Moving is never fun, but I guess the good thing about moving from one motorhome to another is that there isn’t much furniture to lug from the old rig to the new one.

Since the customer traffic at the Carriage RV rally was so slow Monday and Tuesday, yesterday Miss Terry stayed home to start moving her kitchen items from our bus conversion to the Winnebago, while I drove to the fairgrounds in Goshen to man our vendor booth. By the time I got home in the afternoon, Terry and Brenda had pretty much moved and set up all of her kitchen and the bathroom.

The rally was such a bust that I decided not to go back today for the last day of vending. Every day we have spent more time talking to the other vendors, who were just as bored, than we ever did to any customers. The problem is that every day they are off to some tour or event away from the rally grounds. That’s fun for the attendees, but it makes the rally a complete waste of time for the vendors. I can use the time much better to help in getting the move completed. 

Right now we living in a sort of disorganized limbo, because half of our stuff is in the Winnebago and half is in the bus, so whenever we need something, it always seems to be in the other motorhome. But hopefully we can get moved and settled in within the next few days.

Some good news for the RV industry; Dutchmen RV in Goshen, Indiana announced yesterday that it is hiring 50 new employees to fill new manufacturing positions. Company executives said they’ve recently made “internal structural changes to support additional job growth” within the company. Hopefully this is just a start and we’ll see more RV industry workers going back to work in the near future.

I have had a tremendous response to the new Bad Nick Blog, and it has been interesting to read some of the comments and e-mails that have come in. I just posted a new blog entry titled Bad Nick Gets A Discount that I think every frustrated shopper can relate to. 

A few people have commented on the type of Google ads that have shown up on the blog. As expected, some hard core Republican conservative readers are already objecting to the ads pushing a Democratic liberal agenda, and just as many folks from the other side of the fence are upset when the ads Google serves up are about things they disagree with.

I don’t control the ads, Google’s AdSense program automatically inserts them. I just cash the small commission check I get from them to help pay the bills. But here’s an idea from Bad Nick – if you see something that piques your curiosity or interest, by all means, click the ad link and check it out. And if a particular ad offends you, don’t click on it!

Thought For The Day – When I read about the evils of drinking it scared me, so I gave up reading.

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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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