July 2011 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:
- 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.
- It helps me keep track of my goals and see what is working and what isn’t working.
- 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:
- Linking to “web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web”. Over the years I’ve accepted 200 or so guest posts. I always reviewed the content to make sure it provided good information. But I wasn’t very good at reviewing the sites that were being linked to. I mean, they weren’t fake viagra sites or anything but some of them were pretty low quality MFA (Made for AdSense/Affiliate) sites. I went through and reviewed every single outgoing link. I ended up notifying around 50 people that I had to remove their guest post.
- “Avoid ‘doorway’ pages created just for search engines.” I didn’t even realize it, but this actually had a lot of these “doorway” pages due to the way tags were being used. I had over 1,200 tags compared to 400 pages of actual content. The tags were totally unnecessary since I had all of the content organized by date and by category. I’m sure Google thought I was trying to game their search engines by having these tag pages that were optimized for a keyword, but didn’t provide any unique content. I removed all links to tag pages. They’ve also been no-indexed and removed from the sitemap.
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
- 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
- This month: $7.68
- Last month: $0.00
- Change: $7.68
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!
How to Dominate a Niche You Know Nothing About
Like I mentioned in my June 2011 income report, I’ve stated working on a new niche site. This new niche site has posed a bit of a problem for me though. It is a niche that I know absolutely nothing about. I don’t just mean that I only know enough to write a little bit. [...]
{ 4 Comments }One Authority Site or Multiple Niche Sites – Which is Best?
If you want to earn income online, it’s pretty much a given that you need to have your own website. Sure, you can write for revenue sharing sites or try to use something like Blogger…but I would never consider something like that to be a long-term income stream. Most people won’t argue that you need [...]
{ 8 Comments }