March Earnings Report
Monday, April 4, 2011 16:16I was a little bit slow getting my earnings report up this month. One thing I have noticed in the past few months is that many – in fact, most – of my favorite IM bloggers have stopped posting their earnings, something I’m a bit disappointed about. It used to be that at the first of the month I’d be in a rush to post my earnings so I could compare it with other bloggers I respected and who were at a similar point in their IM business, to see how I fared. I completely understand why others have stopped posting their reports, but I must admit I find it a bit disappointing and I’m not quite as motivated as I used to be to get these reports up. That said, I still am going to post mine through the end of the year, since I know how important it was to me to see realistic earnings and expense reports from others when I was first starting out.
My earnings at the March level were pretty much at the same level they have been for the past few months – just over the $2000/month mark. This is a mixed blessing, really. On the one hand, I haven’t seen a decline in my earnings and $2K a month is meeting my basic financial needs right now. Still, I want those earnings to grow. I know that the work I’m doing now – and for the past few months – won’t really show results for three to six months down the road usually, and being patient can be difficult at times. For much of December and early January, I did little in terms of business activities (backlink building, especially – I did not have a VA working in December, and I wasn’t doing much work myself being distracted by holiday activities). I imagine my slow growth right now is reflective of that gap in activities. However, for the past month or two I have been working hard, and I hope to see those results of those activities showing up real soon.
I mentioned this in my weekly newsletter (if you haven’t yet signed up for it yet, you are really missing out!), but I am adding a new category to my earnings this month: SEO and website consulting work. I’m often asked by people via this blog if I can help them with website building or development, and until now I have rarely taken on these kind of jobs since I prefer to focus on my own business instead. But I recently took on one SEO contract to see how I like doing this work. The contract was a direct result of my activities on this blog, so it feels like I should report it as part of my internet marketing income even though it is a bit more “active” than passive. I will separate it out from the other income streams I have however, and will be labeling such jobs as “consulting” in my future income reports.
So here are the number for March:
AdSense: $598.21 (Last month = $497.96) +$100.25
ClickBank: $940.87 (Last month = $1024.40) -$83.53
Amazon: $170.61 (Last month = $141.42) +$29.19
Other Affiliate Programs: $108.96 (Last month = $358.20) -$249.24
Consulting: $300 (Last month = n/a)
Gross Earnings: $2,128.65 (Last month = $2,021.48) +$107.17
With the exception of the always unpredictable “other” category, earnings for nearly all my programs were pretty similar to last month. Overall, earnings were up just a bit, although that is only with the consulting work factored in.
My expenses were also pretty similar to last month, although they were spread out a little differently. This month I purchased five more expired domains, two which I have added to my high PR homepage blog network (one PR4 site plus one PR3 site) and three to my blog posting network (all PR2 blogs). I also have fired my VA (again), and am now spending most of my outsourcing costs on writers instead. Here is a summary of my expenses this month:
Outsourcing (virtual assistant, writers, Mturks, fiverr, article spinning, HiveDesk utility): $461.00 (Last month=$554.00)
Backlinking Tools and Subscriptions (Sick Submitter, decaptcher fees, ebooks, link packages, proxies, homepage backlinks): $123.96 (Last month=$113.96)
Other (Domains, Hosting, Aweber): $229.05 (Last month=$143.59)
Total Expenses: $814.01 (Last month=$811.55)
This means my net earnings before taxes was just a bit higher this month, coming to $1314.64 (versus $1209.93 last month).
I’m really not very excited about those totals, although I do have hope for the near future that this amount will go up soon, which I’ll discuss more below. Here are some reflections on the individual programs.
AdSense: My AdSense earnings are currently on the rebound. This is the result of new sites being built – my main earner is still down, bringing in only around $350 this month (versus over $500/month a few months ago. Rankings haven’t changed for this site, BTW, but the amount earned per click has dropped).
