Ahhh! My earnings have dropped down to $885 and I have only myself to blame for some serious laziness. I have been blogging sort of reliably but I haven’t been doing much else. I know that I work best later at night when everyone is asleep but I’m usually too tired to think after about 10pm so I haven’t managed to be productive. I need a kick in the pants and hopefully this crappy month will scare me into doing some work.
Earnings breakdown:
- Google Adsense – $195 - Adsense is getting worse but I haven’t done anything about it. The good news is that so far in January, things seem to be back to normal.
- Affiliate Sales – $555 - Affiliate sales are diversifying but that doesn’t help much when my big earner takes a hit. If it’s an indicator for what lies ahead then I’ll be in trouble.
- Linkworth & Text Link Ads – $23 - I think this might be my final month for this category. TLA has been eliminated from my sites and Linkworth has cancelled their one remaining ad.
- Private Link Sales – $30 - I am riding high on my three monthly subscription payments for $10 and not much else. I have a few people to collect payment from but haven’t heard back. I think my PR for Travoholic.com has dropped to zero and many of my other sites are still stuck there. Emailing Google about this is on my agenda but, like everything else, I’ve been putting it off.
December saw a big drop in earnings but it was also the second full month in a row of doing no work at all. I have learned that being surrounded by people isn’t conducive to me being productive. I am going to attempt a late night working session tonight and see how that goes.
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That’s a somewhat disconcerting drop in earnings, considering where you were before. Just wondering, is it tied to a drop in traffic? Drop in search traffic?
Surely it must have something to do with the global economy as well? Organizations are becoming a lot more careful on how they spend their money.
My traffic has increased overall by a bit and seems to have jumped up a lot in the first week of January so I don’t think that’s what the problem is. The main things are eliminating Text Link Ads from my sites and a drop to zero in the PR of some major sites meaning that getting renewals on link sales is pretty hard. Google Adsense has also been cut in half from six months ago and my major affiliate had a bad month too. It’s a combination of things, I guess. I think part of it might have a bit to do with the economy but mostly, I think it’s all of my earners having a bad month all at once for the first time.
With a PR 0, it will be hard to get link sales. Maybe its time to create a few more sites as well as work on the ones u have.
Do you do article submission?
Isn’t it quite common for travel related websites to have a drop in December? Nobody seems to plan a trip just before christmas (neither would I). I’ve seen this for 3 years in a row, and things always went back to normal in January.
Interesting comment about travel websites dropping in Dec – I noticed a bit of a dip but nothing too dramatic – I think it was because some of the slack was picked up with end of year themed sites.
Lissie
I think we all had a pretty poor December, i certainly did anyway!