My Passive Income Online Blog

My earnings for June were down from my May earnings, but there is still some good news in these numbers which I’ll detail below. First, here are the totals:

Earnings For June

AdSense: $902.68 (Last month = $914.56) -$11.91
ClickBank: $524.16 (Last month = $482.54) +$41.62
Amazon: $317.81 (Last month = $187.40) +$130.41
Other Affiliate Programs: $159.98 (Last month =$139.78) +$20.20
Consulting: $0.00 (Last month = $300.00) -$300.00

Gross Earnings: $1,904.63 (Last month = $2,024.28) -$119.65

As you can see, earnings were up for ClickBank, Amazon (my best month ever!), and for some of other smaller affiliate programs I participate in. And even AdSense, which showed a small decline in overall earnings for the month, was actually up in terms of my daily average earnings (my AdSense earnings went from averaging $29.50 a day last month to averaging $30.09 a day – the overall earnings were down simply because there is one less day in June compared to May). The biggest drop in my income comes from my consulting work, but this was completely expected as the contract I was working on ended this month (and I’m not sure I will take on any more SEO work in the near future, as I want to really focus on building up my own business right now).

My ClickBank income is still down nearly $500 from where it was a couple of months ago, as my main ClickBank earner still keeps jumping around in the lower ten of the SERPs. This despite the site having over double the number of backlinks coming to it than it did a couple of months ago – and also getting a nice PR boost in the last Google page uprank (the main page of the site went from a PR2 to a PR4). However, when (if?) it returns to the top three of  the page one results, I expect the earnings to return to the level they were at  – and hopefully surpass them – which should bring a significant overall boost to my income.

But what is most important to me is that my other programs are showing growth while this site is down. Due to my increased earnings with AdSense and Amazon over the past few months, I can deal with the drop in ClickBank earnings without it impacting my personal financial situation too severely. As I often stress, diversifying your income streams is very important in this business – and something which I hope to do even more so in the near future.

Expenses for June

My expenses for June, however, were up considerably from last month as well. This month saw a large number of domain renewals come due. In addition, I had to renew my yearly subscription to TheBestSpinner (which I consider an essential tool) and had some additional unanticipated computer related costs as well: My laptop, pictured here, finally died on me. Fortunately, my mother recently purchased a new computer for herself and gave me her old one, but I needed to purchase some additional memory for it in order to continue using some programs  (cost=$53.99).

With these additional expenses, I unfortunately didn’t have the money to invest in a lot of outsourcing this month (again). Here is the breakdown of all my business related expenses for this month:

Expenses for June:

Outsourcing (Fiverr + BFSO): $15.00 (Last month=$115.00)
Backlinking Tools and Subscriptions (Sick Submitter, decaptcher fees, proxies, The Best Spinner): $139.96 (Last month=$72.96)
Other (domain purchases and renewals, hosting, Aweber, computer related expenses): $341.33 (Last month=$89.17)

Total Expenses: $496.29 (Last month=$277.13)

This means my net income (before taxes) for June was $1408.34 (May=$1747.15)  – a decrease of $338.81.

I’m not very happy about the decrease in my overall income for the month. Despite the fact that many of the expenses this month were once a year type of expenses, I do want (and need) my net income to be much higher.

However, I do have a plan to hopefully help significantly on this front. In the next few days, I will be posting a review of my progress over the last six months in terms of meeting the goals I set at the beginning of this year, and I will also outline a new project that I will be pursuing which will not only help me meet several of my yet unfinished goals for the year and also hopefully boost my income significantly. This will be a public project, similar to what I did last year with my Master Cleanse site building project, where I will be revealing the actual website I am working on, traffic stats and more. So stay tuned!

Reflections on Individual Programs

AdSense: As I mentioned above, although my overall average for AdSense earnings were down a little from last month, my daily average was actually up (and over the $30/day mark for the first time ever!).

For June I had 24 websites (plus a few hubs) bring in AdSense revenue (ranging from $0.56 up to $460.45 per site). However, only six of these websites were bringing in at least $1/day, with two of these websites being new sites that I’ve built this year following the AdSense 100K Blueprint! In fact, the first A100K site that I built (now five months old) earned a whopping $144.59 – and it’s only ranked at #3 right now for its primary keyword. I can’t wait to see how these sites perform once they move even higher up in the SERPs! (For those interested in seeing my daily totals for everyday in June, click here). I’m still hoping to cross the $1000 mark for AdSense earnings – this will be my goal again for July.

ClickBank was very disappointing again this month, although I did see some increase in my earnings. Mostly I’m just waiting to see if my main earner regains its rankings, while working behind the scenes on promoting some of my other sites as well. It can be hard, however, since most well converting ClickBank projects have a lot of competition and getting high rankings for keywords is quite difficult.

