Amazon Associates (US) - $1111.25

Amazon Associates (UK, CA, DE, FR & JP) - $90.34

Chitika - $7.44

Google AdSense - $770.85

Misc Other PPC & Affiliates - $564.51

________________________________

Grand Total for June 2008 -  $2544.35

Although, I’m down a bit from May, which came in at 2735.04, I’m pretty happy with the results.  More importantly, I had $250 in private ad sales, which is something that I’ve been interested in breaking into.  Again, expenses have been nominal.  I picked up one new domain at $7 for a future niche site. I’m also working on a way to outsource my advertising now that my traffic is up enough to catch the attention of some of these commercial ad serving resources.

Niche Project 1

Project 1 kept producing traffic and income this month, although it was little less than May at $151.08 versus $186.06.  I can’t complain too much, however, because I didn’t do anything to it at all this month.  I know I can get this up higher with a little more effort but I was rather busy in June.  I want to do some more article marketing as I noted in the May Earnings Report.  I saw quite a bit of traffic come in from the short article that a I reworked into a post, so I got double the benefits out of it.

Niche Project 2

No updates for Project 2.  Little traffic.  No work on it.

Primary Blog

My primary blog continued to see a boost in page views; however, revenue took a slight dip.  Again, 1,000,000 page views per month is the goal for year end.  It got close to 400,000 page views this month.

AdSense and Amazon, my two biggest earners, were a little less than last month but I’m not really sweating it because I put a little less effort into content this month.

As you can see, Chitika took in less than $8.  I’m rather disappointed in Chitika.  I received several promotional emails at the end of May, one of which claimed that similarly situated sites were pulling in over $31 eCPM.

I gave up a top spot in order to give Chitika a shot to produce some revenue.  It actually dropped when I added an additional ad spot to the ones that were already on my site.  I don’t know why it’s not working on my site; however, I’m pulling out of Chitika completely.  I’ve tried emailing and calling them several times in response to the big promotional emails and blog posts from Chitika and have yet to get a personal response from anyone.  I’m going to drop some ads into these spots and see how another advertiser can convert that space over the next couple months.

I also landed my first private ad deal, which was small, but still it’s now an established relationship that I think can benefit both of us in the months to come.  Most importantly, it was a learning experience.  Hopefully, I can continue to build these relationships and develop my reputation among companies and people in my niche looking for a place to promote their services and/or products.

New Blog 1

Traffic picked up a few hits per day on Blog 1, which also made its first $6 this month from contextual links to Amazon, which is about the only revenue source on it now.  Still, the goal is to keep building traffic, content and backlinks.  Need to kick it into high gear this month if we’re going to pull in our goal of a few hundred bucks in the holiday season.

New Blog 2

I’m about ready to kill off Blog 2, since my partner on this site is quite fickle.  I’m not upset with him; however, I don’t have the time to manage and develop content for 3 blogs and continue to build niche sites too.  Needless to say, Blog 2 did very little this month and I don’t have high expectations for its future.

Final Notes

June was pretty much consistent with what I expected it to be.  Although income was down a little, I didn’t work as hard at content development.  I dealt with a lot of administrative tasks though, which means it’s probably time to look at picking up some writers to produce some content.  The goal for July is $3000.  I’ll feel a lot better at making my goal of a $10k month by the end of the year if I can crest that barrier in July.

Amazon Associates (US) - $1294.99

Amazon Associates (UK, CA, DE, FR & JP) - $40.45

Chitika - $16.68

Google AdSense - $795.50

Misc Other PPC & Affiliates - $587.42

________________________________

Grand Total for May 2008 -  $2735.04

Although my $2735 is a far cry from John Chow’s May income of $32,529, I’m still pretty happy with the results.  May saw quite a jump from April’s earnings (at $2105.46) and even bested February’s earnings, which was my previous best month at $2400.  As usual, expenses were minimal because all of my sites are hosted either at 1 and 1 or Blue Host.  I picked up 5  new domains for a total of about $35.

Niche Project 1

Project 1 saw a boost in traffic and earnings.  It was around $40 last month and brought in $186.06 in May.  One thing that I experimented with this month was article writing for free article sites.  I had never given this a try before.  I followed the suggestions of Courtney Tuttle and his Keyword Sniping article, including re-writing posts as articles.  I actually did it backwards - instead of taking posts and making them into articles, I wrote the article first and then re-wrote it to publish on my site.  I’ll keep building these articles and hopefully continue the growth of my revenue stream from Project 1.

Niche Project 2

I didn’t get much more content finished for Project 2, however, it is a long term project that is not quite ready for mainstream audiences yet anyway.  Again, this is a future technology site and  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 continued to see a boost in page views and revenue.  Again, 1,000,000 page views per month is the goal for year end.  It received over 300,000 this month.

The changes to AdSense that I talked about last month worked and I saw an increase in click-throughs and revenue as a result.

The key points are:

1. put ads in the content, not just near it;
2. make the link colors match your links/h1 type; and
3. keep the ads above the fold.

