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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The elk are on the move here in the White Mountains of Arizona. Yesterday while Miss Terry was stuffing envelopes with the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, I ran some errands and saw a herd of five or six elk in a field just off State Highway 260 in Lakeside. When I pulled back into Show Low Lake Campground, two more large cow elk were standing in the driveway. Elk are huge animals, and every year unfortunate motorists have collisions with at least one or two of them as they migrate from lower elevations to higher mountain meadows as the weather warms up.

The White Mountains, our former home, is a forest wonderland that contains the world’s largest stand of Ponderosa pine trees, and is dotted with lakes teeming with trout and other freshwater game fish. In fact, the state record walleye was caught right here at Show Low Lake, where we are camping. The lake routinely rewards anglers who know how to catch them with walleye over ten pounds. And you thought Arizona was all deserts and rattlesnakes!

It is always nice to come back to our old hometown, but poor Miss Terry pays a price for it. Her allergies have really kicked up, and she is miserable with itchy eyes and sneezing. A lot of people who never had allergies come to Arizona and find that they do indeed have them. From the deserts to the high country, the folks who sell Zyrtec and other allergy medications do a booming business this time of year.

After I returned to the bus yesterday afternoon, I spent some time working on my websites while Terry made a huge dent in the number of envelopes to be filled. Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour has designed a neat graphic link to my new Honor A Veteran website, and I added it to my Gypsy Journal, Motorcycle Travel Online, and Publishing 4 Profit websites, along with the Todays Hero Blog.

When that was done, I answered several e-mails from readers, and reluctantly had to turn away two vendors who wanted to come to our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally, because we already have folks signed up with the same products. Both were disappointed, but understanding when I explained that our rallies are small and we want our vendors to have a good show, so we do not allow duplication of products among our vendors. We’ve already got a lot of registrations in for the rally, so be sure you get yours in too!

In the evening we took a break and went to my daughter Tiffany’s house, where son-in-law Jim grilled hamburgers and we had a good time playing with our two granddaughters. Those little ones sure do have a lot of energy! They can wear a fat old grandpa out in no time at all!

We’ll spend the rest of the weekend getting the new issue ready to mail out Monday. A cold front is bringing more wind to the area, and we’re hoping that it will pass on through before we have to drive back to the mail service in Flagstaff Monday morning.  

Once the mailing is finished, we’ll have some time to relax and play before we have to hit the road in mid-May, headed for the Escapees Escapade rally in Sedalia, Missouri.

Thought For The Day – Life not only begins at forty, it also begins to show.

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There is news on the RV industry scene. In a press release issued Thursday, Monaco Coach Corporation announced that it has signed a non-binding letter of intent with Navistar, Inc. in which Navistar will acquire certain assets and assume certain liabilities primarily associated with Monaco’s recreational vehicle manufacturing business. Navistar is a leading global manufacturer of commercial vehicles, military vehicles, diesel engines and related parts and services.

There are a lot of hoops to jump through before this is a done deal. But if it works out, hopefully it will keep at least one RV company from disappearing completely, and put some workers back on the job. With one RV manufacturer after another going belly up, we certainly need some good news for a change.

We spent most of yesterday hanging around the bus. I spent several hours promoting our new Honor A Veteran website by sending a publicity release out to VFW posts around the country, while Miss Terry did some paperwork, caught up on some laundry, and filled a couple of orders that had come in.

I’m trying very hard to get the word out about both Honor A Veteran and Todays Hero Blog, and I really appreciate all of you who have sent links to these new projects to the folks on their e-mail lists. It really does help a lot.   

Late in the afternoon we ran to the post office and made a stop at Safeway, arriving back at the bus just before Terry’s sister Lisa and her husband Jim arrived to take us to dinner at Red Lobster. Jim and Lisa are a hard working, busy couple and we never have enough time with them. But we always appreciate it when we can get together with them during our visits to Arizona.

I wrote last week that former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was going to be airing a segment on the Fox News channel from the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart, Indiana.

My friend Al Hesselbart, the museum’s historian and the author of the book, The Dumb Things Sold… Just Like That!, which tells the story of some of the milestones in the RV industry, said that he had the opportunity to meet Mr. Huckabee during the event, and that he is a genuinely nice guy who went out of his way to be friendly, and not in that smarmy glad-handing way most politicians have. Too bad we can’t get more real people to run for public office.

Thought For The Day - Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.

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I have decided not to attempt to sell our bus and find a used rig as a replacement. Instead, today we are placing our order for a new 2009 custom built 45 foot Prevost coach with triple slides and every option.

We have gone with a beautiful black and gold custom paint job, and the stainless steel bays shine so brightly you could charge your solar panels off them. I wanted to carry the color scheme into the interior of the new bus, but finally gave into Miss Terry’s better eye for design, and we have settled on an off-white leather for the seats and sofa.

No we didn’t hit the lottery, and my elusive rich uncle didn’t pass on and leave me his fortune. I’ve just decided to apply for my bailout money.

After all, I run a business that could use a big cash infusion, and I’m at least as incompetent as those jerks who run outfits like AIG. I figure I’ll give myself a couple of million bucks as a bonus, take a leave of absence, point that nose of that new Prevost down the highway, and ride off into the sunset.

I’ll miss all of you folks, but you have to understand that with my new elevated financial status, I really have a lot on my plate. So if we never cross paths again, please understand that it’s not that I don’t care for you. But let’s face it, the rich really are different.

Ouch! Okay, never mind, Miss Terry just jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow and told me to stop snoring. I’m awake and back to reality now.

It’s been hot here in Apache Junction, about 90 degrees the last few days. But it cools off nicely at night, which makes sleeping very comfortable.

Yesterday Miss Terry and her mom had a girls’ day out, doing some shopping and having lunch, while I stayed home and did some work on my new Honor A Veteran website, and updated our Gypsy Journal website. In the early evening, we had dinner with Terry’s parents, and Bess had cooked up a delicious meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, and all the trimmings. Yummy!

My new Dell desktop computer also arrived, and I’ll be busy today getting it set up and getting all of my programs installed into it. It will be nice to pack my laptop away and get back to a Nick-sized computer. Yeah, I know, I can plug a regular keyboard into the laptop and hook it up to my big LCD screen. But just as my comfortable old recliner fits me, I need (or more likely want) a computer that fits me too.

I don’t watch the Fox News channel, because I don’t enjoy listening to endless political rhetoric from either side of the great debate. But I received a press release that former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will be broadcasting live from the RV Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Indiana this Saturday at 8 p.m. Eastern time on Fox, in a segment called Save This Town.

Elkhart is one of our favorite haunts, and the folks who live there have taken one hit after another from the economy and the failing RV industry. It’s not just the laid off RV workers who are hurting. Everyone from restaurant workers to small business owners are suffering, and we feel sorry for our friends in Elkhart. Hopefully things will turn around for them soon.

Thought For The Day - In some attempts, it is glorious even to fail.

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