I have been pretty quiet recently about blogging and income reports, mostly because things have been ticking along slowly, and there really hasn’t been much additional news. So how did I fare with my online earnings in the first six months of the year? Well, I’ve made a Google Spreadsheet that calculates and displays the totals for you.

You should note that I have been earning additional money via Amazon and Adsense, but because of their payout limits, I’m including their totals in the grand total only provisionally: Currently, Amazon is $49.56 and Adsense is $19.86. ClickBank has contributed nothing yet.

In 2008 1H, I generated an estimated $3961.95 in additional income compared to 2007 1H $3322.80. So let’s see how I’ve done in 2009. Remember I’ve switched to cash accounting so amounts like Amazon or Adsense only count if I have the check in my hands (I don’t!)

As you can see, my earnings have had a real hatchet job done to them: what happened? First and foremost, I’m now one client less on my hosting since last year, the online advertising market is very soft at the moment, though specific areas are doing well. I quit working for PayperPost in 2009 after they switched from paying sweeties to paying peanuts for the same work (or similar), and SocialSpark just never worked for me, even with top ranking blogs. I had very little choice but to stop wasting my time on their system. I’m grateful for the work and the fact that I was able to earn nearly $2000 with them. But PayU2Blog is now approaching a similar sized figure, and so far I’ve had only technical glitches with them. Of course, Google has just spanked one of my blogs thoroughly, so I don’t doubt that this will ease the number of assignments I get.

Interest rates have dropped through the floor, causing my bet that rates would rise when I bought my last CDs to fail. I would have done better with fixed rate CDs at the end of last year, but I made the wrong choice. Woops! And the stock market swoon has taken quite a chunk out of my expected dividends, though I think I’ve done comparably well with 2008. That’s probably only due to owning more stock than last year.

Overall, you will see a 15.62% decline in the income since 2008. While that’s not surprising given how difficult things are at the moment, the fact that I can still earn about $550 pm extra income from careful choices, online sources and owning a small business shows the benefits of diversifying the sources of your income as much as possible. There are one or two cash payments I didn’t record properly over the six months, too, but since I have no record of them I can’t really Even having an extra 10% of income gives you a little more wiggle room than before.

I’m now facing the possibility at work that I may have to cut my own job to part-time status for the time being. While I earn and do a lot of work for the business, we’re also facing a slowdown of about 10% in the past 6 months from 2008. It’s certainly enough to eat our profit margin up, so since our labor costs are so high, and I’m the one now teaching the fewest hours, I have little or no choice. We’re about to run a new marketing campaign in August, but if that doesn’t produce an upswing in enrolments, then we face little choice but to cut my hours (and my salary). I’m hoping that the slowdown isn’t the ‘new normal’ everyone is talking about.