These changes made for a surge of over $200 this month. As usual, this blog made up for most of my earning for the month.  Hopefully, I can diversify my income sources a little more over the next few months.

New Blog 1

Traffic is trickling in on the new coop blog that I’m building.  Monetization is not really an concern right now.  Putting some PPC up in the fall is really the goal.   A few hundred bucks in Q4 2008 would be ideal.  We’ve got several posts up now and it’s probably time to start working on some link building and keyword sniping.  I would really like to see some natural search traffic coming in over the next couple months.

New Blog 2

In addition to the New Blog 1, which I told you about last month, New Blog 2 (another coop project) started gaining a little traffic this month.  Like New Blog 1, I started this one at the prompting of a relative who wanted to get into blogging.  He is a little less dedicated thus far than is my partner in New Blog 1.  However, we are gaining traffic nonetheless and, given the niche that we are in, this could produce some serious revenue if I can keep him on task.  See this post for a reflection of my advice to him. Monetization goals are about the same as New Blog 1.

Final Notes

I would love to see June’s revenue come in over $3000.  However, I’ve got a week long vacation coming up this month and the wife would be rather unhappy if I spent the week at the computer.  Content development will probably slide a little bit this month, which could hurt page views and, of course, revenue.  I certainly expect to stay above $2000, but if I’m going to hit my 5-figure month by the end of 2008, I’ll have to really starting cranking it out after I return from vacation.

We’ve had 4 clicks to Amazon. No sales. Like I’ve said before, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. We will probably need 10k-20k hits per month before we start thinking about any income. We’ve been up for less than two months, and not many posts during that time. It just depends on the rate that we get quality content up on the blog. We’ll get out of it what we put into it . . . and, so far, we haven’t put much into it.

I worked on my primary blog and it’s predecessor for over a year before it took off. But, when it took off, it really took off. In January 2007, I had 350 hits on it. In January 2008, I had over 540,000. The difference? Lots and lots of posts containing quality content.

My goal for our new blog, is to make a couple hundred bucks in December 2008. That goal is realistic and something we can build off of. If, however, we start cranking out better content at a faster pace, it could be more.

The key to affiliate links on a blog is putting a lot of them in content over time. We’ve got a handful. We need hundreds. This will just take time.

When we started this idea, I told you not to worry about making money the first few months. Keep that in mind. Worry about content. This is not a get rich quick gimmick. It’s working smarter, but also working hard. I put 30+ hours a week into blogging (on top of my day job), but it’s paying off and I expect it to continue to grow.

In the mean time, keep learning about blogging and how to build up our new blog. Keep posting new content. I’ll do the same. I’ll be sure to let you know when we start making any money.

Sometimes, as bloggers and tech-savvy Internet users, we get so fine-tuned into our blog’s subject matter that we forget who our audience is.  This is especially true if you attract a significant audience from search engines.  I have a suspicion that the typical visitor to my sites is not quite as tech-savvy as I am.

Step back from your content and think about what kind of questions a visitor that arrived at your last post because of the keywords within it a Google’s favor of your site.  What is it about those keywords that a searcher would want to know?  What would such a visitor want to buy if they were looking for information on those keywords? How can I break down the information regarding these keywords to short, simple words and sentences?  Can I use a more active (less passive) voice in communicating my message?

These are the questions I’ve been trying to ask myself when writing lately because that searcher is my audience. He (or she) is actively seeking information and I want to make sure he finds what he is looking for on my site and, if I can intelligently incorporate affiliate links within the content, then I’ve got a potential lead/conversion.

The problem that I encountered relates to default text wrap on images within posts.  Apparently, some WordPress theme designers feel the need to insert a default text wrap into the Stylesheet.  (If you design WP themes, please don’t do this.  If you do this, please tell us why.) The offending code, generally looks something like this:

#content p img{
float: left;
border: none;
margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px:
}

The problem stems from the float: left; line.  What this little line of code does is to make every image that you insert into a post have text that wraps to the right.  If you try to use the Alignment dropdown list in the WordPress toolbar, it is always overridden by the Stylesheet float: left; line.

To solve this problem, simply delete the float: left; line.

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

________________________________

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.

The Problem With Saving Posts in Worpress 2.5

After upgrading to Version 2.5, the first time I tried to create or edit a post I received an error page stating “your attempt to save this post failed.”  Additionally, I received an Internal Server Error 500 pages on save attempts sometimes. Note, however, that the post changes were saved each time I received these errors.  I just had to get back to my admin page and open the posts up for more editing. If I tried to save again, guess what?  Right, more errors.

Finding the Solution

I broke out my secret weapon . . . I Googled “problem saving in wordpress 2.5″, which took me to the Wordpress Support Forums on this topic.  It appeared that most people that solved their problems identified a plugin as the culprit, with the big one being the WP Database Backup plugin.

Solving the Problem

I tried deactivating the WP Database Backup plugin.  No help.

Then I noticed these cool little notes under the plugin listings that said:

“There is a new version of [Name of Plugin] available. Download version [Version No.] here or upgrade automatically.”

