Ahhh another month over :). Time flies by, SEO hybrid is almost done and should be released shortly.Ā I also have a bookmarking demon review that should be up soon but I contacted the owner to possibly get a discount so I’m waiting on an answer for that before posting it. This month is actually my 2nd worse month ever in terms of adsense, very weird. I’ll post the results below and explain what happened after ;).
October Niche sites income
$2,406 from adsense
$221 infolinks
$175 CPA offer (wow that went up a lot this month, I guess they changed their salespage and it converts way better now :D)
$51 Amazon
~$225 from clickbank
Total from niche sites: 3,078 (-$464 from last month)
$225 TKA
$95 Article Ranks
$22 Seo cockpit
$174 The best spinner (I see a lot of people took advantage of the half off discount at the beginning of the month š )
$60 Semrush
~$150 clickbank (Mostly article marketing robot)
Total from the link back: $726 (+261)
Grand total : $3,804 (-203)
What happened to Adsense???
So ya basically as you can see the big drop in earnings is mostly from Adsense. Almost everything else has been converting really well this month, cpa offers, clickbank etc. However, for some reason my ecpm has dropped more then 25% on my biggest site (and like 10-15% or so on my second biggest one). I guess shitty advertisers have been clogging up my ads on my bigger sites :(. Traffic has also gone down a bit towards the latter half of the month but the drop in ecpm is really the most annoying.
Not much I can do about it but at a friend’s suggestion I will try to ban some advertiser url’s soon. He told me he was able to get his ecpm back up by going to sites like http://www.labnol.org/google-adsense-sandbox/, checking what type of ads are displayed on your site, noting the url’s and then going to http://www.keywordspy.com and banning those that seem to have low CPC for their ads under domain. I have not really done it yet so I cannot give more information then that but for those who want to try, basically you want to put the url’s with CPC’s under $.5 in your adsense interface so those advertisers are banned. Honestly, I have not been working much on these sites this month but I will probably do it if the ecpm does not go back up soon.
What’s happening this month!
IĀ have been working hard on my new mobile app business and finishing SEO hybrid. I also decided to no longer have a VA. I’m at the point with my bigger websites that more links from many blog networks does not always = higher rankings. Backlinks are still VERY important for my sites made in 2011 but for the older one it seems that it basically reached a point of diminishing returns and I want to let them rest because while no Google Panda update has destroyed my sites, I do get inner pages/important keywords constantly experiencing minor Google dances of position #1-5. It’s hard to be certain about what is happening here, do I have too many backlinks vs my competitors over the past ~year and a half? Too many do follow links? Not enough anchor text diversity? Or is Google just hating on me for now like it did in February 2011?
Now that I no longer have a VA, a lot of my time in October was on SEO hybrid and now that that’s done 75% of my time will be on my mobile App that I am doing with a local business partner for local businesses (more on that at a later date…). I am learning a lot about PPC/sales page since my main goal is to make sure a lot of people download the app (it’s free but people need to be made aware of it of course š ). Of course, a VA can not help me much with that for now since before outsourcing anything you have to make sure you master/know what you want to do and the best way to do it yourself.
For those having trouble writing articles
If you have TBS, John (the creator) probably sent you an email about jiffy articles. He released a new “article template” service that is called jiffy articles. Since it’s in beta and free I gave it a try and it seems pretty cool. I want to create some free ebooks to give away in exchange for signups to my email list on my niche sites (because I don`t want to rely so heavily on adsense in the future) so I was looking at inspiration for articles around topics like “5 mistakes everyone does about xniche” or whatever and the basis seem quite good. BTW, I probably am not going to have someone write these for me, as much as I would love to I’m starting to go back to the old ways of writting my own content that is engaging. Either I do it myself or I pay someone a lot more then usual who will write me some informative/engaging content…
By the way, I really admire John Ledger’s stuff both as a customer and a marketer… Not only is TBS an amazing tool that seems to constantly be updated (I really love TBS 3.0 and it’s new duplicate content/grammar checkers) but making such a great selling tool on a YEARLY subscription must be amazing for his revenues :). He also has a lot of other software that I personally do not use but must give him quite a good income too. If some of you are programmers I definitely think going that route is a great way to make money online. Or, hire a programmer to do a software for you and market it properly :).
That’s it for this month’s report! Hopefully adsense picks up next month!
Hey Alex, a little question do you use, infolink and adsense at the same page?
Ya, all that infolinks income is off my third website, it’s combined with adsense. For that one infolinks seems to work very well and does not affect my adsense income.
hey Alex ,sorry for your adsense income…i’m sure you’ll get it back on track!
…
Do you have experience with sites getting from page 1 results to around position 50..
6 of my sites got in one day down to position 50 on average…
from your experience what you think is the best route to go to get those sites back ranking?
cheers!
Also Alex….
are you still using statcounter as your analytics?
anyway you know what the different between “Page Loads” and” Unique Visits” there…
the “Page Loads” are always higher than the “” Unique Visits”” numbers…but i’ve got no idea what it really means …
thanks in advance!