If you have been reading my weekly newsletter, you will know that the sites I have been building based on the AdSense 100K Blueprint are now starting to generate income (the oldest is now eight weeks old), and I have a lot of hopes for these sites in the next month or two! Currently I have seven A100K sites built, and plans to build another three this month based on the A100K blueprint strategy before I take a break and let them age, rank well, and then do a full evaluation of their performance and whether I will continue on with this strategy.
I have posted my daily earnings here. I can’t show you the impressions or CTR, but I will tell you that my impressions are way up – nearly double what they were at the beginning of the year. My daily average this month was just over $19, but if you look carefully you will see that earnings toward the end of the month were much higher, with most days well over the $20 level now. My goal for April is to get my monthly earnings back over the $700 level again.
ClickBank: Earnings were down a bit this month, although mostly because the items that sold generated a little less money per sale than last month, not because of a decline in overall sales. I had a total of 51 sales and five refunds for March, versus 52 sales and 4 refunds in February. I chalk this up to just randomness.
On the plus side, I am getting more traffic to the sites (3,729 hops in March, versus 3,127 hops in February). Conversions were down a bit this month, however, with only 1 in 79 hops converting (versus 1 in 64 in February).
I’d like to get some of these sites ranking and converting even better, of course. My focus has certainly been more on AdSense and Amazon as of late and I’ve not been backlinking these sites too aggressively. My current plans is to take a hard look at my ClickBank sites and strategy during this summer to see if I can boost my earnings significantly.
Here is my monthly screenshot (click to make larger):
I am going to set my goal to be $1400 again this month, which I think is really in reach, especially given a little luck and possibly a little boost in the SERPs for a few targeted keywords.
Amazon: Earnings were up a little this month, but they are not nearly where I want them to be. Since December, my earnings have pretty much hovered between $150-$200 a month, and I would really like to get this total over the $300 month in the next month or two.
Consequently, from April through June I will be trying out a new site building strategy based largely on Jan Roos’ “The Physical Affiliate” WSO course and Amazon site building method and the WordPress review theme he recommends using as well. Since I no longer have a VA working for me building these sites, I’ll be setting them up myself but outsourcing the content. My goal is to get three to five new sites built a month over the next three months (at least ten total).
On the positive side, I am getting more traffic to my sites and orders shipping. In March I had a total of 60 orders shipped (plus two refunded) versus only 45 in February. I had a total of 3365 product link clicks in March, versus only 2472 in February. I think my earnings would have been a lot higher if it hadn’t been that a lot of them (like with ClickBank) were for cheaper products (ebooks and such) Here is a screenshot of earnings:
Still, they are not converting very well – at only around a 2% conversion rate. I’m hoping this new theme plus better written reviews will help improve my conversion rate and my Amazon earnings overall. I’m setting my earnings goal for April to be $300 (again).
Other: Right now I’m not promoting any other affiliate programs too aggressively, and other than occasional sales from products mentioned on this blog I imagine this amount will stay at its usual level, somewhere between $100-$200. I’ll set it at $200, just to be optimistic.
Consulting: I expect another $300 to be earned for consulting work as well.
This means my overall earnings goal for April is $2800. That is still not at the $3000 ($100/day) mark, but hopefully it is a very realistic goal. Given that my AdSense impressions, Clickbank hops and Amazon click through rates are all much higher this month than last – if those numbers continue to go up and up, my earnings have to start reflecting this change soon as well! 
Related posts:
Maria (WriterGig) says:
April 5th, 2011 at 3:13 am
Your clickbank earnings are especially impressive to me — way to go!
Maria (WriterGig) recently posted..Rev-Share Sites Still Viable for Residual Income
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Michelle Reply:
April 5th, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Thanks Maria.
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Ruth - Web Career Girl says:
April 5th, 2011 at 9:10 am
I still appreciate your earnings reports despite the fact that I haven’t been posting my own (and also I’ve been so busy that I haven’t been very good at commenting here!) And I look forward to following them in future as I have a feeling things are going to go really well this year!
