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One bad thing about vacations is that it can be really hard to get back into the swing of things. Our week long getaway at Grayton Beach in the Florida panhandle ranks up there as one of the most enjoyable vacations I’ve ever taken. We had plenty of time for activities, business planning, eating some great food, long walks on the white sandy beaches and of course the all important relaxing, making it hard to return to normal life.

We chose this location because Grayton Beach was voted best beach in the nation in 1994 for its white sugar sand, its state parks featuring deserted stretches of beach and a phenomenon known as coastal dune lakes which exist in only 5 locations worldwide and our recent discovery of this area’s themed developments. My wife read about Grayton Beach several years ago and we finally got the chance to take a vacation here.

We stayed in a beautiful 4 bedroom 3 bath home that was much larger than what we needed, but was also much less expensive than what it would have cost us for a room or condo at a resort or a “vacation rental” for a week. The home was ideally located in a community on Highway 30A that runs along the beach towns of Walton County. Watercolor, Seaside and Alys (pronounced Alice) Beach are some of the planned towns that were within a few minutes drive or slightly longer bike ride from our accommodations.

These meticulously scripted developments all feature shopping, tons of nice restaurants, bars, numerous coffee shops and of course ultra-pristine beaches with a non-commercial, very relaxing atmosphere. The only drawback of this Disney like lifestyle is that it’s hard to find a home in any of these planned communities valued at less than $1 million, meaning that prices in restaurants and shops are relatively expensive. As an example, the occasion did call for a tasty $12 (ouch!) margarita at what became our favorite taco bar. If you’re concerned about spending money here, it would be less expensive to be a crackhead in Grayton Beach than it would be an alcoholic (I’m sure the Chamber of Commerce will love that line).

Here are some more pictures of a super enjoyable vacation:

Beautiful beaches:

I actually got my wife to ride a Waverunner with me. Not much of an action pic, but this is where we picked up our Waverunner. It was actually several miles west of Grayton Beach in Destin, FL.

Enjoying coffee at PJ’s, the best coffee shop in Grayton Beach:

Insane property values on Grayton Beach. This is a $13 million home we saw in a real estate magazine and then realized it was right beside our development’s beach access. I’m not sure why it’s so expensive.

We had a great time, but it’s time to get back to work and implement some of the plans made on vacation and things I’ve been learning at PPC Coach to offset what is shaping up to be a very slow September for affiliate earnings. The goal is always to make life more extraordinary than it is normal.

I’m not the accountant in our family. Crunching numbers for hours at a time makes me loony, but I do love to figure out affiliate earnings every month because it gives me a legitimate excuse to be obsessive about checking stats, which I usually have a bad habit of doing way too much.

I was hoping to get to $5,000 in earnings this month, but actually had a slight drop. This month was a good example of why you should keep your affiliate business diversified. Revenue shifted quite a bit from some solid earners into newer and unexpected income streams. While earnings from the eBay Partner Network were down by about $400 and revenue from my top BANS store was down by nearly $600, other affiliate streams almost replaced it. Earnings from Azoogle, Clickbank and Market Leverage were up and after advertising expenses, profit was around $500 from these three. I also earned a nice $282.51 from Site Build It which I rarely ever promote.

Pay per click advertising between Facebook ads and Adwords showed the most promise this month as a spend of $1,115.11 (this is what I can specifically track)  created revenue of $1,609.90, realizing a profit of $494.79. It’s now a matter of weeding out the losers and attempting to tweak and ramp up the winners.

Total revenue did come in at over $5,000 this month, but costs were at an all time high. Everything breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,415.24
Commission Junction - $110.37
EPN - eBay - $719.19
Meal Planner Ebook - $102.00
TripAdvisor - $177.03
Clickbank - $266.83
Private Advertising - $175.00
AzoogleAds - $1,152.85
Microsoft - $200.00
Pepperjam  - $49.70
Market Leverage - $252.85
Other Affiliate Programs - $405.46

Total Revenue - $5,026.52

Total expenses - $1,208.46

Total Income - $3,818.06

The goal for September is to reach $5,000 in earnings even though this month is traditionally very slow and we’ll be on a nice beach vacation for a week. Hopefully we can avoid the 3 storms churning up the Atlantic ocean as I write this. Our last vacation was rained out, so it would be nice to get a break from that.

Remember, keep your earnings streams diversified to avoid getting crushed when that big stream turns into a tiny creek and your income suffers significantly because it’s the only thing you have going.

Google Adsense for many online marketers can almost be considered free money. It is the golden egg of revenue on the net. All you have to do is have a decent site that has content related to high paying keywords and you can make money with Google Adsense. And once you find those high paying Adsense keywords, you can just duplicate your efforts 10 or 20 times over and you too can soon be making millions on the internet.

If it were only that simple…

The problem with Adsense, or nearly any affiliate program, is that it usually isn’t a static way to make money. The dynamic way niches come and go, the way Google adjusts landing page guidelines (this does affect your earnings per click), the way your sites get ranked in the search engines and many other factors, require that you tweak your web sites on a fairly regular basis. Google dangles the Adsense carrot in front of you, but they constantly adjust the distance you must go to get the prize. And the horse you’re riding to fetch the carrot? It must be fed, watered, brushed, walked and see the vet a couple times a year.

In my last installment of Lessons In Perseverance I expressed some of my frustration working with Adsense because of this constantly changing face of Google and doing business as an affiliate marketer. And as you may have read or commented on in my March affiliate earnings report I do fairly well with Adsense, earning an average of $1,200 to $1,300 per month. But what you may not know is that the niches and sites that earned me money with Adsense this month are about 50% different than they were last year at this time. And even the sites that are the same have gone through many changes to be able to maintain those earnings since last year.

Probably one of the hardest things to get used to is watching your Adsense earnings fluctuate, even on a day to day basis. I’ve had days where earnings were $60 to $70 one day and then come in at $25 or so only 24 hours later. You also have to get used to watching one site start to rise in earnings and anticipate living life a little larger, only to watch another site tank because Google happened to make some sort of a tweak or an algorithm adjustment and whatever adjustment they made, your site happened to be in the cross-hairs.

A good example of this is, only a week or so after my best day ever in Adsense earnings I watched a high ranking travel blog go from getting 100 Google search visitors a day to only 5 per day. A site that was earning $15 to $20 per day was now earnings me $2 to $3 per day. What had I done to deserve this treatment. As far as I can tell all I did was update it after not posting for 3 months and the hammer came down. Did I freak out? No, not at all, because I’m so used to seeing this, it was just another day at the home office.

The packaging in the Adsense egg basket is not quite as soft and cushy as I would like. This is about as good a reason as any to diversify your income streams on the Internet.