Category — Blog Income Report

Welcome to the July 2011 income report! In an effort to be as transparent as possible, I publish a report on the first of each month outlining my income for the previous month. I show all of my income sources, passive and otherwise. If there are any expenses associated with that income, I’ll share that as well. Things like hosting, PPC costs, outsourcing costs, etc.

I share this for 3 main reasons:

1. I want to keep myself accountable. By making my goals and plans public I have someone other than myself to answer to if I’m not working like I should.
2. It helps me keep track of my goals and see what is working and what isn’t working.
3. I hope to inspire people and show that it really is possible to earn income online. No gimmicks or schemes, just good old hard work.

What Happened In July

Like I mentioned in my relaunch post, my main earner died at the end of June. Before being hit with a penalty it was on track to hit $500 from in July.  Without this site, my income was pretty minimal.

One of my big projects for the month was to go through that entire site and clean it up. Right after my site was penalized in May I submitted a reconsideration request to see what the issue was. The response was that the site violates Google’s quality guidelines.

Since I didn’t know exactly what the issue was I went through each item on their list and tried to look objectively at how my site compared.

After reviewing everything, I think I was penalized for:

I also had a contact of mine who does manual reviews for search engines take a look at my site. I made a few other changes based on her recommendations that I’ll talk about in a future post.

The reconsideration request was submitted on July 27th. It usually takes a week or 2 to hear back. Hopefully that will solve everything and I’ll see a big earnings jump for August.

My other big project for the month was launching the site I mentioned in the June 2011 income report. In that post I talked about a Clickbank product that I had my eye on for some time.

Since then I’ve fleshed the site out a bit more. I’ve added some good content that targets low competition keywords in the niche. I’ve also started my backlinking campaign.

I’ve already had 247 visitors and sent 82 hops to the product. No conversions yet, but I should see my first sale very soon.

Income Report for July 2011:

Adsense

• This month: $45.73
• Last month: $303.82
• Change: -$258.09

Neverblue

• This month: $79.95
• Last month: $132.90
• Change: -$52.95

Clickbank

• This month: $0.00
• Last month: $66.67
• Change: -$66.67

Amazon

• This month: $1.80
• Last month: $9.30
• Change: -$7.50

Total Income

• This month: $135.16
• Last month: $512.69
• Change: -$377.53

Expenses

• Bluehost – $8.95
• Domain Renewals – $8.25
• The Keyword Academy – $33.00

Income was obviously way down over last month.

It can be discouraging to put a lot of work into something and not see immediate results. That is one of the biggest reasons most people never make it when trying to earn income online.

Society programs us with the mindset of  ”You go to work. You collect your paycheck.” But in this business, you may go to work every day and not get a paycheck. Or it may be 6 months before you collect the paycheck for the work you’ve done.

I feel good about the work I’ve done this month even though earnings are down.

Goals for August

This month I plan to continue to work on my new niche site. I need to get at least 5 more pages of content up and a couple dozen more back links. I expect to see a couple of sales this month.

I should also hear back on my reconsideration request within the next week. If the penalty is removed, I’ll start adding new content to this site. If it’s still penalized then I’ll continue to work on it to fix whatever issues may be remaining.

I’ve also go some great content lined up for WallerBlog this month. I hope I can share some really great things with you.

One Final Note

On July 31, 2011 my wife and I welcomed our two beautiful twin boys into the world:

Ian Timothy and Noah Riley - July 31, 2011

Ian was born at 2:48pm – 5lbs 8oz, 18in long and Noah was born at 2:49pm – 6lbs 12oz, 20in long. Woohoo!

In an effort to be as transparant as possible, I’ll be publishing a report on the first of each month outlining my income for the previous month. I’ll show all of my income sources, passive and otherwise. If there are any expenses associated with that income, I’ll share that as well. Things like hosting, PPC costs, outsourcing costs, etc.

I Hope For This to Serve 2 Purposes:

First – Like I’ve said before, I want to be as transparent as possible. On the internet, it’s really easy to create a fake persona. It wouldn’t be hard for me put a bunch of fake information up to make myself look good. I have no doubt that a lot of bloggers do that.

In my relaunch post, I said that this blog would really serve as a journal for my business. A place where I can organize my thoughts. If I’m not honest and transparent, then it defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to accomplish.

I also want anyone reading this to know if I really practice what I preach. If I say that a certain strategy is great or that some product is awesome, then I need to be able to show the results to back that up.

Second – These reports will help to keep me focused. My ultimate goal is to be able to be able to live off the income my online ventures generate. It is so easy to get distracted in this business. There’s been many days where I’ve set down to work and walked away 2 hours later and all I’ve done is check e-mail, read some blogs, visit some forums and check my stats.

