My first paycheck from Google! - A look into making money with your blog.

Yay! My first paycheck from Google! Enough money for.... something I guess.

Yes. It is possible to make money with your blog. I have always dreamed of working for Google. Even though that probably will never happen, I now can at least pretend it is happening, because Google sent me a paycheck! Just under $120. Woot!

A while ago I did a blog post that details my quest to see how I could make money from my blog. The post more or less shows some of the stats of my site and makes an estimation for how many viewers you would need before you would actually start making money.

This post will be a concise post on some of my stats and observations for making money using your blog.

General Stats:

My site averages roughly 900 visits per day.
I used to try to share and publicize my posts by linking them on other sites to get visitors. I now just let Google searches work for me. Currently, my most popular post is one I did about my own Ninja Turtle personality test.
I have had this blog for about 9 months. The blog has made about $140.
I currently have 85 posts. That is about $1.65 per blog post. Not that great. :)
Google and Facebook are two of the top referring sites to my blog.
Jimmer Fredette is by far the most commonly searched term to get to my blog.

Some observations:

I used to submit my tutorials to tutorial sites. While I think this is fine (especially when I was just getting going) I have become lazy and stopped doing that. I feel that Google now picks up a lot and if my tutorial is good enough, then other people will link to it. My Ninja Turtle personality test is not linked anywhere but is the most popular post (presumably because of keywords).
Popular keywords and good posts are what will drive visitors to your site.
Blogging is not worth it if you are only doing it for money. Blogging should be done because you are passionate about something.

2013-03-22 Update:

My website still averages about 900 posts a day (closer to 1000 actually). Not that great... to be fair though, I have not been that active with updating it. I still get paid once every two to three months.