June 2012

June was an exciting month for me.  My income increased by 66%!  Looking at my previous month, I earned $237.13 and in June I brought it $392.58!  Talk about seeing some light at the end of the tunnel!  For anyone who’s started doing business online, they can attest that it’s never an overnight thing, but on your first run of things, it’s easy to get impatient.  I know when I first started all this about a year ago now, I was getting very frustrated after just a couple of months.  Now it all seems to be coming around and I’ve learned some very interesting things!  So, without further ado, let’s get into it.

Youtube is the Key

While I only uploaded two new videos during the month of June, the strength of my original videos became more evident!  Many of my most popular videos are now into the thousands of views rather than the hundreds, and the number of subscribers jumped to over 200!  This was absolutely huge for me as I started noticing when I posted a video, rather than seeing a couple trickle in every day, I was seeing in upwards of 50 views in the first 24 hours!  50 doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you started out getting 5-10 a day, again, that’s another huge leap forward for me.

Amazon Associate Earnings

This month was an awesome month for me with the Amazon!  In May I earned a total of $140.65 off the Amazon associates program and in June I brought in $214.84 – that’s a net increase of $74.19, or an increase of 53%!  That’s absolutely huge!  One of the key things I’ve learned during this whole process is that people don’t always buy what you lead them to when they click your link, and it doesn’t matter!  WAIT A MINUTE!!! Am I mad?!  Don’t I want them to buy what they clicked on?!  Well…yes….and, maybe no!  If you’ve done any reading about Google Adsense and projected click through rates and earnings and all that, you’ll know that traffic is the key simply because the conversion rate of people coming to a site is so incredibly low.  Well, one of the things I started keeping a closer eye on in the month of June is the number of clicks and the conversion rate.

In the month of June, I recorded 1,116 click throughs to Amazon.  Of those clicks, I had a conversion rate of 6.18%.  Does that mean that 6 out of every 100 people bought the item that they clicked on from my site or Youtube channel?  No.  It means that sometime within 24 hours of when they clicked through to Amazon, they bought SOMETHING!  That’s the amazing lesson I learned during June – the key is to get people over to Amazon.  Tell people to click your links to check out the product, and get them in the shopping mode.  When people are on Amazon, they immediately go into shopping mode because it’s a site that most people inherently trust.  So if you can get them there, and they decide they need some paper towels even though they clicked on my headphones, more power to them!  I’ll take a commission on that too!  It’s absolutely beautiful!  And, while my commission on a set of headphones would be higher than those paper towels, there’s been more than once that someone’s clicked on a lower priced item and then purchased something 3-4x more expensive.  It all balances out in the end!

I’ll probably be dedicating an entire post to this in the near future, but I just wanted to give you a heads up on things I’m just starting to pick up on because this is all so new to me – it’s exciting as heck for me and I hope it gets your blood flowing too!

Google and Google Adsense

As I mentioned in my May report, I got completely blasted by the Penguin/Panda update.  It’s all my fault too.  I SOMEWHAT followed the plan that Pat Flynn laid out on his website in his post The Backlinking Strategy that Works  – his most popular post he has on his site to date.  Well, the problem is that I got lazy during my link building, and rather than follow his formula for building the main link layer and then building links to those, I figured, why not just send all those links to my site…well, I found out why!  When Google blew away all those sites and bombed the ones they were linking too, I found out why I shouldn’t have had so many garbage links pointing directly to my “money site”.  Live and learn I suppose.  The positive thing is I did see traffic numbers start to creep back up a bit so apparently my real links are starting to dig me out of that hole I dug for myself.

My Adsense numbers during the month also went up!  I earned $31.48 during the month of May and that increased to $47.74 during the month of June – an increase of $16.26, or a jump of 52%!  I know the $16.26 doesn’t sound like much, but again, when you increase your revenue by 52%, that’s absolutely enormous!  I can’t pretend to understand the Adsense just yet though as it’s all over the board as far as payouts are concerned from day to day, but it was nice to see that increase.  And just as a side note, almost ALL of the earnings came from ads that roll during my Youtube videos.  My Adsense on my main site literally gets me next to nothing.  I’m actually considering removing all the Adsense ads from my site as at this point I feel that they take away from the user experience.  More on that to come.

Bluehost Affiliate

Bluehost Clicks/Conversions June 2012

The last big thing I need to touch on for the month of June is my Bluehost affilate commissions!  I had TWO conversions this month!  I know that’s not a lot, but when you consider that those TWO conversions account for $130 of my $392.58, that’s almost 33% of my overall revenue.  It’s absolutely clear to me that I must start spending more time promoting Bluehost so now I just need to determine what my best strategy for that is.  I have people asking me all the time how to do things with WordPress so maybe that’s the route I’ll take – how to vids on setting up sites, etc.  Again, I just know that when two sales make up so much of my earnings in a month, I’d be a moron not to explore how to increase these conversions.

The Numbers