My Passive Income Online Blog

Happy New Year Everyone! This is one of several fairly long posts to come, so bear with me and thanks in advance for reading this if you manage to get all the way through! I’m excited to write this post because December turned out to be a great month for me – finally breaking through the $2,000/month barrier! My goal for the month was to earn $2200. I didn’t quite meet this goal, but I did come very close. Here are the numbers:

AdSense: $639.92 (Last month = $739.13) -$99.21
ClickBank: $984.12 (Last month = $616.52) +$367.60
Amazon: $317.25 (Last month = $199.97) +$117.28
Other Affiliate Programs: $188.01 (Last month = $122.19) +$65.82
Gross Earnings: $2,129.39  (Last month = $1,677.81) +$451.58

With the exception of AdSense, which saw about a 15% drop in earnings – which I think is probably seasonal – earnings were up across the board, with my biggest jump being with ClickBank. I actually found this somewhat surprising, since ClickBank sales are generally very bad for the month of December. For example, take a look at the ClickBank index at cb-analytics.com:

It was not a surprise that Amazon earnings were up, however, and I was actually hoping they would be a little higher (my goal was $400 for the month). And my other sales were up due primarily to a few purchases of SEO Link Robot (thanks to all who purchased – I hope you love it as much as I do!).

Crossing the $2000 earnings barrier is a huge emotional milestone for me, similar to when I first earned $1000 in a month (which was only last July). Two thousand dollars a month, for me, is a livable income to have each month. Although it’s not where I want to be, I know that it will cover my basic bills (rent, food, utilities, car insurance, etc.) each month while also allowing me to pay for a few things that aren’t absolute necessities, but are very important to me (such as the monthly tuition for my son’s Waldorf preschool).

I know that if I were to stop building my sites today, it is likely I would continue to have earnings at around this level for months to come – and with just some minimal continual backlinking efforts – that would likely be years to come. Currently my necessary monthly business expenses – things I have to pay for to keep my sites up and running (like hosting, domain renewals, and Aweber) runs less than $200 a month. And I’ve also now purchased nearly all the software tools that I need to maintain a consistent flow of backlinks to my sites for years to come (including Article Marketing Robot, Scrapebox and SEO Link Robot).

However, although I am extremely happy to be at the $2000 a month level now, it is not where I intend to remain. I will be posting my goals for 2011 soon (probably later today or early tomorrow), so you can read more about this later. But for now I will say that I will be continuing to use a portion of my earnings each month to invest in my business.

Business Expenses in December: My expenses were actually down a bit this month as well, mainly due to the loss of my VA mid-month – which cut down on my outsourcing costs quite a bit. I did invest in several new software tools, but didn’t add to my high PR network since I decided to wait until a few days into January to start purchasing my more expensive PR4 and PR5 sites just in case Google decided to do a major PR update at the beginning of the year.

Here is a summary of my expenses this month:

Sick Membership and Link Packages: $27.99
Software (AMR, Scrapebox) : $132.95
Decaptcher Credits : $50
Virtual Assistant/Outsourcing: $ 243
Domain Purchases and Renewals : $46.55
Hosting : $48.79
Other (Aweber, VPS, Proxies) : $75.93

Total Expenses: $625.12 (Last month=$882.37)

This means my net income was $1504.27 – nearly double of what it was last month ($795.44)! That’s a nice pay raise.

Here’s a brief summary of what’s happening with the three major programs right now.

AdSense: I currently have 20 sites with AdSense on them, although nine of these promote Amazon products as well. The month had a lot of ups and downs, with my lowest earning day (Christmas eve) bringing in only $4.27 and my highest earnings day (ever!) bringing in a whopping $68.34. (You can see my entire month’s earnings here. I’ve blocked out the portions that I have to in order to comply with the Google AdSense TOS). I believe the ups and downs this month were largely seasonal in nature – due in part to a decline in traffic around some holidays, and in part to more unpredictable bidding behavior by advertisers during this month. Overall, my daily average dropped this month to $20.64 a day (it was $24.64 in November), but I’m hoping that it will rebound again this month and I’m actually going to set my goal to be to earn $1000 for the first time with AdSense for the month of January.

ClickBank: As I mentioned, ClickBank was a bit of a surprise for me this month, since sales often decline for many CB affiliates in December. However, taking a closer look at my statistics begins to show why I had the nice boost in my earnings this month. Here is a screen shot of my sales for this month (click on the image to make it larger):

What first strikes me about this month’s sales (compared to last month’s) is that my conversion rate is much better (1 in every 71 hops converted into a sale, compared to 1 in 98 hops last months). This increased conversion may be due in large part to a site revamp I did on my main money earning CB site towards the end of last month.

Second, I see that a lot more sites and programs are converting this month. In November, I had 36 sales (and four refunds) of eight different products from seven different ClickBank sites. In December, I had 57 sales (and six refunds) of twelve different products from nine different sites. In addition, I was averaging 127 hops a day in December compared with only 115 hops a day in November.

This means that more of my sites are now producing sales (I currently have 21 ClickBank sites) and that I’m getting more traffic overall to my sites. This is due primarily to my backlinking efforts and increases in the SERP rankings of a few of my sites because of these efforts.

I’m guessing that my sales were actually lower this month than they would have been normally as well due to the holiday season, so I’m setting a very ambitious goal of hitting $1500 in ClickBank sales for the month of January.

Amazon:  This month saw a nice increase in earnings from the 28 Amazon sites I now have in my portfolio. Nearly all of  my Amazon sites have been built in the past three or four months, with the exception of a few older sites that used to be monitized using AdSense and which I switched over to the Amazon program last month to see if they would perform better.

I had set my goal for this month as earning $400 with Amazon, but I fell a bit short of that goal. Here is a screen shot of my earnings for this month with Amazon:

One big disappointment was that I fell just a little short of meeting the requirements for the 7% affiliate payout level (by only 13 products). I hope, however, to reach that level soon.

I really need to focus on building some good backlinks to these sites now that they are starting to age a bit and be more responsive to backlinking efforts, so for January I will be focusing a lot of my efforts on building backlinks to my newer Amazon sites.

Sales were really crazy during the first few weeks of the month, and then they dropped to almost nothing during a week around Christmas, and just in the past few days they have started to go up again. I’m going to set the same earnings goal for January that I had for December: $400. I think it will be a real challenge to meet this goal, but hopefully I will also see some results from my backlinking efforts on these sites.

Other Affiliate Sales: I had several E-junkie and Plimus sales this month, and I’m currently building a site that is promoting a Commission Junction product as well. I’m going to set my goal for earnings from other affiliate programs this month to be $200.

This means that my total earnings goal for January is $3100! If I were bring in this amount for the month of January, that would mean I would be averaging $100 a day in passive income – and meet my 2010 goal of earning $100 a day by January, 2011!

Related posts:

1. Weekly Update #28: December 8-14
2. Weekly Update #30: December 22-28