Still, one huge plus for ClickBank when compared to other affiliate programs – namely AMAZON – is that they have long made a commitment to not kick their affiliates to the curb over sales tax disputes (read their post here on this issue, if you are interested). So in many ways, ClickBank feels like a more secure source of income to me than either AdSense (since Google is known for banning people outright with little explanation) or Amazon (who is dropping affiliates from their program in numerous US states over a sales tax dispute).

This month I saw a total of 31 ClickBank sales plus 4 refunds (last month = 32 sales plus five refunds). My hop count was down a bit this month to 3472 (compared to 3890 last month) while my conversion rate was up slightly (1 sale for every 124 hops, compared to 1 sale for every 130 hops last month). I attribute this primarily to losing the rankings for be best performing site, which generally converts pretty well (prior to this, my monthly conversion rates were usually around 1 in every 80 hops). The traffic decline I saw I think is likely seasonal but I’ll keep my eye on that. Here is a screen shot of my CB stats for this month (click to enlarge):

For July, I’m hoping that my main earner will start to show some signs of recovery (it’s about time), and I’m setting my earnings goal to $800 (again).

Amazon – As you can tell, I have been quite discouraged reading the news about Amazon dropping affiliates as of late, and I have considered pulling back on my Amazon affiliate activities as a result. I actually think I’m pretty safe since I live in Washington state, where Amazon’s headquarters is located, and Amazon has been collecting sales tax in our state for years now (and affiliates have not been impacted by this). So unless they relocate their entire business out of state, hopefully nothing will change for me in the near future. Still, I feel that on principle I still may want to pull back on developing more Amazon affiliate sites in the near future.

But regardless, I actually had my best month in terms of earnings from Amazon ever this month – beating my previous high set last December by a whopping .56 cents! Given that November and December are usually crazy in terms of Amazon earnings – I can’t wait to see what this next December brings!

The increase I saw in Amazon earnings were largely due to the new Amazon sites I have built using Jan Roos’ methodology and the recommended WordPress Review Theme he suggests in his course. One of these sites (the second one I built) brought in $113.11 this month, while the first one I built brought in a more modest $25.97. Neither of these sites are ranking in the top ten yet for their targeted keywords (they are only a couple months old at this point), and these sales were only from random long tail keyword searches. Again, I can’t wait to see how they perform once I get them ranking well (currently both are high on page two for their primary keywords, so hopefully this won’t take too long).

And here is a screen shot of my Amazon earnings for this month:

For July, I’m hoping to reach the $500 mark. That is a bit ambitious, and it is completely dependent on having my sites rank better, but I’m really hoping for good results from Amazon for this month.

Finally, in terms of other affiliate programs, I continue to make a modest amount each month from E-Junkie, PayDotCom, and Plimus affiliate sales. About half of these are from products I recommend on this blog (thanks for your support!), while the other half comes from products promoted on other websites I own and are completely unrelated to internet marketing.

Overall, I’m hoping that my July earnings level will hit the $2500 mark (all from passive income sources).

Reflections on Work and Other Related Stuff

As I mentioned earlier, I have a big project in the works and I will leave those details for another upcoming post. However, other than this project, the month’s activities have largely been focused on redoing some of my older Amazon sites into a new format (still haven’t quite completed this work yet), and doing my usual backlink building.

There was yet another algorithm change rolled out a couple of weeks ago (Panda 2.2), but to be honest, I didn’t really notice its impact at all on my sites. As with earlier versions, it seems these Panda updates are targeting sites with low or a lot of duplicate content, and fortunately my sites seem to pass the content quality test.

That said, there does seem to be some kind of slow down in the manner in which Google registers new link building. My guess (albeit a wild guess) is that some kind of filter has been imposed. I wouldn’t say this is a penalty – my link building efforts are still showing good results – they just seem to be slower than they were a few months ago and new links seem to take longer to register than they used to. This means it takes longer to rank a site than it used to (for me, at least), although they will – eventually – get there.

There was also a recent Google PageRank update as well, and in general my sites fared very well. Several of my A100K sites started earlier this year got PR3′s and PR2′s, and many other sites saw a nice boost as well!

The drop I’ve experienced with my ClickBank income has resulted in me spending far less on outsourcing efforts, which has left me feeling a bit overwhelmed by projects and writing.  Despite money being tight, I’m going to have to hire someone soon and in the past week or two I’ve  started searching again for a new full-time employee (located in the Philippines, most likely). So far, I haven’t had any luck. After past experiences, I’m certainly going to be much more careful and selective than I have been before with who I choose. But hopefully I will find someone very soon.

And how was your month? Please leave any comments or questions below – and thanks again for reading what I know is a very long monthly update! And don’t forget to visit again soon to learn more about my upcoming project. This month is actually going to be a quite busy month on this blog – so do be sure to visit again soon!

Related posts:

1. June Earnings Report
2. May 2011 Earnings Report