MyBlogEarnings For April 2007

Another month has been and gone and it’s time for another earnings report. As previously stated, I will continue sharing my earnings until someone tells me to stop, so that hopefully somebody out there can learn from my mistakes and successes to hopefully help them improve their earnings.

If you are looking for some quick tips on generating more income from your site then check out my Guide To Making Money Online With Blogging.

April was in some ways a good month, and in other ways a bad month. The goals I set myself at the end of last month were to:

• Try and stabilise my Adsense income at the same time as continuing to reduce my reliance on Adsense
• Find a replacement sponsor for my theme and new direct advertisers
• Get the handful of Intellitxt referrals I have submitted accepted
• Check that I have finally added Feedburner FAN ads properly
• If my Pank Rank does increase, review my TLA prices
• If the Directory’s PR does go up to 6, start selling links in the directory
• See if there is any way I can improve my Tribal Fusion CPM
• Find ways to improve affiliate income
• Improve my Alexa Rank

Looking back at this list for the first time (very bad I know), I actually managed to achieve 7 of my goals, (albeit maybe not the extent I had hoped) so I guess the month was better than i thought.

Ok, here are April’s Numbers (March in brackets):

• Google Adsense: $3,648.26 ($3485.34)
• Direct Ad Sales: $750.00($3236.00)
• Intellitxt: $555.05 ($625.30)
• Text-Link-Ads: $535.43 ($351.94)
• Tribal Fusion: $437.10($214.46)
• Feedburner FAN: $350.24 ($533.17 $446.39 – number got adjusted after I published)
• Blogads: $0 ($149.37)
• Vizu Polls: $110.72 ($180.65)
• ReviewMe : $0.00($50.00)
• Chitika : $31.79 ($31)
• Robert Sherman $0.00 ($50)
• Advolcano $0.00 ($6)
• Grand Total: $6,418.35 ($8,913.49)

Despite a big dip from last month’s total which was inflated by a very big one-off Direct Ad deal, I’m quite happy with the final result which still represents a 42% monthly growth rate this year, and 64% more than I made in February.

I’ve also exceeded the target I set for myself this year of $6k/pm for the second month running. This is the amount that I have factored into my personal budget, so anything I make above this amount is great. I’m very happy that I hit this amount despite suffering a number of setbacks in April which hampered my earnings (see later).

Successes For The Month

Direct Ad Sales

I managed to generate $750 in direct ad sales with no effort through two direct approaches that lead to a sponsored review and a new theme sponsor.

Adsense

I had a bad start to the first half of month, as the awful performance from March continued into April for about 15 days. But in the second half of the month my Adsense metrics shot higher than they’ve ever been before, and I hope they stay at current levels as I will then have bumper months in the future.

TLA

My strategy of dropping TLA advertisers who were paying a small amount and constantly managing prices is really starting to pay off. My TLA revenue is now double what is was in January, despite selling less links. My revenue should continue to increase in May, as I sold a few new links at the end of the month.

Rankings

The biggest success of the month was seeing my Page Rank finally increase from 5 to 6. My other ranks also continue to improve. I should drop below 20,000 soon with Alexa, and my Technorati rank is currently 545. Hopefully improvements in these public measures will help me sell more ads.

Disappointments For The Month

Site Availability

Due to screwups with my domain where my registrar said they were going to renew my domain and didn’t, I lost about 3 days revenue thanks to my site being unavailable. This was doubly annoying as the day before the outage was my best ever for revenue and I was on a roll.

FAN

In order to rectify mistakes I made in my theme release, I had to kill my old Feedburner feed and create a new one. Unfortunately this didn’t go smoothly and I lost about 10 days revenue, but Feedburner were brilliant and got me live again as soon as they could.

Intellitxt

I finally managed to get two referrals accepted which could lead to a payout of $1000. However, they haven’t received their codes yet so it could be a while before I get my payment.

Vizu

I’ve given up on Vizu as a major source of income. I think what I will do in May is put a high CPM on my polls, so I only get a poll if someone really wants to target my users.

Plans For Next month

• Implement direct sales plan

I have a plan for generating direct sales which I think will work. It will be one of my weekend projects and if it works I will share the details.

• Concentrate on building traffic and improving Alexa Rank

I don’t think I produced any ‘link-bait’ articles in April. I have a couple of drafts lined up that will hopefully get picked up by the big networks.  My Alexa Rank will hopefully continue to improve.

• Directory Moved From PR0 To PR5 – Sell Links?

This could be a big win.  Moving the directory from PR0 to PR5 was a big achievement in April. This will hopefully attract a lot more links and hence Google juice, which will hopefully mean that I will now be able to sell some links.

• Chase Intellitxt

I really want to get those referrals live, not just to get my cash, but also to help my two main blogging partners Martin and Mikael generate more cash themselves.

• Evaluating new ad scheme – approached directly

I might be adding a new ad network to my site who approached me directly, to replace some poorly performing units. Watch this space for more news in the month.

• Continue to optimise TLA sales

I’m hoping that the improved PR and the constantly improving Alexa Rank will help me sell my final links. If I manage to do this, then I will try and manage my rates to continue my revenue growth.
I hope that the amount of information I have shared here will encourage you to do the same (An alternative way is to tag your post ‘MyBlogEarnings‘ so that your details can be found easily on Technorati), or provide you with food for thought. The more info we share with each other, the more we will all hopefully make.

If you are looking for some quick tips on generating more income from your site then check out my Guide To Making Money Online With Blogging.

Read Related Posts

1. MYBlogEarnings For March 2007
2. MyBlogEarnings For May 2007
3. MyBlogEarnings For June 2007
4. MYBlogEarnings For February 2007
5. MyBlogEarnings For October 2007

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