If I view 2 pages on your site that is 2 page loads.. But I am 1 unique visitor :). Ya I use statcounter (since you just need to activate the plugin, nothing else needs to be done) all the time until I decide to put google analytics later on.
Hey Alex!
Been missing posts from you š
I’m sure your other sites will come back, just takes time.
What’s the deciding factor that would make you add Google analytics to your sites when you just use Stat Counter?
So when you are building new sites are you using stat counter first?
I only use stat counter first so I do not bloat my GA account with tons of sites, I have 50+ sites… Only 10-15 of them made it into my GA account.. I usually put them in GA once they get traffic and I decide to put adsense on them.
yes, this happened to the sites I built in 2011 as I said in september’s report, page 1 to page 5. They haven’t come back yet but it happened to a site I did in late 2010 around May 2011 to July 2011 and then it came back to #1 so I am hoping the same happens with these.
Hey Alex
What’s your opinion about your income this month? Is it hard to get where you’re at? Do you realize that where I live people work 12 months for $3804 ? You’re incredible in my opinion, keep up the good work š
btw, I’m waiting for SEO HYBRID to start IM š
I do not find it hard.. It just takes time/patience and being willing to learn, make mistakes and keep trying. Success is all about your motivation.
I don’t know why you’ve been stuck with SEO+Adsense for so long, though.
I mean, you ‘ve been on plato for so long :).
Well, let’s hope it gets better for you, man :).
It’s because most of my sites made in 2011 did not end up increasing my income because they got sandboxed in September, if they get un sandboxed I fully expect my adsense earnings to go to $4k+ very quickly. Also, those sites will be great for CPA offers (one of the reasons I was so happy to make them) but I am not applying until they go back to 100+ uniques per day on each of them.
What do you mean by ‘sandboxing’?
being pushed from the first page of Google to page 5+ for a long time (weeks/months).
Thanks for all the value you guys have been giving. My friend and I have been hitting it hard lately and getting some of our first sites up.
Can I ask how many sites you have to generate that type of income from adsense? and is it spread out pretty evenly or do 1 or 2 sites crush everything? thanks!
It’s spread out between about 6 sites or so. 75% of my income is from the top 3 sites.
Hey Alex,
yeah Adsense sucked donkey b@lls for me last month, although there was no Panda slapping. Traffic went up. But Adsense fell remarkably. WTF are they doing?
On the + side, we kicked butt with Trip Advisor sales. Few more back links, and we’ll be hammering with this one.
Thanks for the blog. I love it and you’re on my iGoogle front page š
Hi Alex – Good to read your post, but sorry for your adsense income dipping.
Google are getting into strange tactics lately, I mean securing the search page, so we can’t find out the kW people are using to find us!
I’m still wondering how your warrior test is going on with all the different article marketing systems you were trying out – especially Article Samurai – as I was thinking this was going to help me get lots of deep links.
Anyway’s keep up the good work and really enjoy your writing.
Cheers, John
ya I wanted to continue it for a while but they locked it in the forums… I get a lot of people asking me about it and the results were pretty much #1 AMR, #2 linkamotion and AS (they both had some keywords beating each other…). #3 is UAW + AMR and #4 UAW alone… Really suprising, combining AMR and UAW somehow made it worse, maybe too many links even fi the site is 6-8 months old by now…? I stopped recommending UAW.. Also I think AS submits to the UAW network anyway (and at $69 for UAW per month it’s definitely overpriced nowadays, at most I would pay one month and submit a ton of articles to many sites then discontinue).
Alex you suck
WOAH! :'( Do not be mean to me mr turkey burger.
haha, I was actually using that as an example of how to make a comment backlink in a coaching session =P Why spam other blogs when we have a perefectly good on here!
Oh I see now.lol
oops.lol
Hey Alex, I just checked Jiffyarticles, nice concept. I had a similar idea, but using content grabbed from article directories, I’m thinking since people would be just looking for inspiration, it shouldn’t be a problem copyright-wise right? Like artists do…
Well, some products out there already do that. I think another of John’s products called article builder or something do it. I personally never found the need for it as I had to edit my articles anyway after to make them better and more complete in information. IMO building articles like that will never get you so far. Sure it might be enough for SEO rankings but doing articles just for SEO is not a very good long term strategy.
Does alexa ranking of a site got any co-relation with the adsense income one can generate? why i ask is because my site ranking is better than yours but can never imagine earning even one tenth of what you have. that i never even tried to monetise the site inspite of having adsense acc is another matter. actually never dared to..
No Alexa ranking just shows how much traffic you have. More traffic definitely helps making more money but does not mean you make more money. If I have 100 visitors a month and each of them click my adsense ad for $1 I will make more $$ then you even if you have 10, 000 visitors but only 1 in 100 of them click an ad that only gives you 0.05 cents a click (if you are in a low paying niche).