Online business is never boring and one of the key benefits to making money online is that you can see results and gather data very quickly. In less than 1 month, Davey Z and I have learned a lot about search engine marketing and gathered enough data to be able to anticipate and predict certain patters in our trial campaign. We hope to be able to take what we’ve learned in the last few weeks and scale our projects to make us more money this month, so that we can reinvest it and keep growing.

This is what this month looked like:

In January, my eBay sites had started off nicely, earning me roughly $3.50 per day. February showed a little bit of a slowdown for these sites, although I believe this has to do with my lack of effort in updating those sites. For the month of February, those eBay sites made roughly $2.87 per day, or about $83. Although this is a low number and I’d like to see much better results from those sites, it’s important to remember that I did absolutely no work on those sites this month nor did I invest 1 penny into buying new products/plugins or any advertising. This is $83 that go right into my technology savings fund.

In addition to the made for Ebay sites that are making me some money online, I also kept up this blog and started on a search engine marketing campaign with Davey Z. The blog’s performance was similar to last month’s, although advertising sales are still sluggish. Do you want to see your ad on my site? Contact me by 5pm on Wednesday, March 5th and I’ll give you a special rate! Thanks to Claire from Sharp Wit Designs and a few paid reviews, this site earned $40.50.

The part about this income report that I’m most excited about is the SEM report. Starting in the last few days of January, Davey Z and I launched and managed 4 different campaigns. Two of them turned out to do well and two of them turned out to be dogs. We ditched the dogs and kept the ones that worked. That being said, our total income from our SEM campaign topped out at $721.25. Not bad for our first month, eh? Our total cost for running these campaigs was $367.79, but given that we used some promo coupons to get us started, our adjusted costs came to be only $84.87, for a grant profit of $636.38. This is a great first month! We are going to reinvest these earnings and go all out in March. Hopefully to see these numbers keep growing!

2008 is off to a great start. Breaking records and learning new things, I’ve been able to add to my arsenal of webtrepreneurship. I hope that March is a better month than February; given that Davey Z and I already have a bit of experience with SEM and have data to helps us know what to expect, we hope to keep trucking along and pushing the envelope of our SEM skills.

a

Before I tell you how much I made this month, let me first give you a bit of background. Last year I managed to earn approximately $400 total online by promoting a health-related affiliate product. That website is still ranking reasonably well on Google, has great potential to rank in the top 10, but has not been converting any sales in the last 3 months as I have not had any time to work on it. Reworking that site will be priority number one for me in February as that site brings in commissions ranging from $20 to over $100 when sales are made. I believe that this product is capable of helping make even more money this year and I’m looking forward to working with a friend and talented writer to help turn that site from a dud to a stud.

This website is continuing to grow; comparatively speaking this site is still very small. Averaging only 50 or so visits per day and 34 RSS readers, I would like to double or triple those numbers in February and I’m cooking up some strategies and more guest posts to help me achieve that goal.

This is how things turned out in January:

In January, I earned $212 online. This is a combined income consisting of a paid review and private ad sales on this website and my recently built “made for eBay” sites. The eBay websites can be optimized further by applying a few more SEO techniques and I think that the numbers in February will be even better. In addition, I am planning another 3 or 4 “made for eBay” sites in February so that alone should help bump up my monthly income.

As you can see, I also had some expenses. The advertisement expenses were to promote the site in addition to my search engine marketing scheme that I’m working on. The search marketing campaign is still on going and I’m tweaking it with my friend and business partner so that we can figure out what works and what doesn’t really work. So far we’re down a few bucks but we’re on the rebound. In addition, I purchased the phpBay Pro API that lets me get eBay auctions on hand-made sites, not just Wordpress sites. The API is pretty good, but after working with both I prefer the flexibility and options of the Wordpress plugin. It’s definitely worth my while and as you can see I’ve already made my money back on that investment.

