RVers love blogging! These electronic newsletters provide us with a way to share our traveling adventures with our friends and families back home, and to keep in touch with other RVers we meet along the way.

Blogs allow us to remain a part of our children’s and grandchildren’s lives; they can log in and see pictures of Grandma and Grandpa fishing, sightseeing, or just relaxing under the awning. These visual reminders seem to make the miles separating us go away.

But can your RV blog also become a source of income? It’s a question I get asked a lot from RVers who have or want to launch a blog.

There are several ways to monetize a blog, though the simplest is by putting advertising in your blog. On the surface, it looks easy. You sign up for one of the many advertising affiliate programs, such as Google’s AdSense, paste in a simple code, wait for your readers to click the ad links, and then sit back and watch the money roll in. How cool is that?

There are literally thousands of books, e-books, special reports, and online courses you can buy or subscribe to that promise to help you make a fortune with affiliate advertising. Uh huh, and I have some swamp land in Florida I want to sell you.  

Yes, you can make money by placing advertising on your RV blog. But can you earn enough money to make it worth the effort? Probably not. The sad truth is that out of the millions and millions of blogs on every topic imaginable floating around in cyberspace, very few bloggers make more than $5 or $10 a month, if that.

To make any significant money in blogging, you have to have a lot of visitors to your blog every day. I average about 1,000 daily blog readers, and with my five blogs and websites all together, last month I averaged 2,206 page views, according to Google’s AdSense statistics. In June we averaged just over $13 a day in ad commissions.   

But, my RV blog runs at least 500 words daily, our Todays Hero Blog is several hundred words a day, and I have a couple hundred pages on my various websites. That’s a lot of work. I approach this as part of our income stream. Most RVers don’t want to invest that much time into their blogging efforts.

I have found that commissions from ad clicks on my different websites can vary widely. My biggest single commission comes from ad clicks on my Publishing4Profit website. Many of those clicks are over $1.50 each. My Motorcycle Travel Online website generates the next highest individual commissions per ad click, at about 75 cents each. By contrast, ad clicks on the Todays Hero Blog and Honor A Veteran websites earn an average of five cents each. I don’t publish these two websites for the money as much as for the love of honoring people who deserve it.

My RV blog and Gypsy Journal website ad commissions average about twenty cents each, with some exceptions. Some of the ads on pages like Use That Generator and RV Tech Training Offered Online pay a dollar or so each.

Experienced blog publishers have found that Google is constantly tweaking and adjusting the formula they use to determine AdSense commissions, and there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to how they do so. A few months ago my commissions were higher, and then they suddenly dropped like a rock. The same type of ads are appearing, the number of visitors and ad clicks have remained stable, but the commission are much less. This is a cycle that I have seen come around every so often in the three years or so I have been blogging.

I also have Amazon ads on my websites, which has proven to be a total waste of time. In over a year, I have earned just over $100 from the Amazon program. I also tried the Commission Junction advertising affiliate program, with no results at all.

So, can you make money with an RV Blog? Yes, if you work hard enough at it and put out a lot of information on a consistent basis, but I sure would not want to try to live off my commissions. I love blogging and website publishing, and would be doing this even if I did not have ad links on the blog and my websites. And the ads do help buy a tank or two of fuel now and then.

My advice to you, if you are considering putting ads on your RV blog, is to go for it and see what happens. It doesn’t cost a thing to enroll in the AdSense program, so all you have to lose is a little bit of your time. But blog because you enjoy it, not because you expect to make any real money at it.

Thought For The Day – Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars in the universe, and he’ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint, and he has to touch it.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally

If you don’t like the weather in the Midwest, wait ten minutes and it will probably change. A few days ago I was complaining in the blog that it looked and felt like winter, and yesterday it was so hot and humid, it felt like we were in the Amazon.

Finally, the new issue of the Gypsy Journal is finished and today we’ll drive up to Michigan and drop it off at the printer. It feels good to get that out of the way.

Of course, while my work is out of the way, Terry’s will start once we pick up the finished papers from the printer in a few days. Then she’ll go into high gear getting thousands of envelopes stuffed and ready to mail out. Each envelope has a distinctive bar code, and if even one of them gets out of order, everything comes to a screeching halt when they reach the post office, so Terry has her own method of doing the job and will not allow me or anyone else to help her. Each time she has, it has taken longer to get things sorted out again than if she did it herself.

Her job will be a little bit easier this time, because quite a few readers have switched over to our new digital edition, so she’s got 100 or so less envelopes to deal with. Once the printer approves the job and lets us know it’s good to go, I’ll be uploading the new issue, and sending out an e-mail with a link and password to our digital subscribers. I’m a bit nervous, just because this is the first time we will officially do the digital edition, but I think it will be okay, and I have Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, my technical wizard, on speed dial.

Today is Miss Terry’s birthday, and once we get the paper to the printer, we plan to drive over to Muskegon and visit with Berni and Rocky Frees. We’ll take Terry out for a nice dinner, and probably go back to Berni and Rocky’s place for a rousing game of Mexican Train. Happy birthday, Terry! You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, baby, and I love you more every day.

Yesterday afternoon, Richard and Patsy King arrived at Elkhart Campground in their beautiful Allegro Bus. Richard has helped us with parking RVs at our Arizona rally the last three years, and Patsy, his long suffering wife, is always a joy to be around.

Richard’s mother, Dorothy King, is with them on this trip. Dorothy will be 91 years young in September, and is an absolutely beautiful lady. She still lives on her own, and while she’s entertaining the kids by playing gypsy right now, she can’t wait to get home to Victoria, Texas because she is missing her weekly bingo game with her cronies. Richard took a picture of Miss Terry and me with Dorothy, and I sure look happy with those two pretty ladies, don’t I? I hope I’m half as spry as Dorothy is when I’m her age. Heck, I wish I was that spry now!

Thought For The Day – Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.

Register Now For Our Ohio Gypsy Gathering Rally