MyBlogEarnings For July 2007

End of the month and another MyBlogEarnings report. 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.

At the end of June my traffic started to dip, so my number one priority for July was to try and stop the decline so that hopefully my earnings wouldn’t suffer from the expected fall in ad spend over the summer months. Unfortunately due to various reasons I took a bit of a break from posting over the first two weeks of the month, although thankfully Gili and Dennis noticed that I wasn’t posting so they wrote a few additional posts to keep the site ticking.

Thanks in part to their efforts when I returned from my ‘break’ halfway through the month my traffic hadn’t fallen by a huge amount, although my Adsense eCPM was down 25% and all my other schemes were suffering apart from Text Link Ads.

Earnings Report For July 2007

Note: Figures for last month are in brackets and some numbers are estimated (in italics) as data for 31/7 was not available at the time of posting.

• Google Adsense: $4,280 ($4,234)
• Text-Link-Ads: $1,386 ($1,010)
• Intellitxt: $1,034 ($1,210)
• Tribal Fusion: $715 ($810)
• Direct Ad Sales: $235 ($825)
• Linkworth: $168 ($0)
  
• Feedburner FAN: $159 ($337)
• ReviewMe: $130 ($560)
• Chitika: $14 ($55)
• Blogads: $6 ($6)

Grand Total: $8,126 ($9,048)

Overall, I’m happy with the way the month has turned out as my target was to stop my earnings falling by more than 10%, and I managed to only fall by 9.2%, which is amazing given that I took a two week break.

Successes For The Month

Adsense

As I mentioned earlier my eCPM was down 25% halfway through the month. However, the picture for the second half of the month was totally different and my overall eCPM only fell by 6% over the month – I even set a new daily record for earnings. My total earnings were higher in July because I actually managed to increase my traffic in the second half of the month and because I had an extra day.

Text Link Ads

My strategy of cancelling my lowest paid links every couple of months because TLA allow advertisers to constantly renew their ads at an old historical price seems to be working, and I sold a few more links during the month. I know it’s not making me popular with TLA, but given that I’ve managed to generate (if no-one cancels their ads next month) $1300 extra per month for both myself and TLA from doing this, I don’t think they can really complain too much.

A bonus for the month was selling a link via Linkworth for the first time!

Growing My Traffic

I thought my traffic would fall in July due to the summer hols starting, but thanks to some unexpected additional traffic, I actually had better traffic levels than in June. I hope that I can do the same in August!

Disappointments For The Month

A common theme in July was a major fall in CPC and fill rates:

Intellitxt

Not only did my traffic increase in July, but so did my Intellitxt CTR. Unfortunately like my other schemes the CPC rates totally tanked so I ended up making less money than in June.

Tribal Fusion

I think Tribal Fusion was the biggest disappointment for the month. I’d actually increased the number of units on my site, and I was expecting to make nearly double the $700 I made. But the fill rate plummeted over the month, and even when an ad was displayed my CPM fell to about $1.

FAN

The FAN ads make very little money, particularly the ads in my feed where I made a grand total of $15. I’ve decided that I’m going to ditch the FAN ads in my feed as they are probably just annoying my regular readers who never click on them anyway and this is definitely not worth $15/pm, but I will keep the site ads as they pay a decent CPM when they (rarely) appear.

Direct Ad Deals

Nothing substantial occurred over the month, although I’m in the middle of negotiating a big deal which unfortunately didn’t close in time. Hopefully, I’ll be able to close that deal in August.

Weak Dollar

The Dollar is getting so weak now, that I really wish I didn’t have to convert my earnings into pounds. The exchange rate is now paying more than two dollars to the pound, and I really hope it doesn’t get any worse.

Plans For Next Month

My plans for August are pretty much the same as July’s:

• Stop my traffic falling to try and minimise any further falls in CPC and CPM rates
• Close Direct Ad Deals
• Experiment with Tribal Fusion categories to see if I can improve my CPM/fill rates
• Try and sell the few remaining text links in my forum and directory, before reviewing advertisers and rates again at the end of August

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.