So this is a quick summary of May. May has done slightly better than the most of April with $2723.10 ($2590.29 in April). Despite the drop between March and April, the trend still looks like a positive growth.

I decided to compare the graph below, and although there seem to be a strong affiliate (amazon) increase, we can see that the adsense increase seems to have plateau since September of 09. This make sense since most of our new sites have targeted affiliate programs rather than adsense-based websites.

Overall, the month was sparsed with many high days, and many very low days. Not sure what is going on with google, but the rankings of the websites have seemed to be dancing around, something being pushed as far as 2nd or 3rd page before coming back to the first page. We have also lost a few first positions for some keywords that had looked strong in 1st position. We did not change anything… Google change in algorithm?? Difficult to say… Anyway all we can do now is keep pushing the websites and the keywords and hope that we can rank for more keywords and get our first places back.

So this is May and time for an April recap.

Unfortunately, this month did not meet our growing expectations. We made a total of $2590.29 for the month of April, which is not bad, but certainly not as good as our previous record month.

Interestingly, we are seeing an overall increase in traffic on our websites as seen on those analytics charts below. So the reasons in drop in income does not lie behind a decrease in traffic, but rather a decrease in sells and adsense revenue. So people have not been buying as much – affiliate income have dropped by 20% (tax season? summer coming up?) and we assume that for similar reasons people haven’t been tempted by the ads or adsense ads were just really crappy – adsense income have dropped by 34% (tax season? bad economy? summer season?). We are trying new affiliate programs other than adsense (clickbank), and are excited to see how this will turn out for us. In April for have earned only 6$ in other affiliates :P, but we are working in increasing this number.

These are the trends for a few of our main sites. As you can see, there is a general growing trend in increase traffic.

We are hoping that sells will pick up for the months of May, and that the new affiliate programs will help increase the revenue so I can finally quit my full-time job and travel the world :P.

People who COPY our keywords then go and COPY our backlinks…

Just be more original, or at least don’t make it so obvious you are trying to take over our keywords… Geez.

Ouch… They hurt the revenue pretty badly! We’ve seen record lows, numbers that we haven’t seen since Christmas day!

Anyhow, happy Easter everyone!

The month of March follows our somewhat linear trend with a total revenue of $3421.06!

This is our record month, and throughout the month, we have finally reached the goal of the challenge that inspired us to start making website… the “100 bucks challenge”, where Steve Crooks challenged himself to make 100$ a day in 3 months using 1 website and only adsense. Well we did it in 12 months using 46 websites, adsense and other affiliate programs ;) (but anyway, long story short, he did not succeed to make 100$ a day in 3 months using only adsense and 1 website).

And this morning, we woke up with an awesome surprise… A lot of the websites that were ranking low are suddenly moving to the top !! We started adding more content to some of the older websites, and apparently, Google liked it…

Easter weekend is coming up, we would not be surprised if this weekend would see low days of income, due to people probably gathering with their families and friends.

Nat

As of March 27th 2010, we now have 46 growing websites. Of which, only about 11-12 of them have consistently been making money.

As we can see, the graph above shows an almost linear growth curve for the amount of money generated by the websites.

This is pretty exciting and amazing to see that the amount of money generated does correlate with the amount of effort put into the websites over time, and that they add up.

The month of March is following this trend and is on track for another record month, going for an over 3000$ month.

With all the money generated, we decided to incorporate a company, which will allow us to receive a tax break on this extra income generated on top of our regular income.

Our company became effective as of Mar 26th 2010 and we are very excited to read and learn more about running our very own company!

Goal : We are expecting to hit a 4000′ish $ month by the month of June. In order to do so, we need to bring more websites/keywords to the first-second-third positions of Google/Bing to increase the number of visitors.

Nat

In November, for the first time, we experienced “holidays” revenues weeks, which are scary low. Thanksgiving week was far our worst week in several months. A week with extremely low number of people coming through the sites, therefore low revenue.  We figured people probably spend quality time away or with their family ;)

Nevertheless, we are, once more, reaching a new high with a big total of 2109.10. This is very encouraging.

This month, for the first time, we made more in affiliate-based revenue than in adsense-based revenue.

Table of progress

And on thanksgiving, we had a taste of what the new google will be like… We were really excited when we realized that many of our websites are showing on the first page or near the first page with google caffeine! However, Google decided to postpone to the new year the full release of caffeine because they did not want to risk messing up their servers and people’s site before the holidays… SIGH.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that we had created 4 new Amazon websites targetting niche products. The websites are filled out now, and have had a fully SEO pass done on them. One website has done amazingly well, going all the way up to #1 spot on Google. Another has taken a about a #5 spot (bounces around between 4-6 usually). The last 2 have had a harder time making their way up the search engine listing. They’re on the 5th and 8th pages respectively, but they’re making progress every few days as well. I’m optimistic they’ll hit the first page in the next couple weeks.

Oddly enough, none of these new sites have even been indexed by Bing yet.

I’ve never posted here, so I thought I might try my hand at it. While Nat usually handles the creation of the websites, I often handle some of the other aspects of creating websites. Usually that involves research, trying out various tools, and doing SEO. Mostly boring stuff. I might write some posts on different SEO techniques I’ve tried, or the tools we use.

Last month we hit a high of $1810.94, and as of yesterday, we’ve surpassed that. The last few days of the month are all record setting now, and we’re averaging about $60/day at the moment so hopefully we can come in $200-300 over last month’s high. Cross your fingers.

With Christmas approaching, we’ve registered an additional 4 Amazon based sites. We’re hoping to fill them with content and being ranking them before Xmas hits. This is a bit of a rush job, but I think it’s doable. One of the sites has already crawled its’ way into the top 10 on Google, the others don’t appear at all for their keywords yet.