Ruth – Web Career Girl recently posted..I’m Taking A Blogging Sabbatical
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Michelle Reply:
April 5th, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Thanks, Ruth. I certainly hope your feeling is right!
I know you quite busy right now with moving and all, but you are certainly one of my favorite IM bloggers whose postings I miss – you provided a lot of inspiration to me in the past. 
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Ben says:
April 5th, 2011 at 11:40 am
You say this month your earnings didn’t really increase…but at least they didn’t dip either. Staying at around $2,000 is better than it not dipping to $1,800 or so. The work you’re putting in at the moment; you’ll see the benefits in the near future.
I have a question (without giving away your nichés or anything), to get the $170 this month from Amazon, how many Amazon websites do you have?
I’m just setting up my first one using a decent theme and an ebook a friend sent me. [Exact Searches] are in the region of 1k-3k with all my keywords. Hopefully I’ll start to see my first real passive income from it
Ben.
Ben recently posted..Earnings Report- March 2011
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Michelle Reply:
April 5th, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Right now I have around 20 sites that have Amazon on them in some form or another. However, about half a dozen of those are costume sites that I only expect to do well in September and October (Halloween) and another half dozen or so are geared towards Christmas items and/or winter weather stuff. So right now, I’d say only about 10 are really producing sales. I want to build another four or five costume sites plus also build more “evergreen” sites as well – focusing on things that are not seasonal.
Keep us posted on how they do!
Good look with your Amazon sites – sounds like you’ve got a plan and the tools to help.
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Bristolboy says:
April 5th, 2011 at 1:33 pm
These are some very good earnings. You mention no increase in earnings but at least you weren’t adversely affected by the Google algorithm changes like some other people were!
Bristolboy recently posted..Monthly Update – March 2011
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Michelle Reply:
April 5th, 2011 at 4:21 pm
You’re certainly right about that. A few of my newer sites slipped a little in the rankings in early February, but in general they’ve fared the recent algo shifts pretty well. I see you have an update too – I’m off to read!
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Jared @ Trickle Cheddar says:
April 5th, 2011 at 2:11 pm
I’m still chasing down the adsense, and even after your drop in CPC and RPM, you are destroying me. I appreciate you continuing to post your earnings reports, because like you, it gives me a lot of inspiration to see some realistic numbers rather than a bunch of guru hype nonsense. Thanks for sharing again.
Jared @ Trickle Cheddar recently posted..Won the Domain Auction and other Firsts!
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Ben Reply:
April 5th, 2011 at 2:15 pm
I must also say I appriciate the monthly earnings reports.
Why are others stopping it?
I find it inspirational, and it also gives some sort of goal and something to aim for.
Others should carry on posting it because it lets you gage yourself against others and compare notes. It also lets you refine targets and can give you that extra boost you need to bring in that extra income.
Ben.
Ben recently posted..Earnings Report- March 2011
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Michelle Reply:
April 5th, 2011 at 4:25 pm
I think it is because of a lot of factors. Some people stop posting when their earnings are not doing so well (I know that I find it hard as well), others are busy with life, and still others are so successful that they feel uncomfortable releasing the figures. I think it is probably coincidental that so many bloggers I found motivating have stopped either posting their earnings or posting pretty much altogether in the past few months, and I know many have good reasons to stop. Still, it makes me a little bit sad.
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Michelle Reply:
April 5th, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Thanks Jared, I’m glad you find them helpful.
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Tiptopcat says:
April 5th, 2011 at 4:15 pm
I too am glad that you are continuing with your monthly earnings reports. It is great because you explain clearly how much time and effort it takes to reach the level that you are at. This makes me feel a little better about my own lowly figures because I know for a fact that I do not put in the same commitment as you do – I want to but I always seem to get a little distracted.
I wish you luck for your targets this month.
Tiptopcat recently posted..Earnings For March 2011
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Michelle Reply:
April 5th, 2011 at 4:31 pm
Thanks for your comments. As I remember, you did quite well with Amazon last December – your numbers were quite impressive! I’m off to take a look at your earnings report too – seeing several comment luv posts now reminds me that there are still some great bloggers that post their earnings – so thanks to you too!
