September 2012

September came and went very fast and again the numbers stayed pretty consistent.  Here’s a brief overview of what I noticed through this month.

Amazon

The one thing that I can say about Amazon is my earnings stay pretty even from month to month.  It was a little disappointing to see this number drop off a bit especially considering I added several additional video reviews throughout the month.  As with any type of retail business, you can never fully expect to see your numbers not go up and down, so I should just get used to this.  but, again, the numbers didn’t fall off all that much so I can’t complain.  The good news is I had a large number of clicks on my affiliate links and 6.3% of people who clicked through from my links actually ordered something.  I believe the biggest change in my earnings was from the price of the items that were ordered.  Being that Amazon pays a flat % based off the amount sold, this makes perfect sense and really nothing to be alarmed about.  Here’s the breakdown of links clicked throughout the month…

Amazon Click Report for September 2012

Google Adsense

The numbers were the highest yet!  I know that $58.56 doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but any time you hit highs in your earnings you have to be excited about it!  I did a couple of things through the month to try and maximize this.  First, I went through all my videos on YouTube and made sure I turned them on for monitization.  I believe I had become a little slack and hadn’t gone back and updated all these so that was a win.  Another thing that I believe played a roll in this is now that I’m getting more videos live Google is starting to put more relevant ads on my videos and thus more click throughs.  As a side note, I have noticed that there are hardly any people clicking links from my primary website.  This may be something I need to take into account and redo how my ads show up there.  Really there’s no reason to have ads junking up a page if nobody is clicking them, not to mention the additional latency that it takes to load external ads on your site.

Observations on Number of Page/Video Views

Below is an image indicating a small portion of my September numbers.  Overall this is a pretty decent representation of what the month looked like…

Adsense Snippet for September 2012
Columns: Date, Views, Clicks, Click Through Rate, Earnings Per Click, Estimated RPM Eearnings (earnings per 1,000 page views), Daily Earning

One more thing before I move on from Google and their Adsense program.  Currently I’m just earning money off click throughs.  The reason behind this is I don’t have enough views in a day to qualify for RPM – earnings per 1,000 views.  As you can see in the image below, I was getting about 400 page/video views a day.  My goal is to build this up to over 1,000 a day so that I get both click earnings as well as earnings just for having my pages and videos in front of a large audience every day.  Also, to go along with that, if I get up over 1,000 views a day, I would naturally expect for my Amazon earnings and click through earnings to also increase.  If I’m getting 50 clicks a day with 400 views, it would just make sense that doubling the number of views would likely double the amount of clicks as well…so, I would GUESS (fairly educated guess) that I would have nearly twice the earning potential on Amazon – so let’s put this into perspective…

Current Avg Daily Views: 400
Current Amazon Earnings: $213.51
Current Google Adsense Earnings (clicks): $58.56
Current Monthly Total:  $272.07

Alright, if I were able to increase this to 1,000 views per day, that would be an increase of 150%.  I’m not calculating everything exactly to the number because for the purpose of estimations, it doesn’t really make sense.  So I’m just ballparking all this.  So let’s put this into perspective.  This is where my numbers would likely be with that increase:

Estimates Based off 1,000 Daily Views:

Note that I multiply everything by 2.5 because that would be the original amount + the original amount again, plus 50% of the original amount – 400 + 400 + 200 = 1,000 daily views..400 * 2.5 = 1000.

Amazon Earnings: $213.51 * 2.5 = $533.78
Google Adsense Earnings (clicks): $58.56 * 2.5 = $146.40
Google Adsense Earnings (RPM – 1,000 views): $5/day = 30 days * 5 = $150/month
Estimated Monthly Total:  $830.18

That’s a HUGE increase!  That’s not just a 250% increase because of the 2.5 increase in daily views – NO, that’s a 305% INCREASE!!!  You have to account for the fact that the RPM earnings will also kick in so you’re seeing increases of even more!  An extra $150 per month in the RPM earnings which is more than 50% of what my current earnings already are!  This is a big win and an obstacle I’m aiming to overtake!

Bluehost

You can see here again that I made ONE sale with Bluehost and that accounted for nearly 1/5 of all my earnings.  I have big plans for this in the coming months so I hope to grow this tremendously.  This will be something I’ll be writing about here on Untethered Income and hopefully I’ll see these numbers increase dramatically.  Looking at Pat Flynn’s monthly earnings, it’s clear to me that I’m missing the boat by not trying to put more effort into this.  Stay tuned for more….

Catalyst

Back to normal here.  I’ve had a ton of people click the link to go over and look at Catalyst but almost nobody buys.  It’s probably because they don’t understand what they’re getting and this is something I’ll need to work on to let people know what they’re actually getting and why it’s worth a purchase.  This will probably be something I do in the near future – a couple months maybe.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully these insights will help you see where I’m headed and what I’m trying to do and provide you with some inspirational thoughts to help you keep trudging through and keep pushing towards your goals.  Most people would only dream of getting a $1,000 per month raise as for most people that would be a HUGE jump in their salary.  That’s just the beginning of my plans as my ultimate goal is to be able to stop working for others and be able to spend more time with my family truly enjoying life.

The Numbers