March and April 2012 Updates
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 16:05I’m behind on posting my monthly updates (again) so this will be another double month income report.
I know right now a lot of people’s attention (including mine) has been focused lately on the April 25th Penguin update put out by Google. I did get hurt by this update as well (more on that below), but overall I’m pretty upbeat about my earnings and the future – which I hope you all don’t find too annoying!
Why Am I So Upbeat?
Over the past couple of years I’ve made remarkable strides professionally and personally thanks in large part to the “free” traffic I’ve received to my websites from Google. Three years ago, I had never even heard of “affiliate marketing”, didn’t know what WordPress was, and was a bit desperate to find a way to support my young son (then just one years old) and myself which didn’t involve putting him day care for 10 hours a day.
It’s been a long journey, with many ups and down, but I feel that what I’ve accomplished, thanks in part to Google (yes – thanks to Google!) has allowed us to be able to afford to live in a beautiful home on a small island in the Puget Sound while also being a full-time at-home caregiver to both my son and my aging mother.
I’ve also always known that things can change in this business, which is why diversification has always been something that I’ve pursued in terms of building websites in multiple niches, using multiple kinds of monetization. I’ve also experimented with diversifying a bit beyond Google (although those efforts have not gone far enough to date). I’m sure the latest setbacks are just temporary. I will continue to grow, learn and improve my business – and I’m kind of excited to see what’s in store next! It’s clear that some old methods will have to be ditched, and this is a good time for experimentation and improvement.
Of course, a lot of people have been seriously hurt financially by this update, and I don’t mean to trivialize that at all. I certainly wish I had put aside a bit more into my “emergency fund”, although I’m sure that I will be able to make it through the next months as I work to rebuild some parts of my business (even if this means taking on some freelance writing gigs or something similar to pay the bills).
And I know that I haven’t been hit nearly as hard as some others either. Only about half of my sites declined in rankings (some just a few slots – others more dramatically), and I actually had a few go up in rankings as well. I’ll probably see my income drop substantially for May (up to 50%, is my guess) – but I don’t think this will be a long term drop. By studying which sites did well, I certainly see a path to move forward!
OK – Now onto my monthly income reports!
March’s earnings were actually up quite a bit from January and February’s numbers (which is probably part of the reason I’m feeling pretty optimistic). April was on target to be similar to March – before the Penguin update hit.
Here are the numbers (I’ve included February’s numbers for reference):
February March April
AdSense $405.70 $581.59 $630.61
ClickBank $476.94 $547.66 $310.41
Amazon $263.62 $374.87 $385.01
Other Programs $196.85 $380.01 $114.14
Total $1343.11 $1884.13 $1440.17
As you can see, AdSense has been making pretty nice improvements month after month, as has Amazon. In part, this is because some sites I built last year using the A100K Blueprint as well as Jan Roos’ Amazon site building course were starting to move up in the ranking. I suspect this is in part due to the sites gain age and authority (the sites built using Jan Roos’ course were especially hard to rank, although this is probably more a WordPress theme problem rather than the content itself).
Expenses were going down as well:
Expenses for March: $415.88 ($1884.13-$415.88=$1468.25 net earnings)
Expenses for April: $295.47 ($1440.17-$295.47=$1144.70 net earnings)
My Earnings Since Penguin And My Strategy Moving Forward
In the past two weeks, I’ve seen a decline in my earnings, but I certainly haven’t lost everything. Although I usually reserve the details of my weekly earnings for my newsletter subscribers, I will say that for last week (May 2-8) my earnings were $217.52. Nearly half of those earnings were from my AdSense sites, which all in all seemed to fare the update best.
During the past couple of weeks, I’ve been studying the sites that were hit, those that weren’t and those that even improved. I think there are a wide mix of factors that probably negatively impacted my sites:
- Google either devaluing (most likely) or penalizing links deemed “low quality”
- A loss of links from BMR finally impacting my sites (“negative link velocity”)
- Over-optimization of anchor text for my backlinks
Sites that fared the best seemed to be those that had many high PR links (mainly from my own private blog network), and which targeted more than one keyword (meaning that my anchor text for my links was more diverse).
Sites which I had never put much effort into backlinking (usually because they didn’t convert and/or earn me money) also did well (many of these were blogspot blogs). As did newer sites that I haven’t done much backlinking to yet.
Sites that were hit the hardest generally relied most heavily on BMR and were targeting only single words or phrases.
These are my observations, at least, and I have started various testing. Fortunately, I still have some income coming in from my remaining sites, so I’m not panicking about this. And although I will not be publishing on this blog many of my tests and results (again, I will save this information the details for my newsletter subscribers) will say that I believe high PR links from private blog networks is going to be a huge way of ranking sites in the future.
This means building my own private blog network out even further. I think I’m pretty much done with paying for links on a public blog network that will likely get found and deindexed by a Google employee down the road…
Of course, you can also go the road of abandoning SEO efforts completely, or even giving up on this “game” or internet marketing entirely. I do hope that one result of the Penguin update is that there will be much less need for link building in the future – although I’m somewhat doubtful that this hope will actually be the future reality for webmasters. More likely, it will involve building more powerful and less obvious links – which will likely be more time consuming and expensive to do.
Like nearly all kinds of businesses, this business is not static. I still think internet marketing has huge benefits when compared to many others out there. Brick and mortar stores in my area, for example, were hit hard first by the economic downturn – and then by some seemingly never-ending construction on a main road in our community that literally drove people to shop elsewhere. I’m sure you know of many people whose non IM businesses have suffered in the past few years as well.
I believe there are still plenty of opportunities in IM. It remains a business that has a low overhead, start-up costs and a lot of flexibility in terms of when you work and how much you work. The game has just changed a little. But things often change, and you just need to learn and adapt – or give up. I choose the former. 
