WordAds… ah, go on then.

I didn’t want to make money from my blog. I had my reasons for that, which were basically…

• I’ve always felt bad, kinda guilty about the idea.
• My content is random and rambling – I couldn’t see it as a way to generate income. I’m surprised people read this stuff tbh.
• I didn’t want money to change my content. As it stood, I wrote what I wanted, when I wanted. I was worried that monetizing might lead me towards more clickbait.
• etc

What changed?

Last year I ordered lots of books, subscribed to different sites, and spent quite a bit on training courses. I wondered whether my blog could help pay for resources I needed/wanted, as the cost of these was mounting up. I upgraded to WordPress Premium, which cost about 80 dollars for the year (there was a deal on I think) and activated WordAds – nothing ventured, nothing gained. I was just hoping for enough income to cover my subscriptions.

Why WordAds?

I’m lazy. I have WordPress.com, so activating WordAds is just the click of a button. WordAds is okay – I don’t think it’s too in-your-face for readers but if it is then let me know!

How has it worked out?

I guess so. The revenue for the year has come to over $500.

I wrote off nearly $200 of that straight away to pay for WordPress Premium for a couple of years. You can’t monetise without having a premium account.

When I got the first payment I split that with the four people who had guest-posted for me. Well, I offered to – one didn’t get back to me, one was my wife, one said ‘buy me a coffee or two when we catch up’ and the other one said donate it to charity, which I just have.

There was about $200 left, so that’s gone on resources. So far it’s paid for…

• The EAL Teaching Book – Jean Conteh
• Closing the Reading Gap – Alex Quigley
• Three copies of Retrieval Practice by Kate Jones, two of which I’m passing on to Matt and Tiago at our next ELT Bangkok meetup!
• A subscription to EAL Hub (review removed, sorry!)
• A few monthly Wordwall payments

So, I guess things worked out. Cool!

Things to consider

I’ve tweeted about this before and chatted to a few bloggers about the ins and outs. Overall, I’d say it’s worth monetising if the option is available to you, but with caveats.

• Remember – it may not be much money but it’s still tax deductible.
• I guess you need to have some regular blog traffic to make it worthwhile. ELT Planning gets around a 1000 views a day, WordAds brings in $40 or so dollars a month.
• Don’t get clickbait-happy – WordAds for small blogs like ours won’t make you rich!
• Don’t forget to reward your contributors if you can. Then again, it’s your money so do what you want with it!

So, does old-school blogging bring in much money? Not really. It does provide writers with a platform for their bad puns though – far more important!

Image by Andreas Breitling from Pixabay 

Categories: General, reflections

Tags: blog, blogging for CPD, elt, passive income, reflections, teach English, teacher