A few months ago I didn’t even know what a podcast was, and now we’re the topic of one! How cool is that?

For those of you who don’t know what a podcast is, basically it’s a digital media file that you can view or listen to online, or download from the internet. Kind of like a radio broadcast that you listen to on a computer, an iPod, or an MP3 player. There are millions of podcasts floating around in cyberspace, ranging from short movies (think U Tube), to talks on any subject you can think of, from technology to religion, to politics, as well as musical podcasts. Many producers have their own regular podcasts.

A while back a gentleman named John Huggins contacted me and told me that he and his wife Kathy have a website and produce a weekly podcast called Living The RV Dream, which they produce from their motorhome as they travel around the country fulltime. John asked if they could interview us, and we arranged to get together. Wednesday afternoon they arrived and we had a very nice visit, then John set up his digital recorder and we sat down for the interview.

We talked about our life as fulltime RVers, about the Gypsy Journal, and about our upcoming Gypsy Gathering rally. I’ve conducted a lot of interviews in my newspaper career, and I’ve been interviewed myself before. John and Kathy are real pros, and they kept the process flowing smoothly. Miss Terry isn’t quite as comfortable when she’s put on the spot, but she did a fine job and helped carry the conversation well. The podcast is live now, and you can listen to it here.

In previous podcasts, John and Kathy have interviewed folks like Fleetwood executives Dave Coffin and Justin Humphreys about the future of Fleetwood; Mark Nemeth from the Escapees RV Club; and Ron and Opal Erickson, a country and gospel duo who have been working the RV circuit for years. Other podcasts have covered things like the Escapees Bootcamp Program for new RVers, getting their RV’s thermo pane windows repaired at a Florida business specializing in refurbishing RV windows, RV fire safety, and their travels around the country. I’m hooked! All of their podcasts are available free online, and it’s like having an RV radio program on my computer. Check out their website and our interview, they are a great resource for both new and experienced RVers. I was so impressed with John and Kathy that I asked him to do a seminar on podcasting at our rally, and he readily agreed.

John had originally said they needed about an hour of our time, but we had such a fun visit with them that it stretched out a couple of hours, and then we piled into their car and headed to the nearby Texas Roadhouse for dinner. The time flew by, and all told, I think we were together about five hours! Isn’t the RV lifestyle wonderful? We meet new friends wherever we go!

While Terry and I were learning about podcasts, Bad Nick was busy too, writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled You’re Fired! Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Live the life you love, and love the life you live.

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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.

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