Without focus, I cannot make progress.

Here’s How I Want These Income Reports to Work

Each month I will give a brief update on the projects that I am working on and their effect on my income. I will share any websites I’m working on or ideas I have for new project. If my income goes up each month, then it stands to reason that what I am working on is productive. However, if I my income is stagnant month over month, then hopefully I will be able to identify where I am wasting my time.

So without further ado…

Income for June 2011:

Adsense

• This month: $303.82
• Last month: $306.48
• Change: -$2.66

Neverblue

• This month: $132.90
• Last month: $204.40
• Change: -$71.50

Clickbank

• This month: $66.67
• Last month: $43.16
• Change: $23.51

Amazon

• This month: $9.30
• Last month: $3.16
• Change: $6.14

Total

• This month: $512.69
• Last month: $557.20
• Change: -$44.51

Overall, income was down a bit for the month. This really isn’t a surprise. Like I mentioned in my last post, my main earner is in the dumps right now. 75% of the earnings above are from that site. It was penalized on June 27th. Unless that site comes back within the first week of July, I very much expect earnings to be down for a while.

In the mean time, I will be going back to a few older websites that have been on the back burner. I have also started a new project that I’m pretty excited about.

About my New Project

Even before my main earner went to the dumps, I knew I needed to diversify. One of the projects that’s been on my list for a while is a niche site focused on a particular Clickbank product that I’ve had my eye on for some time.
This week I registered the new domain, got the basic site put up and posted the main pre-sell page.

Over the next few days I need to finish my keyword research and get some solid content up around those keywords. The main keyword that the entire site targets will most likely see the best conversions. However, it’s very low traffic. I expect fewer than 1,000 visitors per month from it. There are enough related keywords in the niche that I’m not concerned about finding other low competition keywords that I can target.

After that I’ll start the marketing campaign. I plan to get involved in some of the forums in this niche and put together some videos of me using the using the product. After that, I will set up some satellite sites to support the main site.

Other Things On My To-Do List

Once I get this site going, I’ll most likely give some of my attention to a camping site that I started about a year ago. It was kind of a cross between a passion site and a niche site. I was in boy scouts for 10 years (Eagle Scout, holla!). I’ve done a lot of camping, hiking, climbing and all of that outdoors stuff. It’s a niche that I’m interested in and I think I would have a pretty easy time talking about it.

I think that’s key to whatever niche you’re in. It needs to be something that you’re interested in. Earning income online doesn’t happen with the push of a button. It’s a lot of work (despite what anyone will tell you when they’re selling their latest MMO products)!

If you aren’t interested in the niche you’re working on, you probably won’t last long. It’s so easy to get burnt out in this business. The only way I’ve ever been able to work in a niche I wasn’t interested in was with outsourcing. The problem with outsourcing is that it’s very easy to burn through a lot of money and not make much progress.

Don’t get me wrong. Outsourcing is a fantastic tool and you can use it to scale your business quickly, but it can be a huge money suck if you don’t know what you’re doing.

This niche also has a passionate following. That opens a lot of opportunities for natural marketing. I think it has a lot of potential.

That wraps up the report for this month. It may be slow for the next few months as I ramp new sites up, but I’m feeling positive about the new opportunities.

This is the first real monthly earnings report since this blog was resurrected at the beginning of this month from an 8 month hiatus. Year to date income for WallerBlog dot Com has averaged $47.03/month. Blog income for May was down from the YTD average, but has increased from April’s $34.13.

Total Blog Income for May 2008: $37.32

Here is the breakdown:

• PayPerPost: $20.00
• Private Ad Sales: $7.00
• Google AdSense: $5.40
• TNX.net: $4.92
• Grand Total: $37.72

Blog income has decreased since the beginning of the year. This is primarily due to Google’s PageRank update. My blog went from a PR 3 to a PR 0. This has effectively killed all income from Text-Link-Ads and LinkWorth. Before this month LinkWorth was my biggest money maker. That loss has been mitigated by the addition of PayPerPost.

Traffic Stats

Traffic this month is up to 1,294 page views from 608 visitors. The top traffic sources were:

• Google: 138
• Direct: 119
• StumbleUpon: 125
• Entrecard: 95

As usual the big G was the top referrer. The biggest surprise though was the 125 visitors from StumbleUpon. The Blogging Tips Carnival was Stumbled and received more traffic than any other post this month.

Determination is the key

Determination is the only thing that will make your small blog a success. Determination to write good content, determination to research monetization opportunities and determination to network to drive traffic to your blog. This month I am determined to work to gain quality backlinks in order to gain more green on my PagerRank. This will give me many more opportunities to increase this blog’s income and get me closer to my goal of earning a full-time living via the internet.