April Earnings Report

May is here, and that means its time to recap my April 2008 earnings across my various blogs, sites and projects.

Amazon Associates (US) – $1135.21

Amazon Associates (UK, CA, DE, FR & JP) – $11.80

Chitika – $17.82

Google AdSense – $590.34

Misc Other PPC & Affiliates – $350.29

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Grand Total for April 2008 -  $2105.46

This means I’m up slightly from last month (March earnings were $1972.01), but not quite as high as February, which was my best month so far at $2400.  Expenses were minimal because all of my sites are hosted either at 1 and 1 or Blue Host.  I only picked up a couple of new domains at $7 a pop, but I consider that more an investment than an ongoing expense.

Niche Project 1

I saw one of my niche sites go from PR 0 to PR 2 when Google updated its page rank last week.  Not bad for a 1.5 month old site, eh?  That’s been good news as my Google traffic has continued to climb for the most popular keywords in that niche.  Revenue was around $30 to $40 for that site, which is a decent achievement for its first full month.  As it continues to grow, I’ll break down the revenue more specifically for that site – we’ll call it “Project 1″ for convenience sake.

Niche Project 2

Additionally, I got one new niche site off of the ground, which has no ads and, therefore, no revenue yet.  Still working on content for it.  This “Project 2″ is the new niche site that is geared toward a technology that has not quite arrived yet.  I’m hoping that my foresight on this technology will payoff and I can build an authoritative site that Google likes before it hits and be able to profit from that authority and a good generic .com domain as it rolls in over the next 2-3 years.

Primary Blog

My primary blog, which went from a PR 4 to a PR 5 site, saw a boost in page views and revenue.  I’d like to see it getting 1 million page views per month by the end of the year.  It’s averaging around 250k to 300k page views per month now.  I know that’s big wishes, but I don’t think I’ve tapped it’s full potential.  I’m posting somewhere between 80-100 posts per month and my Google juice should be much stronger this holiday season.   On the revenue side, I monkeyed around with AdSense designs this month and actually saw it dip a little bit.  I made some more adjustments for May (link colors and positions in posts) and we’ll see if I can get it back up over $600 for May.  I also emailed a few individuals in the industry with private advertisement offers with no positive responses yet.  This is something I’ve got to keep working on.  Hopefully, May will bring some better results for private ads too.

New Blog

If all that’s not enough, I’m partnering with a close relative on a new consumer-oriented blog.  We got it launched this weekend and will dedicate these next few months to building up traffic and then integrate some ads into it.  The goal?  Get some PR position for some quality consumer-esque keywords by the time fall rolls around and capture some holiday traffic for affiliate sales and PPC networks.  We’ll see.

SEO Notes

One thing I’ve done in April is work on SEO for all my sites/blogs.  I’ve integrated the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin with all of my sites now.  I’ve also read up on Courtney Tuttle’s notes on best practices for the plugin and implemented many of them.  I’m pretty happy with the progress I’ve made with SEO these past couple of months, as evidenced by the PR updates.

Ok, I’ve got to get to work now to make money online (see, can’t stop the SEO tinkering).  Let’s hope May sees another revenue boost.