Making Money

With the first of the month I received my first payment from Chitika eMiniMalls and went through their audit for the first time. Here’s the experience from my perspective:

The audit disallowed approximately 33% of the clicks which added up to about a 25% reduction in revenue from the unaudited reports I’d been receiving. That’s a pretty fair amount for them to be taking away without any knowledge of how they go about doing so. I’m sure I would have been a lot more upset about it if I considered it a vital income for the sites, but both Nate and I approached it as “an extra” from the beginning.

The ads aren’t really geared for a site like our main one which isn’t product based. We placed them up in an area where we had blank space in the forums and felt putting up another set of google ads there would have just been too much. They are also only visible to visitors to the site – if a member signs in, they disappear. We therefore are happy with anything that we get from them. That being said, when you have one report that you’re going by the entire month and then it gets hacked by 25% the day before the payment comes, it’s a bit disappointing even when it’s “extra” money.

It would be interesting to try them on one of the satellite sites if we create one that is more product oriented. That might be something we try in the future. Had they produced a better return, I might have spent some time putting together a plan to best utilize them on the site, but they’ll just remain as they are as making a plan wouldn’t be worth the effort. As it is, they produce less for the entire month for what we get from google on a good day. For now, they are nothing more than space fillers that bring in a bit of extra money.

The one thing I was impressed about is that the payment came by paypal right on time and without any fees taken out – a nice surprise.

Are they worth signing up for? They are for us – why throw away extra money that you can earn without it affecting your membership? If you have a smaller site or journal without a lot of traffic that isn’t product oriented, I think it would be difficult to earn much with them. It should be interesting to see how the income compares next month to this past month.

In my attempt to turn websites into my full time business, I’m finding that the “satellite sites” we’re building are becoming a more important factor into the equation that will ultimately determine whether we can make the jump. I mentioned in an earlier post that the 10 sites that we had up were bringing in an average of $36.74 in October, so I felt shooting for $50 a site (rather than the $100 I had originally mentioned) would be a reasonable goal. This past month saw a nice increase in profits from the majority of these sites (as I did a bit more promotion of them).

As mentioned before, there is basically no cost (except time) for me to build these sites as we already have a server we pay for for the main site that has plenty of room to host them. This is a combination of adsense and text link advertising on the sites and includes all the satellite site, but does not include this site or the main SavingAdvice site.

Satellite November profits

The average for the 10 sites this month came to $54.09 which shows that an average of $50 can be achieved with some effort. I suspect that this average will drop with the new sites coming into the system until they can get placed in search engines, but even if the average falls for awhile, if I can continue to beat the previous months combined total then I’ll be in good shape.

I was also able to get 5 new sites up this month (actually, 4 were new and one was up, but I hadn’t been tracking its earnings for some reason). As would be expected, most have hardly any earnings since they were only up a partial month, but one (other than the one I hadn’t been tracking) has done surprisingly well for the short period. I will be adding these into the overall average beginning next month

New Sites

Overall I’m extremely pleased with the progress this past month and if this can be maintained, the satellite strategy along with the main sites can work. December should be an interesting month with the holidays which I anticipate will make my revenue lower than in November.

The timeshare site is done for the most part. I actually have more sections to finish writing, but there are ten fairly good sections up now which makes the site at least presentable. Even if I don’t add the other pages for a few months, the site will survive.

While I’m still not sure how the site will ultimately do, I’m feeling better now that it is done and I can move on to the next site. It took a lot more time and effort than I’d anticipated, but hopefully it will tun out to be one of the better producing sites in the long run.

I received another supporting site advertisement request from LinkWorth, but I declined the advertisement. It was for a casino and I didn’t feel that it was appropriate for this site. I’ve received quite a few requests from other similar sites – you could certainly make some extra money if you were willing to place those ads on your site since it seems they have a harder time finding sites that will (plus they have the money to spend).

I ran some numbers for October and my hope that each of the new sites could earn $3 a day may be way too optimistic. We have 10 sister sites that have been up for just over 6 months now. I went through and ran the numbers for October and the average for all ten together can to $36.74 so I think shooting for an average of $50 a site is a lot more realistic. That means I’m going to have to create a lot more sites, but in the long run it will be worth it.

I’m confident I can bring the current sister site numbers up to $50 because I have barely touched any of them since they went up. Even a little bit of promotion and adding a bit more content should help them quite a bit. The average is also a bit understated because one of the sites is seasonal and brings in quite a bit of money for 4 months, but not much of anything the other 8 with October being one of the low months. What I found interesting was the range in the amounts they were bringing in:

Of the 10 sites, the site bringing in the most money for October brought in $111.08 while the site that brought in the least amount of money brought in only $0.15. That tells you right there what the difference is in picking the correct niche over the wrong one.

