Now that July is behind us, I'm going to sum up my victories, my failures, new methods and networks I've tried, and new goals for August.
Making money online is time consuming, that's what I've learned this month. There's a lot of trial and error. Had I known what I know now six months ago, I would have easily been seeing $500-$1000 months instead of the $80 July I just had. The good news is my hard work has been rewarded with my first google adsense payout (yay!). The bad news is I'm sort of stuck right now. I've poured all this time into this blog that has an extremely low paying CPC. Sure, it's only one site, but all these "what ifs" are killing me. The solution: using what I know, start some new sites. I'm already on my way with this, but before I get into that I want to give you the July 2009 roundup.
Goal 1: Average 500 unique visitors a day. I didn't quite meet this goal. I instead averaged 486 a day, with my high being in the high 600s and my low in the low 300s. That's a big gap, and towards the end of the month the highs were more consistent than the lows. Not a total failure, but I didn't hit my goal either.
Goal 2: Make between $25-$30 a month. This was a successful goal that I was able to meet. I ended up with $78.60 for the month, and I expect that August will produce somewhere around $110 (though my goal will be for $160 - I'll talk about that later). I average around $0.15 a click and I'm not smartpriced. This should give you an idea of what I would be making had I chosen a keyword with a high CPC.
Adsense Tip: Keep track of your adsense stats. My CTR for one of my pages that gets very little traffic is around 20% while my CTR for a page of mine that gets about 40% of my entire traffic is around 2-3%. On the page I have a CTR of 2-3%, I made a little over half of the cash I made from the one that's at 20%, which had not even half of the unique visitors of the one getting all the traffic. I've started getting backlinks for the high CTR page and I've seen a dramatic improvement in my adsense clicks. Just a few days ago my adsense revenue per day peaked.
Goal 3: Make 2 new sites. FAILURE. I made two new sites but didn't do anything with them. They each have only one post and no articles or backlinks. I did, however, right a few hubpages and made some extra...pennies.
New methods I've been using:
Infolinks vs. Kontera - Mid July I started using Kontera and made an average of $0.40 a day. I figured "okay, it can't hurt..." and then I read about infolinks somewhere. I decided to give it a go, removed Kontera from my site and added infolinks. WOW! I make on average $2 a day from infolinks. Seriously. Thumbs way down, Kontera. I'll write a more thorough review of these two on a later date, but if you want to try PPC go with Kontera.
TKA - (the Keyword Academy) Google it, go to it, try it out. I'll do a review of this on a later date, as well, but for now just trust me. It's a $1 commitment and if you're not willing to spend that, find yourself a different business.
Spending Money Tip: I acutually came into this whole making money online business with the idea that I wouldn't spend money to make money. I realize now how silly it was. Sure, this attitude definitely saved me from ipulse buying e-books that promise you the world, but it also put me off to a very slow start. In some ways this was good, in some ways not so much. What ended up happening was I realized at some point I needed to join some networks, so I did my research, asked some questions and made EDUCATED decisions. I don't regret my decisions, as all of the networks I'm now a part of have payed off big time.
These are connect content, backlink solutions, and TKA.
When I make more money, I plan to try out UAW.
Something new I'm trying:
Uglier than Ugly Sites: What the hell do I mean by this? I started getting some followers over the past few months for my main site that I'm making money off of. At first it was fine. One or two didn't bother me. Five or ten didn't bother me. But now that number is more like 20 and is growing. I don't want followers. I don't want people reading my posts. What I realized was at the top of every post I wrote I had a pretty photo. Colorful and inviting, I like these photos because I get some small traffic from google images. What I've just done today is moved the photos from the pages I make the most money from to underneath the fold. That means that when someone clicks on a link and ends up on my site, they do not see the image until they scroll down the page. I figure that this might encourage more people to click on adsense ads. I'll let you know how it works out as I'll be monitering it very closely.
Now for my August goals. As you might remember if you've read my previous posts, I was going to do a doubling rule. Every month my goal would be to double my success of the last month. The problem with this is that the more successful I am in one month, the harder it's going to be for me to treach that goal the next month. I'm going to try to somewhat stick to the doubling rule. My site isn't exactly getting a ton of traffic that it would be too difficult to double, but it definitely won't be easy.
So here are the numbers:
Goal 1 - Average 900 unique visitors a month.
Goal 2- Make $160 this month from Adsense.
Goal 3- Make 4 new sites! So far I'm at 1 and I've done the research for a second one. Making sites is so boring and tedious, especially in the beginning but you've just got to buckle down and do it. I'm going to make a new site checklist so I don't skip anything. I'll post my checklist in a later post so you can benefit from my madness.
That's all for now. More on how I make money online to come.
Cheers!
Sunday, 9 August 2009
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