So, this is where we stand. January has been a decent month with $212 revenue. I expect that February will be an even stronger month and look forward to reporting what happens in the month to come!

a

This month I changed the title from “Income Report” to “Report” because, well, this site didn’t make any money and my other sites only brought in a combined total of $28. That’s a lot less than I was expecting considering that my previous two months I had been earning around $250 a month.

The cause for this decline in income is mostly due to my Google Dance. On Monday, my top earning site was ranking in at 773 for a given keyword. Yesterday when I checked it was up to 35. Hopefully it means that my site is earning its stripes, but I really don’t know what causes it to be on the top 10 and then to drop off the face of the planet. I’ve checked the supplemental index for my site in early November and the site was doing very badly with roughly 90% of the site in the supplemental index. I’m still not sure how to make the site have more content in the “real” index, but I’ve spruced up my robots.txt file and changed some things around with the site and now it’s at 87% in the supplemental index.

I am still not happy with this 87% and would like to achieve 40% or less in the supplemental index and will focus my efforts this month into making provisions for this. Additionally, this month I want to start monetizing this site by selling ad space or by including more affiliate links on my nearly daily posts.

Traffic

Even though this month I brought in less than 30 bones, I would have say that this month has been a success. That’s not the optimist in me, but the fact that while working full time and working on a dual master’s degree and doing all kinds of other things, I still managed to write nearly daily for this site and saw traffic grow by leaps and bounds. For the month of November, traffic for this site nearly doubled from 297 unique views in October to 540 uniques for November. Growth is good and I must say that December is already off to a rockin’ start.

From this month on, I will include a snapshot of my traffic in order to compare growth on different metrics. Here is a quick snapshot of my statistics, according to http://www.xinureturns.com/:

As you can see, this site has a Google Pagerank of 2, not bad for a site that is less than 3 months old! . Secondly, this site has a Technorati authority of 10 which I think means that there are 10 other blogs who have “favorited” me and added to my street cred.

I submitted my site to DMOZ at the time of inception, but I still have not been indexed nor do I expect to be indexed. Apparently you have to pay money to be included in DMOZ although it’s supposed to be a free site.

The rest of these stats deal with how different search engines index and track this website’s progress. Yahoo! gives me a whole lot of backlinks while Google only gives me one. Strange that there’s such a big difference but I guess that’s just the way it is. None of the other stats really matter all that much other than the Technorati number so I’ll conclude this section at that.

Future (i.e. December’s) Plans

This month has already been busy. I’m in the midst of finals at school (my last one is due Monday by 5pm on “Categorization and Organization”…if you know anything about facets leave me a comment! ) so after then I’ll be able to focus on my 3 new websites that I’ve launched! These sites are eBay stores, but I am going to be branching them out to include non-eBay items. I won’t give anything away yet, but these sites have been fun to make and I hope that promoting them will be easier than my health site.

Conclusion

After it’s all said and done, I think November has been good. Visits to the site nearly doubled, I got 3 new sites ready to roll, purchased a few domain names and made nice progress on figuring out how to monetize this site. John Chow continues to be a rockstar but I guess I can be one too if I had 297,000 visitors per month. I’m chasing you John, and I hope that next year I can be closer to you in terms of traffic and income!

a

So, without further ado I present you my earnings for October 2007.

Affiliate Sales: $202.17
Total Revenue: $202.17

I naturally wanted to make more money in October than I did in September, but it looks like I just missed my mark.

This month I will be trying out a few different strategies to promote this blog and spending a little money to promote my other sites. I’m still no match for John Chow (wow, that guy is good) but watch out John Chow! I’m comin’ for ya!

a

Total Revenue for September: $203.86

• Affiliate Sales: $203.86

At this point this is report is very straightforward.  I’ve made a little over $200 by promoting affiliate products through my various sites, a bulk of which came from one health-related site.  The conversion ratio for me has been pretty bad and I need to work on changing some things that are not working to hopefully create a better user experience (UX).

While I am no match for John Chow, I am happy with the results of this past month and hope that the next month will be even better.  For now I am focusing my efforts on affiliate sales and plan on being able to offer more services to create more revenue streams within the months to follow.

a