I’ll be interested to see how the numbers come out for November and I can begin charting how the sites are doing on a month to month basis…

I mentioned earlier that I needed to focus and build 15 new websites before the end of the year to help with my financial goals of making the websites my main income source. We purchased 10 of the 15 domains we want and have five more domain names we are considering purchasing, but want to spend a bit more time thinking about them and seeing if we can come up with better ones.

I finished the first of the 15 sites we want today. While it certainly can be improved with more information added, it has the foundation laid which is the main purpose at this point. This will allow it to get indexed into the search engines and hopefully begin attracting a few visitors.

The name of the first site is National Condom Week. While this may seem like a strange URL for money information, you have to think back to one of my previous posts about credit card condoms It’s one that I think can meet the $3 a day goal with the potential to make even more if we get some lucky breaks. These are the positives I see with this site:

– There is actually a National Condom Week that is celebrated in the US (Feb. 14 – 21) and also one that is celebrated in the UK (May 8 – 13). That means automatic free publicity for the site 2 times a year – in fact I was quite surprised the domain name was available.

– The site should attract a different demographic that our main site hasn’t tried to go after yet which is college age students. This will give us a good opportunity to convert some of the visitors into regular site members and to create a college savings area on the main site.

– For those who aren’t interested in credit card condoms and were looking for information on regular condoms, there is a good chance they will use the google ads on the site to exit thus creating some income.

– If it rises high enough in the search rankings, media will likely come to it when they are looking for information on National Condom Week for an article. The credit card condom may be a strange enough idea that they write an article on it giving the site free press coverage or at least mention the site as an alternative taking place for the National Condom Week celebration.

– It’s an easy site to promote through news releases (both from the credit card condom angle and for announcements on National Condom Week)

– There are a lot of opportunities to hold contests if we decide to.

– There is potential revenue from doing an affiliate program with a condom site if we choose to go in that direction.

– The site has appeal to a number of groups who might want to text advertise: credit card sites, debt sites, condom sites, AIDS sites, etc.

As you can see, there are a lot of potential pluses for this site. While I’m not thinking about this currently, the site also has the potential to become a central location for all the groups that are planning condom week events. A search on the web shows that there isn’t a site like that at the moment with the events being handled by individual schools or local cities. If a central location is needed for all parties to pass along information and get help at some point in the future, this site has the potential to offer that.

I will be quite interested to see how this site works out in the coming months and will keep my fingers crossed that it is one that goes well beyond the $3 a day minimum we’re hoping for. Time to begin putting the foundation together on site number two…

Nate and I had a long talk about our sites and where we want them to go. After brainstorming for awhile, we came up with some great ideas that we feel would add a lot of value to the sites. The main problem is figuring out a way to double our current income so that we both have the time to work on the site full time. We made the decision that the way to accomplish that will be to build more satellite sites.

The one thing that we having going for us is that we have a lot of quality content. Although I have to rewrite it for the new sites, the basics are all there which is a lot easier than researching everything from the very beginning. So we set a goal to have 15 new sites up and running before the end of the year. That won’t be an easy accomplishment considering all the other commitments I have.

We spent about an hour brainstorming possible URLs for the new sites and already have purchased eight. I promised Nate that i would have seven more bought by the time he wakes up so he can beging the set up process. The difficult part is coming up with themes where we can create a site with about 10 pages of content and then simply leave it without having to update it constantly.

The sites don’t have to be huge or successful. They just need to generate $3 a day. Although that sounds easy, it’s a lot more difficult than most people realize, especially if you aren’t spending a lot of time promoting the site. I know I can make all the sites reach that level, but it will take some time. What it means is taking a step backward to move 2 steps forward.

If I commit to building these other sites, it means I will have to greatly reduce the promoting I’ve been doing to increase readership of this journal and my main site. It means that I probably won’t have the time to post each day here and won’t be able to look for ways to get more people to join my main site.

Truth be told, it just isn’t as much fun either. I like writing here and spending the day working on building content for the main site. Putting together a new site takes a lot more energy and willpower to motivate and get it done. It is, however, a means to an end which will eventually allow me to do exactly what I love to do most and at the same time increase the overall value of the entire site system.

So there it is. I need to get 15 sites up and running in just over a month. No time like the present to get started!