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jamesthejust says:
April 5th, 2011 at 11:53 pm
Nice earnings – sorry to disappoint by not posting mine (hopefully you got the Tweet follow up), I’m stopping that just because I do feel uncomfortable with posting now – March’s figures were my highest yet in IM (actually the highest I’ve been paid in a month ever personally – but it’s not like I was a doctor or anything).
What influenced me to stop was reading several blogs I really enjoy and find inspirational despite their lack of posting – Paula and Wanda’s AffiliateBlogOnline.com and Dave’s MakingMoneyontheInternet.com.
I remember reading Mike Iser a while back, his figures were always inspiring – yours are as well, Michelle. But I’d like to keep it private at this point for reasons that I’ve read on those two blogs in particular.
And for me – I make 90% of my earnings from one site – so now I’m feeling like a target all of a sudden.
“Look at me – I make XXXX from this one site!” That was a big motivator for my paranoia. (Especially reading your “Dirty Tricks in SEO” post! Skeeeeered o’ you, and I know you’re not alone!)
Anyhow – if anyone ever wants to know they can always email me – otherwise I feel like a target. AND I’d hope to be read despite what I make – which isn’t guru level anyway.
What do you think, M?
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Michelle Reply:
April 6th, 2011 at 5:43 am
I can totally understand why you don’t post your earnings any more James, and it completely makes sense to me. I just miss the friendly competition and seeing how badly you kicked my butt each month in terms of earnings.
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Ben Reply:
April 6th, 2011 at 7:46 am
*ben wonders* – possibly share earnings and a breakdown amongst and invite only friends list?
Ben.
Ben recently posted..Earnings Report- March 2011
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JamestheJust Reply:
April 6th, 2011 at 6:22 pm
Ha – yeah, if it’s important to anyone, I’m open to emailing, no worries.
Michelle – you’re building equity with all your sites, and sitting on a goldmine of ideas, no doubt the competition is far from over.
JamestheJust recently posted..How I Bought SEO Tools on a Budget
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Carrie says:
April 6th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Thanks for not pulling a James, Michelle!
Carrie recently posted..March Earnings – Milestone Met
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JamestheJust Reply:
April 6th, 2011 at 6:23 pm
boo! hiss!
JamestheJust recently posted..How I Bought SEO Tools on a Budget
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Ben Reply:
April 8th, 2011 at 8:06 am
LOL! And Carrie, well done on completing your first $1,000 month! That’s excellent.
Ben.
Ben recently posted..Update- Week 25
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Aaron says:
April 6th, 2011 at 10:23 pm
I am in the camp of not revealing earnings when they reach a certain level because the competition can be so cut throat sometimes. However, I decided to share one part of my earnings, which is from Amazon. I am determined to crack the 3k mark per month for amazon this year and I will use my site to crack my progress and to share my learnings. I hit 1k in dec but my biggest earner went into a google dance and my amazon dropped to only 300. It came back this month so I am motivated to build up my amazon income.
300 for consulting? Hmmm.. Seems a bit low. I typically charge my SEO clinet 2k at least for ranking some keywords that they want, which are not too competitive.
Aaron recently posted..How to earn 1000 with adsense-final money making lesson
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Michelle Reply:
April 7th, 2011 at 5:30 am
Thanks Aaron for sharing your perspectives. I wish you the best with Amazon – it sounds like a really doable goal. 2K would certainly sound appropriate (even low) if you were guaranteeing to rank a client for the top three positions for several keywords (although the level of competition would also certainly determine payment, wouldn’t it). That isn’t quite what I’m doing in this case, and this contract actually extends over several months, but thanks for sharing your perspective.
