July 2011: My first income report

Monday, 01 August 2011 15:24 Written by Jeff

My Multiple Streams of IncomeYes I’ve decided to go ahead and do a monthly income report. A couple other niche marketers that I follow and respect do this monthly report and decided it is a good idea. My thinking is for a couple reasons:

  • A way to keep myself honest and track my progress
  • Setting goals and working towards them
  • Maybe help others
  • Publicly see what is working and not working
With that said the key thing to keep in mind (and what I keep telling myself) is that this takes time. The money is not gonna come rolling in overnight. Most of the time it takes months to get the sites ranking, traffic to start flowing and income to be made. I basically just started doing this seriously early this past month and my only real goal was for adsense to make at least $10 (which I met!!).
Some of the things Ive been doing this past month, well the biggest was my spree on Flippa.com and all the lessons I learned with that (see my previous post). Overall I bought up about 10 sites and ill admit 3 or 4 were mistakes. I’ll most likely sit on them awhile and maybe try to flip the again. Besides that I bought up some domains for future project and have started 4 sites from scratch (2 of which will be more of authority sites so will need more work than the niche sites). One thing Im not going to be doing is detailing my photography income, that is my main business and this site is about my internet marketing. So with that lets break down where I hope the income will be coming from.

AdSense

This for awhile will most likely be my main source of income from the websites, as most of the sites are designed to maximize adsense and to get the most click. For those that dont know, adsense is a google product where you place a block of code on your sites and google will the deliver ads there based on your sites content and on your visitors search history. You get paid every time your site’s visitors click on these ads. It can range from a couple cents to $40 a click depending on the advertisers bids. Of all my sites with adsense installed about 6 are getting clicks with 2 getting the bulk of them (the top one is one of my recent purchases). The key is to get the sites ranking 1st page on google, top 5 being even better, to get the most traffic. I can see this play out as my top click getter is currently ranked #4 for its main keywords with the others being lower page 1 or page 2-3. I have been seeing the sites I have been working on (more content and backlinks) slowly rise in the rankings and as they do the clicks start coming. Most the sites I have now are on the low end of the bid scale (.01-1.50 or so) and thats ok for the build and forget types as it all adds up and since most are on shared hosting the expense is low (they need to clear at least the domain fee each year). One of my new projects once it starts getting the traffic should be $1.5-$3.00+ per click :)

Amazon

Well Gov. Brown took care of this one for me. Just as I was getting set up and going and seeing some return he went and signed the law that resulted in Amazon canceling all its affiliates in California. I do have a way around this for now (which Im not going to reveal sorry) but going to go slow on this, looking to other affiliates when I can. How Amazon affiliate works is quite simple. You put some code on your site to sell specific products or widgets selling groups of products on your site. When some clicks it and makes a purchase, you earn a commission. This starts low, only a couple percent but grows the more you sell. Great thing about is with the visitors browsers getting a ‘cookie’ from you, you will earn from any purchase they make with in 24 hours not just the product they clicked from your site.

Other Affiliates

There are other affiliate programs that work like amazon. You place code on your site to promote their product and earn a commission when its purchased through you. I currently use Commission Junction, Link Share and Share A Sale along with a couple minor ones. For me these are harder to earn much from so Im playing around with them and tracking to see how they perform.

Merchant Accounts

I also wholesale merchant accounts. Service to allow people to accept credit cards for their business. I use to actively promote this and had many clients. The way this works is after they sign up I would earn a small amount for every transaction they ran through their merchant account. At times it would earn me a couple hundred on a good month. As of now I am down to one, but this is something I will be promoting again perhaps along with a niche site or something. As once I get some more clients it is a true source of passive income.

July 2011 Report

Ok with that being all said its time for my July 2011 report, such as it is :) Just keep telling myself… its a begining

  • Amazon: $4.00
  • Adsense: $11.87
  • Merchant Accounts: $25.87
Grand Total $41.74

Whats next and Goals

Well the biggest hurdle will be to stay off Flippa :) at least with lessons learned be VERY selective on a purchase. The big tasks of the next month will be to work on the sites that are showing potential and movement upwards to get them ranking higher. Also to continue to build the authority sites and start the marketing for those. I’m also working on my new home office (the command center) which will help me to organize everything and set up tasks to perform each day and week. That is my biggest problem. I tend to bounce around from all the projects and photography work without a plan and its hard to get things moving.

Goal wise since I made the $10 a month, I would like to average at least $1 day next month and get to $50 a month from adsense. Be happy to just make a sale from one of the affiliates. By the end of the year I would like to be doing $100 a month from adsense.

Comments

Posted On
Aug 01, 2011
Posted By
Zero Passive Income

Well done. Looks like your on your way to building some solid passive income sources!

Reply
Posted On
Aug 02, 2011
Posted By
admin

Thanks for the kind words. Hope you will follow as I will be checking on you from time to time!

Reply
Posted On
Aug 04, 2011
Posted By
Passively Earning

Great start! I am hoping to do my first income report at the end of August. Keep us posted!

Reply
Posted On
Aug 18, 2011
Posted By
Shannyn @FrugalBeautiful.com

I always love seeing these posts as it always wants me to give a high five to other bloggers who are also monetizing! I just started out in mid July with monetization so August will my first real month with my various ads and affiliates.

Funny story, well…it’s not funny- it sucks, but I was in Illinois and the Amazon affiliates program got canned, so I switched it to my home address in California and a few weeks later, California followed in taxing affiliate programs. GRREEAATTT. So I too am re-evaluating my options! Keep up the good work!

Reply
Posted On
Aug 18, 2011
Posted By
admin

Thanks! and Good luck in your efforts. Ill be stopping by to check out your blog later, looks good at first glance and nice to see young people figuring this stuff out early (wish I did)

Reply
Posted On
Aug 25, 2011
Posted By
July 2011 Income Reports List

[...] #49 My Multiple Streams – $41.74 [...]

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