Long time no post! It wasn’t all spent lounging around by the pool, unfortunately. Since this my second income report I have come to some conclusions about what I will classify as ‘monthly income.’ In my last blog income report I posed some questions about what ‘types’ of income I should include. I received some private responses that were all very much appreciated. In my April earnings report, I included income from domain parking, domain sales, and website flipping.

I have decided to no longer include any other non-affiliate income in these reports since this is an affiliate marketing blog.  In addition, I wondered whether to only include income once a check was received. As many affiliates know, some affiliate programs have income thresholds (like Google Adsense) and checks are not disbursed until a certain amount of earnings has accrued. I have decided to include any and all earnings earned (whether they are received or not) during the calendar month. This is relatively easy as most programs let you run a date range report. Finalyy, please remember that my earnings come from my network of affiliate sites and not simply from this blog.  So, without further adieu…

May 2008 Affiliate Earnings: $79.10

Quite a drop from last month, but I am only including affiliate earnings and only money earned between My 1, 2008 and May 31, 2008. So where di this windfall come from?

 Adsense: $16.84

I use Adsense on FreeMusicVideos.net, Concerts.ws and MusicGearPlus.com. I have not had any time to promote these sites in awhile, but will still take what I can get, Once my time frees up a bit I will definitely increase their exposure.

 Affiliate Programs: $62.26

Although I run several different affiliate programs throughout my network, these earnings were from sites within the Friendfinder.com network, which I promote exclusively on WebPersonalsOnline.com, as well as a couple of niche dating sites I also promote. I also run Match.com and Yahoo Personals, but was not able to earn anything from these programs in May.

Finally, on this blog - despite gaining several new links, appearing in the SERPs for some search terms, and averaging about twenty unique visitors per day, I have not earned any money from the affiliate programs promoted here. I have a good feeling that will change in June.

So, although May was excruciatingly slow and I have not posted nearly as much as I wanted to I did spend my time productively as a good affiliate should. So what have I been up to? You’ll have to read my next post to find out what I have been doing and why I expect the effort I put in last month to really explode my affiliate earnings in June.  One final comment: While I certainly hope to make money from this blog, it is not my main source of affiliate income, but more of a vehicle to explain what I am doing on my other sites to monetize them and increase their earnings.

Welcome to my first ever Blog Income Report. Although I titled this post ‘Blog Income Report - April 2008′ since I know that’s how many of you search for these types of posts in Google, I want to make this more than just a report about the money this blog has earned over the previous month. My intention is to focus each of these reports on the earnings from my entire network of affiliate sites and try to provide an in-depth analysis of how these earnings were achieved. Think of each monthly income report as a case study in affiliate marketing online. So without further adieu…

April 2008 Affiliate Earnings: $158.77

Now, I know that might not sound too impressive given that I have several sites in my network, but let’s break these earnings down and do some analysis on how they were achieved and where they came from, as well as why they weren’t higher.

Adsense: $106.23

I run Adsense on three of the sites in my network. These include FreeMusicVideos.net, Concerts.ws, and MusicGearPlus.com. (Note: I also used to run Adsense on 39j.net, but I recently sold this site so I no longer consider it part of my network). Of the three sites, FreeMusicVideos.net was the largest Adsense earner, earning approximately 50% of the April Adsense income. MusicGearPlus.com and Concerts.ws earned approximately 25% of the Adsense revenue each. Again, not the most impressive earnings, but consider I have not worked on or promoted ANY of the three aforementioned sites in about one year!

Affiliate Programs: $52.54

So what programs did the best and from which sites did these earnings come? One hundred percent of the earnings from affiliate programs came from Friendfinder.com, which is one of the dating affiliate sites I promote on WebPersonalsOnline.com. Now, I also promote Match.com (through Linkshare) on my online personals site, as well as Yahoo Personals (through Commission Junction). I actually did have earnings of $39.99 from Match.com, but these were reversed because in the month of March I received a check from Linkshare for Match.com earnings in the amount of $77.49 after which they had to issue the customer a refund. Although I was never formally notified, I believe Linkshare is reversing my commissions until I ‘make up’ that $77.49.  If I am correct, I still have $77.49 - $39.99 = $37.50 to go. Hopefully I will make that up soon.

