February 2008 Stats

by Sapphire (March 1, 2008)

This month sucked with earnings of $218. That’s the lowest I’ve had in a while, and that’s despite increased traffic to most of my sites. This forces me to take a look at where I’m going wrong. You’re going to laugh so hard at the first item - I did!

Blocking your aff pages from the SERPs in robots.txt is a bad move. Yes, I really did this, and I can’t remember why. One of those pages was bringing in about $20/month in commissions, and I was looking forward to it bringing in more. The good news is it was a simple mistake, and the pages are already back in the SERPs.

The rest of my analysis is not as easy to fix.

It’s the economy, stupid. We’re in those months after the Christmas rush where affiliate sales just aren’t that hot. And we may be heading into a recession full of lost jobs and tougher mortgage payments. How this affects people who buy ads, another part of my income stream, I’m not sure. But it’s a factor. Not the largest factor for me, in my opinion, but a factor.
My CPM earnings are way down. Despite significantly increased traffic and more pages running BlogHer ads on two different sites, my CPM earnings are about half what they were five or six months ago. This is because the paying campaigns are paying less and the non-paying campaigns are getting more play. CPM is just not a fantastic source of income for sites not generating millions of pageviews. The sad thing is, it’s my best source of income on one site. On the other, however…
Text link ads are down.This is nothing new. Most of my income last year came from text link ads. Most of it is still coming from them. I’m still struggling to boost my affiliate income so that I have a portfolio of aff sales, CPM and text link ads.
PPC sucks. Seriously, AdBrite can’t generate more than a few pennies of income a month. I used to get $15/month on flat rate ads through them on this site years ago when I had about a third the traffic I have now. I don’t know what the problem is - I’m doing the same things I used to do and they’re not working. I’ve removed it from most of my sites. Bidvertiser also sucks. I don’t know what to replace those earnings with. It’s not like I was ever a fan of PPC, but nothing else seems to work better.

What to do? I just spent a couple of days re-theming a couple of sites. My plan for this year is basically content, content, content, followed by site promotion, followed by taking a look at my monetization strategies. Which translates into this to do list:

Put at least three posts a day on Project Mai Tai. I’m now hiring writers to help.
Put at least two posts a day on ChillyCool. Also, I decided my old format (each post containing three links that often had nothing to do with each other) was confusing, so now each post contains one link, a quote, and often a bit of commentary from me. That way you can actually search the site for articles on a certain topic and find what you’re looking for.
Revamp my thin aff sites. Give them all original text for item descriptions, format them in more of a magazine style.
Do lots of promotion. I only wish I knew what type of promotion works. Maybe I’ll go to ShowYourAdHere and start shopping for ads.
Look at my monetization strategies.
Flood my library sites with PLR content. One of them has more feed subscribers than a couple of my “real” blogs.
Have some idea that beats the hell out of all this, because I don’t see this getting me to my goal of $2k/month by the end of this year.