www.affiliateconfession.com

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.

Another affiliate income report is due and July turned out to my best month in affiliate earnings so far, topping last month by 24% which was also a record month. Fortunately I haven’t been slowed down at all by the summer slump many affiliates experience.

Two of the biggest increases in July came from a new record in AdSense earnings, beating the previous best month by $200 and earnings from the eBay affiliate program for the first time crossed the $1,000 per month barrier thanks to Build A Niche Store. Earnings were also good from Pepperjam Network, Market Leverage and AzoogleAds.

Expenses were a bit higher than usual this past month due to experimenting with PPC and having some success. I hope to scale that up a bit this month. Total income for July 2008 came in at $4,312.31 and breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,694.94
Commission Junction - $35.94
EPN - eBay - $1,196.73
Meal Planner Ebook - $85.00
TripAdvisor - $216.63
Clickbank - $88.08
Private Advertising - $140.00
AzoogleAds - $182.20
Microsoft - $300.00
Pepperjam - $278.09
Market Leverage - $219.50
Other Affiliate Programs - $302.77
 
Total Revenue - $4,739.88
 
Total expenses - $427.57
 
Total Income - $4,312.31

Three things I’ll be working on this month to hopefully increase the income again will be paid advertising through Facebook Ads, Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, getting more incoming links to my travel sites and continued work on my Build A Niche Stores. A single BANS store produced more than $800 in revenue this month and I’d like to get that store over the $1,000 barrier.

I’ve also started working on a store mash-up that can bring in content from eBay, YouTube, any RSS feeds, ClickBank, Amazon, Overstock and more that could be pretty lucrative. I’ll be explaining more about that coming up in a few more weeks.

With another 24% increase in August that would put things over the $5,000 per month mark which is a fairly significant milestone in earnings. I’ll be taking a week off this month and a week off in September for a birthday and anniversary so it will be hard to keep up the steady pace of seeming non stop work for the next couple of months. Hopefully there are enough things in place to keep the income on auto pilot while the work pace slows down until mid Sept.

Not intending to write this post at all after part 1 and part 2 of the Adsense series, I discovered something interesting the other day about Adsense earnings while looking at some click-thru statistics on specific pages. So the How To Earn The Most From Google Adsense series continues.

Obviously the best way to earn the most from Google Adsense is to get people to click on your ads, but you can’t just ask people to do that or even trick them into doing so by making your ads appear like anything other than what they are. So how do you get people to click on your ads? You do so by making them the most appealing thing or subject on the page to click on.

But the secret to this goes a little deeper. What I found out after looking over my statistics in the past few days is that most of my pages get anywhere from no clicks (we all have pages like that) to around a 5 to 10% click-thru rate. But then I have a few pages that get an astounding 20 to 26% click-thru rate month after month after month. That means one out of every four to five people that lands on one of these pages clicks an Adsense ad (By the way, if you aren’t using Adsense url channels to track clicks on individual pages you need to be).

How is this happening?

Okay, Here’s The Big Adsense Secret

You can only do this on certain kinds of pages written a specific way. The big secret is, you need to write in a general manner instead of a specific manner. What I mean by this is that if you are writing for your travel based site and write about lets say, the city of San Francisco as a place to vacation, the more general you write, the better your CTR. Here’s what I’m finding out - If you talk about walking along Fisherman’s Warf being around the water and the restaurants, and shops, and sights, and sounds and what it’s like to be in that area and even provide links to some of these things, the ads on pages such as this usually turn out to be the most attractive thing on the page for visitors to click on.

However, if you write about a specific restaurant you visited or hotel you stayed in and go into detail about what you ate, what your hotel room was like, the view you had, etc., and then provide a link, your visitors are more than likely going to go visit that link because that’s where you have driven their interest. Of course if you have an affiliate link you can send them through, that’s the way to do it, but that’s not always possible, especially in the case of a restaurant.