Why didn’t I earn more form WebPersonalsOnline.com? Two reasons, I think. I have not gotten any links recently and it is the ONLY site in my affiliate network not hosted with HostGator. I think that periodic downtimes at my ‘other’ hosting company, although brief, have caused the site to suffer slightly. HostGator is much more reliable and responsive. One final comment about the affiliate earnings from FriendFinder.com - I have actually earned slightly more from them in the month of April, but they have a $50 payout threshold on EACH of the sites in their network, so while I actually earned about ten dollars and change from Amigos.com and just over twelve dollars from AsiaFriendFinder.com, the earnings I am posting here are from checks I received in the month of April. I debated on this for awhile and could not decide if I should show April Income in this report as the total checks received, what my affiliate stats were showing by month’s end, or whatever. PLEASE let me know how you would like to see my income stats reported in futue posts!

Other Affiliate Programs: $0.00

So what other affiliate programs do I promote? On FreeMusicVideos.net, I promote iTunes, RocketProfit (RingTones) and CDUniverse. None of these programs earned me any money in the month of April. On WebPersonalsOnline.com, I recently added Yahoo Personals and I also promote a couple niche dating sites. None of these earned me any money, either.

So what about KillerIncome.net?

I am sad to say that in the first full month of this affiliate marketing blog’s existence, it did not earn any money. On the blog, I am currently promoting HostGator, Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, Revolution WordPress Themes, and GoDaddy Domain Registration (through Commission Junction). Unfortunately, I was not able to turn a commission from any of these programs in my first month.

I am quite happy with the growth of the blog in its first month in terms of the posts I created, the number of indexed pages in Google, and some of the relationships I have formed with other bloggers. On the flip side, I really wanted to have some affiliate earnings from this blog in its first full month. I did consider running Adsense on here since I believe that is the most likely option for earning something from a new site, but I am more interested in making money through the use of affiliate programs on this blog.

Other Online Income: $657.59

Other ways I generate income online, include the buying and selling websites, domain name flipping and domain parking. I sold my site 39j.net, as well as one of my domain names and earned some other income from parking the rest of my domains at Sedo. I didn’t know whether or not I should mention these other income sources, but since I was negotiating the sale of the website and the domain name, it did take away some time I would have otherwise had to work on my sites.

Total Online Earnings for April: $816.36

So, all in all, not a bad month in terms of earnings, but disappointing in terms of my affiliate revenue.

Some final thoughts.

In May, I plan on continuing to add content to this blog. I also plan on promoting KillerIncome.net more than I have thus far (I have an upcoming post in which I will share my strategy for this). I also need to gain more incoming links for WebPersonalsOnline.com, especially to more of the site’s internal pages. That site has over forty pages of content now and 90% of the traffic is to the Home Page and Two Articles Pages. Why? The Home Page is the page that is most linked to, but the two article pages that get the brunt of the traffic also received inbound links. None of the other pages have links coming from elsewhere.

So, between that and posting more on KillerIncome.net, plus a short vacation I will probably not have time to work on the other sites much. At least they still earn some Adsense money without me doing anything, which is nice!

So, now I leave it up to each of you. Please provide some comments on the following:

What constitutes ‘monthly income?’

Is it the checks I receive from affiliate programs in that month. Is it simply the change in affiliate stats from the first day of the month to the last day of the month even if I don’t receive a check for those earnings for several months? Should I post pictures of the checks? I thought about doing this and will probably post pictures of any checks I receive this month in my next report.

Should I include earnings from other sources?

Should I ALSO include income received from website and domain name sales, as well as domain parking income?

I would really appreciate some feedback from anybody who is reading this blog. What would be the most useful way to present this information and what other things would you like to see in my upcoming monthly income posts? Thanks for reading!

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