I chose to upgrade automatically for all of my active plugins.  Not only did the plugins upgrade and reinstall themselves, but the post saving problem was resolved as well.

Caveats

I have a sneaking suspicion that the real culprit was my Google XML Sitemaps generator plugin, which was past due for an update.  I had seen several error messages relating to Google sitemaps in Wordpress 2.3 prior to upgrading and I think the little problems were somehow magnified in Version 2.5.

Anyway, if you’re having problems with saving posts in Wordpress 2.5, then you should consider checking your plugins for needed upgrades before you pull your hair out.

A spike in traffic from hitting the front page of Digg was nice; however, after a few days the Digg effect was gone and I was back to the same old thing  . . . without a whole lot to show for it.

Respecting the Process

After learning more about blogging and social media proper etiquette, I stopped the auto-submission routine that I was on.  When I tried to get involved in social media, I found I really didn’t like most of the social media communities, with two exceptions - StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and Mixx.  Although I’m not nearly as involved as many of you probably are, if I go to a site for fun, I’ll check out one of these two sites.  StumbleUpon is enjoyable for surfing, del.icio.us for bookmarking stuff I want to read and I go back to Mixx mainly because the community is so much friendlier than Digg.

Digg Has Problems

I really dislike Digg’s community nowadays.  It seems like everyone wants to criticize everything.  Digg users are rude and will curse you for an honest expression of your opinion.  Shouts are out of control.  Getting something to the front page of Digg just doesn’t mean the same thing as it used to.  I know, I’ve done it by simply spam shouting to several hundred friends.  You say, I’m part of the problem.  I agree, I was.  That’s part of why I don’t really care for it anymore.  It’s just too easy to manipulate the system and too much junk gets to the front page anymore.  Itty Biz said it better than I can - How We Killed Social Media.

If I Digg something now, it’s from someone’s blog only.  I no longer surf Digg to stay “active” in the community.  I’ve got Digg buttons on my sites; however, I don’t Digg my own stuff anymore - even if I think it’s Digg worthy.

In Closing . . .

I don’t write headlines or posts for Digg anymore.  No more stupid top 10 lists that turn off my regular readers just to get a day or two spike in traffic. Now I write for my readers and for people who are using search engines to find answers.  I believe those are the hits that matter most.

Open mic time.  Let me put a few questions up for discussion to you:

1. Am I way off base?
2. Should I care more about social media?
3. How do I get into social media sites when I don’t really like them?
4. Do any of you have social media misgivings as well?

Amazon Associates (US) - $1000.20

Amazon Associates (UK, CA, DE, FR & JP) - $40.47

Chitika - $60.67

Google AdSense - $627.63

Other Affiliates - $243.04

________________________________

Grand Total for March 2008 -  $1972.01

While that’s some nice extra change in the pockets, I was a little disappointed at a decline of $400 after a record month in February.  I can’t quite put my finger on why; however, March traffic was about 89% of February traffic.  March earnings were roughly 82% of February’s.  The rest of the difference may be chalked up to a little ad placement experimenting that I did in March.

I need to continue optimizing what I’ve got to work with.  More Adsense ads in content is crucial (meaning, I need to go back through many older posts and add the code into them).  In-content ads are performing so much better than those outside of content - more than the rest of the ad locations combined.

Additionally, I need to work on Chitika optimization.  There’s a lot of potential with Chitika that I need to take more advantage of.

Finally, I need to work on optimizing non-US visitors with Amazon Associates programs.  I use the AZ-One plugin from 52 Lives for incorporating Amazon links for non-US visitors.  Obviously, it works; however, it doesn’t seem to achieve the same traffic to income correlation as Amazon.com produces.

On a final, final note, I need to look into private advertising further.  I think I’ve got sufficient traffic to start marketing this; however, I think I need to tweak my theme/s a bit before soliciting advertisers (not the case with Blogger Lane though - see right).

This was educational and therapeutic for me.  I hope you got something out of it too.  Now, I’ve got some work to do.

The progress?  February 2008 yielded roughly $2400 revenue, with minimal expenses (and minimal sleep).  That’s just shy of a third of the monthly revenue stream that I want to have.

My most popular blog seems to have hit a plateau at around 7,000 to 8,000 page views per day.  I’m digging into resources to push traffic through to the next level and to start offering private advertisements.

Another niche site that I’ve been developing over the past couple of months is working its way up through the SERPs.  It’s not getting much love yet for popular keywords, but its got some good long tail search terms and is also getting some referral action, and will actually make a few bucks this month through affiliate sales and PPC.

Also, I started a new blog this weekend on a crowded subject matter.  It wouldn’t have been my pick, but I’m co-blogging with a relative, who is interested in the results I’ve produced over the past year or so.  Time will tell if he’s committed to the daily efforts that it will require. No ads on the new blog until we build up some content and traffic.  My own goal is 10,000 monthly page views at the end of August 2008.  We’ll see.   If that happens, we’ll drop some affiliates and PPC ads on it and see what happens.

We’ll see how all this shakes out and if I can become a six figure blogger. Stay tuned.