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Tiffany says:
April 7th, 2011 at 1:30 pm
At this point I would be happy if my earnings only went up $100 a month. I think it’s great that you still post your earnings every month. It’s definitely inspiring to me. I stopped posting my earnings because the first half of the year I just want to focus on the work and not so much money I am making. Since having the baby 6 weeks ago I haven’t been able to do much of anything. I’m lucky if I get an hour a day to work. My earnings haven’t gone done but they aren’t going up yet either. I’m hoping to really bust through the $1000 a month mark in the next few months once I can get back to working more. (fingers crossed)
Tiffany recently posted..Squidoo vs HubPages – Update 4
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Zero Passive Income says:
April 12th, 2011 at 8:42 am
Michelle,
I just started reading your blog and it’s so inspiring! I’ve just started to build some passive income for myself and they things you teach here are invaluable.
Jeremy
Zero Passive Income recently posted..March 2011 Wealth Reports
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Michelle Reply:
April 12th, 2011 at 8:49 am
Thanks Jeremy! I just checked out your blog – it looks like you guys are doing great in terms of building up your passive income part of your earnings portfolio and raising your net worth. Congratulations!
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JamestheJust says:
April 13th, 2011 at 5:39 pm
Michelle –
Looking forward to the podcast! And not sure about where to post this comment for the newsletter. Anyhow – I hope your SEO Link Robot sales go up, I’ve recommended a number of people your way to see if it’s a better solution for them. So far, though – SENukeX for the win.
Tiger blood.
JamestheJust recently posted..Make Money Online Business Plan – Profit Autopilot
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Michelle Reply:
April 13th, 2011 at 5:53 pm
Thanks James. I’m not even sure my aff links work any more, as he is changing payment processors – but still, I think SEOLR is a good deal as a one time fee.
How’s SENuke working for you, BTW? I’ve heard a lot of reports that it has been having a lot of problems being overloaded, buggy, crashing, etc. Not that SEOLR doesn’t have its own issues from time to time (all these web 2.0 submitters are problematic, IMO). Are you and Charlie Sheen having fun with it still…?
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Mike says:
April 17th, 2011 at 10:03 pm
Hey Michelle,
Good job for March. I am using the 100k BP as well. Just keep at it and your revenue could potentially double in 6 months based on what you’re doing today.
Take Care Mike
Mike recently posted..How The future Will Dramatically Change Your Retirement and Everything Else- Part 1
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Michelle Reply:
April 29th, 2011 at 11:07 am
Thanks for your comment Mike. Best of luck to you with the A100K program as well – hopefully I will see you on the forum.
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Chris says:
April 20th, 2011 at 9:38 am
Hey Michelle
keep going, you’re doing awesome. Your blog is a complete inspiration.
Just to say, I found your backlinks report so, so helpful and full of great ideas.
thanks so much!
keep up the great work
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Michelle Reply:
April 29th, 2011 at 11:08 am
Thanks Chris. I’m glad you found the report useful, and I really appreciate your feedback!
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Anton says:
April 26th, 2011 at 6:27 am
Hello Michelle!
Finally I managed to get to fellow blogs ) I think these days are very hard days for us, since gogle seems to keep on anchging things in their algo, at least I see a lot of people being hurt – serious rankings decrease, total site bans, and complete mess in SEO enviornment.
So pushing the incomes these days is still a good result! I’m not posting now due to this stuff, since there’s no clear picture in SEO yet… Hope to read your end of April post, your thoughts on this.
Best,
Anton
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Michelle Reply:
April 29th, 2011 at 11:10 am
Hi Anton – ha! Well thanks for finally stopping by.
I’m looking forward to seeing your April numbers – I’m always blown away by what you are earning each month. Google definitely makes life exciting for us, don’t they? 
I’ve definitely noticed some changes again just in just the past few days…
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Anton Reply:
April 30th, 2011 at 1:08 am
Yes Michelle!
Another month passed so fast! I’ve read a lot of stories from affiliates seeing their sites even completely banned from google index, in the recent days.
I’ll do my numbers soon and will also share my thoughts on the current situation, however to be frank it’s so unclear now, the google update seems to continue on.
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