As an example of this, my best converting Adsense page has 9 other links in the content of the page to various parks, shops, attractions and flight information all related to the area I’m writing about, yet 25% of the people that visit that page choose to click on an Adsense ad. To contrast that, I write about many of the establishments Jean and I have stayed in or explored and provide pictures and links and these are my worst converting Adsense pages. Everyone wants to go visit and see these places for themselves, they don’t want to read all about the great place you stayed or ate at and then click on an ad.

A warning is needed here though. This doesn’t mean you should go out and create sites full of nothing but general information, that will eventually bore your readers. Visitors do like to read interesting and specific things on a variety of subjects you may have some expertise in. There is always the likelihood someone will get to your pages looking for something specific and and up on a general page because they are looking for the history of an area or want to get the general feel of being where you’ve been or experiencing what you’ve experienced.

If you have a site that isn’t doing well with Adsense, take a look at part 1 and part 2 of this series on the kinds of sites that do well with Adsense and how to optimize your site for Adsense and if you still aren’t doing well, try doing some summary and general info pages based on the info in this post. That’s probably where you’re going to find your Adsense sweet spot.

I’ve written previously on how the travel niche is good for earning money through Google Adsense because it is something where people spend time shopping and looking for the best deals. This kind of action can get you multiple Adsense clicks even on the same page of your travel based site. Another reason travel is a good niche is because it is hot during the first part of the summer through the beginning or middle part of August when other niches are traditionally experiencing a slowdown.

Let’s look at a comparison of the terms vacation rentals and electric guitar and their search volume during 2007 according to Google Trends. As you can see from the graph below the term “vacation rentals” started an upward trend in May and is peaking out right about now as I write this post. And there are other niches within the “vacation rental” niche that trend fairly well through the beginning of October. However, if you look at the keyword “electric guitar” it takes a slight drop at the beginning of July and doesn’t trend upwards until the Christmas season.

The electric guitar drop off in summer is more pronounced when you look at the chart back in 2006 by itself without comparing it to another term.

The obvious reason travel is a good niche to sustain you through the summer is because that’s when kids are out of school and families are planning and taking their vacations. The trick is to find sub niches within the travel niche that sustains even longer through the summer months (easy to do with Google Trends). You can also see that when travel hits its low search volume during November and the first couple of weeks in December, that’s when people are searching for electric guitars and other gift type items for Christmas.

I haven’t looked into this, but other niches that would probably be great during summer are things like camping equipment, travel accessories and recreational toys that people will be using as they are enjoying the summer months.

If you plan your affiliate marketing strategy right and diversify your earnings, you can get through the summer slowdown without losing much steam at all and be ready for the robust Christmas shopping season, possibly with some extra advertising dollars. 

It’s time for another income report here at AffiliateConfession.com and it’s a record month for affiliate earnings mainly due to some nice contest winnings in May which lets me cook the books a little. I didn’t report that I won $750 in cash from the Webmaster-Talk.com contest and I’ve used that to cover $543.66 worth of advertising expenses this month. When the $750 has been spent I’ll again take off advertising from the revenue total.

Google Adsense and the Microsoft Affiliate program contributed significantly to the record this month as well. The breakdown of earnings this month is as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,492.96
Commission Junction - $50.37
EPN - eBay - $778.60
Meal Planner Ebook - $119.00
TripAdvisor - $222.83
Clickbank - $189.95
Private Advertising - $105.00
AzoogleAds - $17.30
Microsoft - $400.00
Other Affiliate Programs - $103.60
 
Total Revenue - $3,479.61
 
Total Income - $3,479.61

You may have noticed that Commission Junction revenue is down by a large margin and that’s because most of what I was earning through them was from eBay who has now moved over to their own private program management and Pepperjam Network. Also, I was earning some decent money through generating leads with Apartments.com and had been up in the range of $200-$250 per month, but their landing pages stopped converting and now the same amount of clicks sent their way is earning me $40 rather than $200 per month.

I’m continuing to work on PPC and have had some limited success and with earnings this month I’ll have an even bigger advertising budget than last month, so things are looking up.