When did you started your Blog project?
I first started blogging maybe 3-4 years ago which was off and on but it wasn’t really until 2010 that I started focusing on it more deeply. At the time, I had been working for an eCommerce company and a lot of the work I did there influenced me to work on my own projects.

What was your motivation to start it?
It was a bit of a fluke actually. I had been getting into web design and that naturally requires you to get websites online. I stumbled across the WordPress blogging platform and it seemed much easier for launching my projects than coding from scratch (which I had some trouble with at that time). After creating a few of my own themes and using them on my sites, I kind of gave up because things weren’t working out and the themes I coded were very clunky. After a few months, I came back to the projects and invested in a few themes and so here I am today.

When did it start to be successful?
I think the real turning point, for me, was the day I dug into the analytics of my website and also ran a report on Quantcast. I realized that the vast majority of my actual visitors were much younger than I originally assumed so then I started shifting my content toward the group of people. After a while, I started to get a response and so I kept at it for a while and it eventually started to pull in a bit of money through Amazon Associates. Before long, I started up Murlu that was sort of a condensed version of what I was learning about blogging and business (since I had been working as a webmaster and developer for the eCommerce site I mentioned, at the time).

How many unique visitors do you receive per day?
For Murlu, I believe the average is about 300 visitors a day, give or take. Although, I do have a larger blog that’s sort of under-the-wraps that pulls in about 1,500 uniques each day. I also have a few niche websites that may do about 30 – 70 a day but I haven’t worked on them all too much in a while.

Where are the traffic comes from?
The vast majority is search engine traffic but some of the posts have been picked up through StumbleUpon which lead to a couple big, prolonged spikes but it’s not something to rely on because the posts that got picked up were quite old. Social has been pretty good too.

How many hours do you work on it daily?
I’m not sure if people want to hear this but I say I probably put about 12 – 15 hours in each day but I wouldn’t exactly call that all “work time”. The “core” amount of work I do is realistically about 5 – 6 hours and then the rest is sort of keeping up with what’s going on, researching and generally browsing the web (or playing video games – ha!). Some days I may only put in an hour just to get a post out; other days, like recently, I put every minute in because I was launching a new website. Don’t be fooled – blogging is a lot of work.

How much do you earn monthly?
Things go up and down but it seems that I’m averaging about $1,200 a month. Sometimes this number can go up to near $2,000 but I’ve also had months where it’s been as low as $600 – things are bouncy especially because of the economy and that it’s summer time.

From where do you get the most Revenue? Google Adsense, Amazon Affiliate or other Networks?
By far, the best is coming from Amazon Associates which I really do love because the product I promote are ones I use so it’s a no brainer that I can create great content around them. It’s what I like to say “go with a hobby” when building a niche website. If you know the product, you can tell people about it without the fluff. Amazon Associates probably pulls in about 60% of the income while the rest is distributed between freelance writing, Adsense and Clickbank.

What do you think is your secret to success?
Truthfully: Momentum.
I know a lot of people that want to rely solely on SEO or content or some kind of push-button system but what it really comes down to is getting something started and pushing at it as hard as possible until it takes on the life of its own – you know, the “tipping point”. The first few months (sometimes years) of a project is going to be hard as hell but then there’s a point where things start to take care of yourself and you just need to keep at it to let it go as far as it can.

Thanks Murray!