I should start calling these Monthly Expense Reports since there’s not a whole lot of Income going on.
Again, this month will be quick and dirty with a side of commentary.
Income
I had my highest revenue month for the year coming in at $272.38. The breakdown is as follows (previous month):
- PDF – $150.56 ($94.10 – 60%)
- Android Apps – $114.86 ($114.91 – NC)
- Adsense – $6.96 ($17.89 – 61%)
Expenses
Expenses for the month totaled $406.22.
- TraffficKaboom – $197.00 – quarterly
- Unique Article Wizard – $67.00 – monthly
- MyArticleExpress – $53.88 – 4 sets of articles for UAW
- SEMRush – $33.30 – monthly
- TextBroker – $18.88 – On site article
- SocialADR – $17.00
- ProArticleWriting – $14.16 – 2 site articles
- e-Junkie – $5.00 – monthly
Net Income and Thoughts
So, running the numbers my net loss for the month was $133.84. For the year, my loss is now $313.49. I keep telling myself I’m building for the future, but unfortunately, reality is I’m just spinning my wheels and hemorrhaging money. I’m often reminded how they say the only people who got rich during the gold rush were the people that sold shovels. This is most certainly the case with me. My Apps and niche site product are masking the expensive nature of trying to make money dependent on Google and SERPs. I could have saved a lot of money going with free methods but have opted for the more automated approach (it takes money to make money). Below is the total spent on trying to build my Online Empire (Since June 2011):
That Link Building amount kind of jumps out and slaps you in the face. Below is the breakdown of that amount.
The major expenses here could have been avoided by just using old fashioned elbow grease. I could have spent time creating backlinks manually through article submissions, Web 2.0, and guest posts. However, that road was paved with hard work. I took the easier way out. My hope was to have about 30-40 sites working for me by now. With that number of sites, the expenses above would be better justified. Not when you only have 6 sites (actually 7, but launched on 5/1).
Site Summaries
Below is a net income breakdown of my 6 sites. This does not include my niche product site or my Android apps. These six sites were built for the sole purpose of bringing in Adsense income. This summary includes only expenses are directly related to the site itself. The expenses here are domain registration, articles, images, and backlinking. The backlinking expenses are only those expense directly tied to a site such as articles for UAW and IMTalk submissions. Monthly expenses such as SocialADR and UAW are not included here.
A I’m Not Ranting About Penguin Rant
I plan on posting about what happened with my niche product site with regards to last month’s updates and some of my conclusions. Regarding my adsense sites, site #6 was completely blown up. It had a few keywords in the top 10. The highest major keyword fluctuated around the 5 or 6 spot. Per LongTailPro, this site is now ranking #73. For the higher traffic keyword that the site was built for I was ranking between 9-11. It is now ranked #326. My overall search traffic from 4/25 – 5/5 as compared to 4/11 – 4/21 was 15 vs 92, an 83% reduction. I’ll post more later, but this site kind of deserved it (at least from Google’s perspective). It had 31 links with BMR, spun article blasts with AMR, UAW, TrafficKaboom, Article Ranks, SEO Link Monster and probably a few others I tested out. The thing is, this site never dropped until Penguin. I would have expected Panda to wipe this one out.
Silver Lining
Some of the other sites have seen an increase in traffic (and earnings). I’m on track to make more this month than last – Estimate May = $11.00. As for Site #6, it may be a lost cause. I might purchase a new domain and reuse the content. But most likely (taking the lazy way out), I’ll probably just ignore it over the last 3-4 months and see what sticks.
Next Steps
I’m not sure what to do next. I have a few UAW submission sitting in the chamber and a couple articles waiting to be posted. I’ve been focusing on repairing my niche product site since it is the bread winner.
Pandering Section
This is the part where I beg for comments. So… what do you think? How did you do this month?
I had my best month of 2012 despite nearly all my sites setting wiped out by the updates at the end of the month.
Slightly nervous for May though now I’m not getting any traffic.
You should have a look at Article Builder if you want to make the most of UAW. I can send you some sample articles if you want to see what they are like. I use it for my UAW submissions and can do a complete UAW submission in about a minute now. The posts get indexed fine.
Don’t forget there were two Panda updates one either side of the Penguin update so it could’ve been that those that hit you.
What are you plans going forward? Get on the authority site bandwagon like everyone else?
Thanks Joe. Right now, Article builder does not seem worth the cost since I don’t have the site volume. The $14 3 article sets have been pretty good quality. Also, none of my sites are related to the articles topics that Article builder provides (though UAW submission in a minute sound mighty nice).
All my traffic tanked on 4/24 so I’m assuming Penguin.
Right now, my plans are to try to focus on creating my iPhone apps. I’m averaging $100 per month with Android, so as each month passes, I’m leaving money on the table by not having my apps on iOS. Regarding my sites, even before the craziness of last month, I was leaning toward having about 10 sites that I enjoy the topics instead of 50 sites built purely for money potential. I doubt I reach authority site level in terms of articles. I plan on my current 7 sites to get to about 15 articles each. We’ll see after that.
thanks for the Tweet too. I think I had the most visits ever to my site today (around 25, 12 from twitter)
I think a 50-70% drop is fairly accurate and standard across most people who lost rankings, so that’s about right.
Kinda surprised on the amount of linkbuilding costs you have. For me the greatest expense is content.
The costs surprised me a bit too. I think I get locked into how am I doing this month. And like I wrote in the post, my apps/product sales were masking the high expense of the niche sites.
These totals are over a 10 month period. 10 months of UAW alone would be $670. Throw in one more service and some miscellaneous stuff and your expenses are over $1200. Content would probably be my biggest expense if I had a decent # of sites.
Yeah that’s true. With UAW to make it more useful is to fire more UAW at your first tier links (even if it’s UAW!). It scales, right? So you want to use it up as much as possible.