My Passive Income Online Blog

Well, October proved to be a disappointing month overall in terms of my earnings. My total earnings were down, mainly due to a large decline in my ClickBank revenue this month. However, there were some positives as well – Amazon and AdSense continue to show some growth. Here are my totals for this month. I’ve included last month’s totals as well for comparison:

AdSense: $455.25 (Last month = $414.09) +$41.16
ClickBank: $490.58 (Last month = $742.09) -$251.51
Amazon: $115.87 (Last month = $58.12) +$57.75
Other Affiliate Programs: $14.70 (Last month = $28.68) -$13.98
Gross Earnings: $1,076.40 (Last month = $1,242.98) -$166.58

However, my business expenses were also down this month – mainly due to my letting go of one of my VA’s. Here are my expenses for October:

Outsourcing = $400
Domains =  $102.30
Hosting + Aweber = $43.95
Sick Submitter (Monthly Membership, Packets and Decaptcher fees) = $77.99
Total Expenses: $624.74 (Last Month = $941.64)

So, my net earnings for October were actually up, totaling $451.66 (last month it was $301.34).

Reflections On This Month’s Earnings and Productivity

As you may recall, last month my son’s father lost his job which meant a loss of $500 of monthly support he pays. It looks like that will not be coming in again this month either, but fortunately with the cut backs I’ve made in business expenses, I am almost able to make up that difference with what I’m earning with my business.

Still, it’s hard not to be disappointed with the decline in my gross earnings, although it is easy to identify the source of the drop: ClickBank.

I only had 30 sales in October (plus two refunds) compared to 41 sales (and three refunds) in September. My daily hop count average was down a little for the month, at 118 a day (versus 124 a day last month), and my conversions were down a lot – only converting at 1 in 124 sales (versus 1 in 93 sales for September). It’s hard to put a finger on what caused the conversions to drop, because it is mainly just one site bringing in most of my ClickBank revenue and I haven’t done anything to change it. As I mentioned in my weekly reports, it is probably just random statistical fluctuations plus a possible seasonal slowdown.

But I do have a strategy to try to get my ClickBank earnings up. First, I will be working hard to get my overall hop count/rankings up for a couple of sites that I know can convert but are not ranking well. Right now, I have two very promising sites that have been stuck at the bottom of page one in Google’s SERPs for several months now. I’m hoping that the new high PR blog network I’m building along with some aggressive backlinking efforts this month will boost one or both of these sites up to the top for their keywords.

Also, although hopefully the sales for my main money earner will pick up again on their own, I’m going to try targeting a few new keywords for that site as well. Since I know that the site usually converts well,  more traffic should equal more sales (as long as they are buying keywords). So I’ll be working on backlinking some of additional pages and see what happens.

I’m hoping that with some hard backlinking work and some good-SERP-luck, I will get my ClickBank earnings up to at least $800 for the month of November.

For AdSense, my daily earnings averaged $14.69 for October, and I would like to get that closer to the $20 a day mark by the end of November. Overall, I’m hoping to earn about $100 more this month than last month with AdSense (around $550). I have to say that it has been really gratifying to see my older AdSense sites (i.e. over one year in age) slowly move up in the SERPs over the past year and finally start bringing in more earnings!

Amazon also saw a nice boost this month as well, nearly doubling what I earned with the program last month. However, much of this came from a few Halloween sites that I put up in September and I expect the earnings will drop again until the Christmas sales start coming in – whenever that is.

I have a lot of Amazon sites that my VA has built in the past couple of months that need lots of backlinks built if they are going to earn money this Christmas season. Hopefully Sick and SEO Link Robot will help me get those sites ranking in time. I’d love to reach the $200 mark with Amazon this month!

So, for November I will be building backlinks like crazy while my VA continues to churn out more Amazon sites – and maybe a few AdSense ones as well. I am also aiming to purchase several PR 3 sites for my own private blog network (I just bought my first one yesterday!), and if I have the money, purchase Scrapebox and learn how to use it.

I’m going to set my earnings goal for November to be the same as last month’s goal: $1600. Hopefully I’ll make it this time!

Final Note:

On November the 6th, this blog will be six months old (and my business will be 18 months old!), and to commemorate this I am going to write a post summarizing some of the changes I’ve seen in the past six months and also revisit some of my goals for this year. So if you have a chance, stop by then and have a look!

Related posts:

1. September Earnings Report
2. Weekly Update #21: October 20-26