Sep 02 2009
August Earnings Report
I earned $1174 in August which, once again, is a step in the wrong direction. Boo! I have been trying some new things and have yet to see any results but it is early days.
Earnings Breakdown:
- Google Adsense - $415 - Adsense has snuck up another $45 from last month which is great news again since it really seems to be the only thing rising at the moment! Again it was due to an increase in the amount paid per click but my actually clicks have also jumped up as well. I am expecting be things from Adsense if these new sites of mine ever stop sucking.
- Affiliate Sales - $567 - Nothing new to report here. I think I will dedicate a week in September to adding all these affiliates I have in mind. I have some pretty targeted number one search results in Google that would feed nicely into affiliate sales so I will work on setting that up. Affiliate programs make my brain hurt.
- Linkworth - $0 - I have finally given Linkworth the boot.
- Private Link Sales - $172 - I made one new sale on the last day of August but the guy hasn’t paid me yet so that doesn’t count. All of the others were renewals. It’s good to people start renewing again after a few months of lots of cancellations.
- Article Contributions - $20 - I wrote an article for 2 Camels and got some cashola for my efforts. I have two more of those up my sleeve for this month and might produce another couple of articles for Location Independent as well. I like writing this sort of stuff and it’s a great way to make a bit of extra cash.
I’m happy to report that I have been spending a lot of time behind my computer adding content and building links. Time will tell whether the things I’m working on will pay off I’m happy to be putting in the long hours again. I love the work and I’ve got a sweet little setup in ‘The Dungeon’ aka my parent’s basement. It’s looking like I will be spending Spetember here in Canada, trying not to spend much, working on my sites and planning my next move.
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Hi Kristy,
I forget if I’ve commented here before, but I’m a newbie internet marketer living in Montreal. I’ve been following for half a year and I’m a big fan of your honesty and transparency, and it’s very helpful to people like me who are starting out. I hope you can figure out how to expand in a big way.
Have you ever tried any automated tools such as Article Marketing Automation or Traffic Bug? These types of tools can magnify your efforts and automatically handle things like social bookmarking or article distribution.
I haven’t tried any personally, but I was a member of Dan Raine’s “Immediate Edge” for a while, and a lot of people raved about them.
Another one that could be cool, especially for travel-related sites is Global Translator Pro. It’s a WP plug-in that takes your articles and automatically translates them into 41 languages. (If you had a 10 article site, you would have 410 articles, indexable by the search engines.) It has a free version. http://www.nothing2hide.net/global-translator-pro/
And if the translation wasn’t perfect, you could at least have a notice on the page saying “this text was automatically translated” or something, and maybe you could regionally target the language with adsense. (I’m not sure if/how that would work, just ideas.)
Cheers,
Chris
Hi there,
I have been following you for a couple of months since finding your site via Lissie’s. I absolutely love the idea of working hard for a little while then being able to pack up and go traveling. I hope to be able to do something like this too. I have some ways to go regarding making money online but everyone has to start somewhere.
I look forward to reading more about your adventures and hope it isn’t too dark down there in your dungeon.
Do you think you will achieve your goal of being elsewhere for the winter?
Setting up affiliates on your website isn’t that hard, so there is basically no excuse for not doing it. The most simple case would be to sign up for a program and place a banner or text link on your page. Of course that doesn’t give the best conversion rates, though better than nothing. If you want people to actually buy something you will have to think about the context. I’ve had surprising succes with an affiliate program when I rephrased the surrounding text on the page — conversion rates tripled.
Congrats! It’s the first time I see an earnings report from a site like this and I think it’s great you can mantain with such a awesome amount of money! I hope some day I can make the same with my blog.
Despite the drop in income this month, I think you are definitely on the right track. All of your efforts should keep snowballing into something big. I agree with Chris’s advice about using some type of language translation. With travel niches, using multiple languages can significantly boost your efforts.
It’s really very appreciable that you have shared your income detail with everyone. Normally nobody do so.
I’m curious to know if anyone has experience of posting in multiple languages and weather it helped with search engine rankings and traffic. I’m assuming the machine based translators are not going to produce fantastically coherent articles. My initial thoughts are that it might work for search engines, but human readers are just going to be annoyed by the articles they find?
I wish i could duplicate your success with affiliates
I wouldn’t lose too much sleep about Aug a) its too early for your new stuff to show up yet and b) Aug is traditionally slow as the US goes outddoors or takes holidays or something …