ProInterneter

I haven’t written an income report for over a year, but there is finally some information worth sharing. The main source of website income thus far has been Google AdSense, and while it isn’t anything too exciting, it has been picking up.

In August 2008 I received my first $100 payment from Google. This took me 18 months to accumulate. I had been running ads across several sites, trying different tactics to see what works. During that 18 month period, my worst month I earned 19 cents and during my best month I earned $21.53.

My second payment from Google came at the end of December 2008, taking only 4 months to reach the $100 threshold. My best month during this period was $59.11, driving by a few year-old blog posts that had good SEO and became relevant again due to Christmas. I simply updated the posts with 2008 information and watched the dollar bills roll in.

My average income over the last 6 months has been around $30 per month / $1 per day. This has obviously fluctuated a bit day-to-day and week-to-week.

I am on pace to set a new Best Month by the end of February and should break the $100 barrier by the end of March, which will be 3 months since my previous payment.

I’ve been trying more things out with making money online. In December, I had an Amazon Blog going that made me $15. In January I scrapped that blog and tried using an Amazon Script that created an entire store, but I got about zero visitors the entire month.I add Adsense to the pages leading through to ProInterneter’s Free PHP eBook, and that made some loose change. I didn’t post those AdSense until the middle of January, so hopefully February will bring more - though at this rate, I won’t be getting a Google payout anytime soon. Eventually I will revise my PHP eBook and perhaps 1) Give away the first few sections for free, then 2) charge a small fee for a much longer version of the PHP eBook.I worked with Blog Project A and made some strides with the Ticketmaster Affiliate program.January 2008 Income ReportAdsense: $3.80Amazon: $0.00Ticketmaster: $23.00Total: $26.80(Dec Total: $26.30)

I made $15 on my Amazon Affiliate Site in December, but things have taken a nosedive since Christmas. I have almost zero traffic and of course that converts to zero dollars on the affiliate end.

I am trying to get back in the habit of posting on that site, and considering if there is something else I can do to improve traffic. I am not creating thoughtful posts about products, but simply posting the basic info along with links to Amazon. That seemed to work well enough in December, so it simply might be connected to my posting frequency.

I’m a little down about making money online at the moment - I made some money via Ticketmaster off of one event on Blog Project A, but since posting additional events, I haven’t generated any more income from Ticketmaster. Also, Blog Project A is getting good traffic, but the pages per visit are still around 1.5 - 1.9 … Not exactly the sign that people are stopping in and shopping around. I expect this is because people are often landing exactly where they want to go, to find the information that they want - but it would be good if I could get them to stick around for a while.

December was the first month where I generated any measurable amount of money online. I didn’t start using Amazon or Ticketmaster until halfway through the month, so January should bring in more than December.

I’ve been learning a good amount about what works and what doesn’t, so I look forward to growing this in 2008.

December Income
Amazon.com : $15.32
Ticketmaster: $10.50
AdSense: $0.78

Total: $26.60

As I mentioned earlier, I have begun working on some Amazon Affiliate SEO tactics. On solution to the outgoing anchor text issue that I am testing, is the idea of putting NoFollow tags in my Amazon Affiliate links. My idea here is that I can use Keywords for Anchor Text, and not give up the juice that those keywords hold for my page. Usually whatever you use as Anchor Text for a link, that anchor text will be associated with the page that you are linking to - not associated with the page that you created.

I haven’t been able to find anything that says “Yes, it will keep the anchor and associate them with your current page” - and I suspect that it may not be the case, but I have created a few test pages using NoFollow tags, and we’ll see what happens over time.

In the meantime, I have read some things that suggest the using “click here” as anchor text for your outgoing links will actually increase the traffic that you send to that link - and in the case of an Amazon Affiliate site, that is exactly what you want to do. My basic theory is to action for long tail keywords, talk about the item for a bit and then get those people to link over to Amazon via my site.

As a general update, my Amazon site got 2 visitors on Tuesday and 0 visitors on Wednesday. My Amazon Affiliate account says I have recorded 22 click-throughs, so I wonder if those are the result of Google following links where I didn’t use NoFollow, or if my reporting is so far behind that I have really had 22 click-throughs? It seems that I should be getting at least 1/20 conversion rate, so I’m thinking that these 22 click-throughs came from somewhere else… or actually it could be from another site where I posted one Amazon Affiliate Link - the Amazon reporting tool isn’t particularly useful.