October was an incredible month for me! It’s my highest earning month so far, and by quite a bit. I experimented with a few things and I saw some real world results from the changes which I’m happy to share.
I thought I’d do a little something different this month and share some of the month to month comparison reports so you can see the effects of little changes to my site or my YouTube channel.
Tweaks I Made to YouTube
First, a BIG, HUGE thanks to RemixSample on YouTube for pointing this tip out to me – Put your affiliate link as the FIRST LINE in your description! Why?! Because only ONE LINE of your description shows by default on the video page!!! I actually feel ridiculous for not having done this in the first place because I’d seen it done on other videos and the link even jumped out at me on the page. For some insane reason, I thought, “I don’t want to be spammy and have an affiliate link as the first line of my description”. People, if you’re looking to make money, don’t let thoughts like the one that passed through my head cloud your vision. If you’re making YouTube videos and you want to capitalize on your hard work, you’d better MAKE SURE you have your link as your first line of your description! To not do so is just robbing yourself of potential income.
Amazon Click Trend Comparison September to October 2012
See exhibit 1 to the right (yeah, that’s attorney speak) – first, take a look at September’s numbers for the daily clicks. You’ll notice that it stayed pretty consistent throughout the month. There were no major jumps up and down so that’s a really good sign that I’m consistently getting clicks each day from my YouTube videos. Just as a disclaimer, I do get a FEW clicks from my HeadphoneReviewHQ.com site occasionally, but not enough to effect this numbers at all. So, back to these numbers, Septembers clicks all came from users who would expand the description below a video and click the links embedded therein. Now…switch over and look at October’s numbers. Look at what happens from October 15th onward. Yeah…those are some SIGNIFICANT increases there. That’s the date that I moved my affiliate link to the first line of my description. That blue link shows up REAL nice on that YouTube video page! My click throughs almost DOUBLED! That’s an absolutely insane increase of click-throughs! So, if you don’t have your affiliate links as your first line of your description, you’re missing the boat my friends! One last thing to note – there was an insane increase in click throughs on October 30th. I have to imagine that’s simply because of Halloween? I don’t know for sure but I wish I had some more insight into why that number spiked so high.
Increasing my click throughs might be great and all, but how did that translate into revenue? This is where things get really exciting! See exhibit 2 below…
Amazon Earnings for October 2012
September’s Amazon earnings were $213.51. I increased my revenue from September to October by nearly 70% by making this one tweak!!! While not all of that amount of money can be attributed directly to the change, I would venture to say that a vast majority of it was. That’s just amazing stuff right there.
One last thing I’d like to show here is the snowball effect of popularity on YouTube. As you get more subscribers and more views, the increase in traffic is more exponential than linear.
Youtube Analytics Sept/Oct Comparison
Looking at the graphic above, you’ll notice that the number of video views increased by nearly 25% as did the total minutes viewed. That is excellent as it means that my content is getting in front of more and more people. While the views went up only 25%, the adsense earnings increased by nearly 80%. That’s an incredible jump in adsense earnings. Part of this is because I’m getting more targeted traffic and another part is I went through each one of my videos and made sure I had my monetization settings set appropriately. Please note that the Adsense Earnings numbers in the graphic above are for YouTube only traffic and don’t reflect other adsense earnings from my primary site. Lastly, I’ll leave you with the Adsense trend for the month of October. It’s encouraging to see a fairly high click through rate as that indicates that the ads are targeted well and my videos are helping convert those ads.
Google Adsense Earnings for October 2012
The Numbers
| Type | Earning |
| Amazon – Last Month – Difference – % Change |
$361.54 $213.51 $148.03 69.3% |
| Google Adsense – Last Month – Difference – % Change |
$97.45 $58.56 $38.89 66.4% |
| Bluehost – Last Month – Difference – % Change |
$65 $65 $0 0% |
| Catalyst – Last Month – Difference – % Change |
N/A N/A – – |
| Overall – Last Month – Difference – % Change |
$523.99 $337.07 $186.92 55.5% |