www.affiliateconfession.com

Well the first full month’s report is in from the new eBay EPN affiliate network thingy (I’m still not sure how to refer to it) and with the inconsistency of earnings it reminds me of the movie Jaws. As you can see below there’s not any more than 2 days of steady earnings:

I find the up and down roller coaster earning levels a little weird. I mean, what’s going on here? Is there an effort on the part of eBay buyers to only make good on their payments just every other day? Is eBay not correctly reporting and still working on getting EPN up to speed? What’s weird is that if you average out my clicks per day, discounting a couple of 3,000 clicks per day anomalies, I come in around 250 to 300 each day and that’s a pretty consistent line. So why the inconsistency in earnings?

Well anyway, just to be goofy, I took my earnings line through the 26th and made a little illustration. I hope there’s no truth to this? The shark’s teeth match up perfectly with revenue:

Anyone else seeing a roller coaster ride of eBay affiliate earnings like this?

The end of another month and the beginning of a new one means it’s time for another affiliate income report. This month’s income was substantially lower than last month’s income for a couple of reasons. One is due to the closing of the Microsoft AdCenter affiliate program which I quit promoting somewhere in the middle of the month and I also saw a significant drop in Clickbank income. I’ll have to look at than a little more closely to see what happened, but that’s just the nature of how things go sometimes. Consequently my income for this blog only went from $541.67 to $112.22 for the month.

Total affiliate income for February was $2,566.11. After advertising expenses of $126.49, the net earnings came in at $2,439.62. The breakdown is listed below:

Google Adsense - $1,326.54
Commission Junction - $655.09
Meal Planner Ebook - $136.00
TripAdvisor - $141.47
Auction Ads - $103.54
Azoogle Ads - $41.25
Clickbank - $112.22
Microsoft Affiliate - $35.00
Other Affiliate Programs - $15.00
 
Total Revenue - $2,566.11
 
Advertising  - $126.49
 
Net Earnings - $2,439.62

Again, the best earning affiliate program for me is through the eBay by using Build A Niche Store. BANS stores earned me $365.14 in February which is up a little from last month’s BANS earnings of $304.79. With the release of Build A Niche Store v3.0 due tomorrow the plan is to start the 5 day tutorial on setting up a store and getting traffic either Monday or Tuesday. I’ve already purchased 2 domain names and have set up the basic shell of a store at AirPurifierAuctions.com which is the one I will be doing the tutorial on.

Even though my income was down in February, I’m optimistic it will be up this month and very optimistic about the new version of BANS and ready to get a few more stores online and functioning.

Alan

This past Thursday was a pretty exciting day when I checked my Google Adsense earnings and found out it was my second highest day in revenue, coming in at $69.05. It was pretty significant because Thursday’s are not usually high earnings days or high traffic days on the net, at least not for me. I had planned to blog about it over the weekend, but just didn’t get around to it.

It was nice to see that much for a single day in revenue and it was encouraging because of it being a low traffic day. I thought, it can only get better from here. Well, today I woke up and logged into Adsense to see that yesterday was my number one earnings day with Google. The previous best day had been more than 2 years ago on Tuesday January 17, 2006 when the total was $72.77. Yesterday’s Adsense earnings came in at $74.38.

It’s hard to believe that it has taken more than 2 years to top my earnings, but if you’ve read lesson 4 in perseverance you’ll see that at one point Adsense revenue dropped by 50% over a 6 month period. I’ve been able to slowly build that back up again and I’m hoping this is a trend in the right direction. Since the past day of record earnings, it has been 2 years of not being able to average much more than about $40 a day with Adsense, no matter what I did. However, having my third best and first best day for revenue in the same week definitely signals an upward trend.

The biggest earning sites for me are in the travel niche and more specifically for vacation rentals. Of the 16 sites that earned me Adsense income yesterday, just 2 sites brought in more than 60% of the $74.38 total. And the great thing about that is, those two sites had combined total page views of just over 525 and unique visitors of just over 300 for both. Now, if I could just get 1,000 visitors every day to each of those sites, I could live off of that income alone. Extrapolated out, that’s over $300 a day from 2 sites. I need to put some extra time into getting more traffic to these sites.

I’m not going to reveal those two url’s, but making money in the travel niche isn’t all that difficult. One site just lists vacation rentals and the other site is a blog where I just write about rentals, attractions and stuff to do in a popular vacation area in the southeast. Beyond fairly good content, the trick is well placed Adsense units. I am also partial to a particular size of ads as well. I like the wide 336 x 280 unit. They make all the difference.

One last thing, I talk about Build A Niche Store a lot, but it’s probably not the best thing for a travel site unless it is just a small part of an overall larger site. Travel just doesn’t seem to do that well on eBay.

The next milestone for Adsense earnings is the magic $100 per day. I’m hoping to get there sometime next month.

Alan