble about any topic that catches his interest and the mogul part seems accurate as well.

How Much Does He Make?

John Chow says he makes about $30,000 per month from johnchow.com. He also runs TheTechZone and his own affiliate program TTZmedia of which ads are placed on his blog articles.

He publishes his income breakdown every month; in April 2008 this is what he made:

• Private Ad Sales: $14,380.00
• Affiliate Commissions: $8,257.55
• ReviewMe: $3,750.00
• Text Link Ads: $1,745.79
• Kontera: $1,000.00
• TTZ Media: $398.50
• FeedBurner: $17.21
• Subscription: $20.00
• Grand Total: $29,569.05

How Does He Make Money?

John Chow is definitely an expert at monetizing his sites.  From the above list, you can see that he made close to $15,000 by directly selling advertising on his blog. He has more than 200,000 unique visitors to his website every month, which allows him to earn great advertising revenues. The second biggest income category was through affiliate commissions. The third largest area is the reviewme service where companies pay for reviews on his website.

He has published a free ebook about how to make money online that you can get if you subscribe to his free newsletter. It is definitely worth the read if you are interested in making money blogging.