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.
