I’m building so many mini money making machines that someday, they will do all the work for me.

I’m a little bit late for this report as I got sick the first week of November. You know how it works when one of your kids get sick at school, right? Everybody in the family got their share of a the flu…

When I look at my online company back in January of this year and I look at what it is today, I can’t even believe what we accomplished in nine month. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making more money than I used to (unfortunately!) but my sources of revenue have reached a whole new level of diversification. I used to make roughly 60% from private advertising and while this business has dropped to 25%, I’m still on target to make as much as I made last year. So let’s take a look at what happened in October!

Traffic Improvement

As I mentioned in my previous Blog Evo Report, one of my most profitable sites has been hit by another Google Chimpanzee update. This resulted in losing roughly 75% of my search engine traffic for this site. My guess is that I’ve become too greedy with this site and pushed too much Adsense optimization. The site has probably been classified as an “ad top heavy site” and Google are currently chasing them down. So because I was making too much money with Google, the same company dragged me down. Ironic, isn’t it?

I was quick to react and made modifications the same week. I didn’t get my traffic back but I was able to reduce the bleeding. In fact, my search engine traffic increased by 30% in the last week of October (keep in mind that if I was getting 100 visitors per day, down 70% it was then 30 visitors per day, up 33%, it’s now at 40…. I’m still a long way to getting all my traffic back). Nonetheless, it’s a good sign and this tells me that I’ve identified the problem and am fixing it with the right solution.

I removed the Adsense leatherboard and changed an Adsense block within my site. Therefore, I ensured that the first thing that readers see on my blog is content and nothing else. My Adsense earnings hurt (you’ll see that below) but at least, I’m getting more traffic back.

On the other hand, I have another site that “fell into the good graces” of Google where I see an increase of 20% in my search engine traffic. That was good news as I’ve seen both my eBooks and Adsense earnings on the rise. Win some, lose some, the joy of diversification!

Affiliate Program Strategies – Newsletter Projects

I recently read a very interesting book called Magnetic Sponsoring. Most of the book has been created to boost MLM (multi level marketing) networkers to even greater success. First, I hate MLM’s (you can read my Primerica Review if you want to know how they work), so I wasn’t convinced about the content of the eBook! The problem with most MLMs is that they are not making money with their products (regardless if it’s vitamins, insurance (Primerica), cosmetics (Mary Kay) or phone/cable (ACN), they are making money from recruiting more people. And I don’t like when you advertise something while you sell something else. The problem is that most people’s MLM won’t advertise that you are in the recruiting business. They will sell you the “system” and lead you to believe that you will earn money from right, left and center. This is not what is happening. Sure, there are a few crazy performers that are making a ridiculous amount of money. But this is the same situation in every field. Ramit Sethi is making over $1M per year through his financial blog, the best doctors are making over $1M/year, the best stock traders too (even bad traders make money, lol!), and so on.

So back to the book, I like a few things about the theory behind Magnetic Sponsoring. In a few words, the idea is to sell yourself as an expert in a domain instead of selling your product. There is one quote that I will remember from this book and it presents pretty much the whole concept:

“Nobody who bought a drill actually wanted a drill. They wanted a hole. Therefore, if you want to sell drills, you should advertise information about making holes – NOT information about drills!”

-          Perry Marshall

I’m going to give more thought to the whole concept and apply it to various levels throughout my network. I’ll let you know how it works. In the meantime, if you have ever heard or read this book, I’d be curious to know what you think of it.

Niche Site Central $560.92 (+ 4%)

I’ve decided to publish my Niche Sites income now to give a little bit more transparency. It will also help me know how much these sites are generating in my company. The $560.92 is broken down into two sources of revenues:

$326.40 from eBooks (Excluding Dividend Growth)

$234.52 from Adsense

There was a huge increase in the number of small eBooks I sold this month. The main reason was a stroke of genius by my partner who simply worked on the sales page. As crazy as it seems, just a few different words in the titles and sub-titles and BAM! 30 more sales! The key was to erase all “feature keywords” and replace them by “benefit keywords”. Here’s an example:

Let’s say you are selling drills (yeah… I know, I’m piggy backing on what was written above). You want to promote the fact that your drill is making super clean and precise holes. You have 2 options on how you can word it:

The S3452 Drill comes with 25 different hole sizes and 8 speeds so you can drill super clean and precise holes.

That is putting the features in limelight while you still outline the benefit of drilling holes. But you can twist it this way:

Make your holes right the very first time, each time!

When you think about it, the real benefit of making a clean and precise hole is not really to make the most amazing hole of all time. The benefit is to do it right, the first time so you don’t scrap your wall, swear at the tool and throw your drill at the dog!

Do you want to make nice holes or do you want to finish this task ASAP with the best results possible? The first one is a feature; the second one is a benefit. The main difference between the two statements is not the end results (it’s exactly the same), but you add the emotional factor to your feature. This is how you can boost your sales instantly with the very same product.

I must admit I’m not the best guy with this technique yet. But I’m slowly learning how to put the right wording out there that will generate an emotion from my reader instead of a “hum… that would be nice” thought. “That would be nice” never triggers an action, especially a buying action!

eBook Development

The book continues to sell very well. The first update listed 144 copies in the first week, my second update showed 226 copies total as at October 15^th and I can tell you that I’m at 291 as at November 5^th. The goal was to sell 300 copies by December 31^st and I can tell that I will achieve my goal big time.

My designer is dragging his feet in the production of a paper copy and I’m about to lose my patience. He just has too much work on his plate and I hate feeling dependant! I plan to do a relaunch for Xmas and I’m running out of time. I will definitely work on a plan B in the upcoming days….

Besides that, we have a few ideas on the side to write another book. With the current success I have experienced with Dividend Growth, I’m seriously thinking that I could build a bigger business model around my books. Just think about it; if I could sell 20 books at $10 each per day, I would be making $200 per day – $73,000 per year from books. I’m currently selling on average 3 to 5 books per day (now that the buzz is over) with all my books, I just need to write more books and I’ll be able to make it!

Current Project I’m Working On

I’m preparing myself for the Holiday season! No… seriously! Last year, I launched the best dividend stocks for 2012 book and it was a great success. I made over $1,000 in affiliate links with this book and it was downloaded 4,221 times so far this year. Not too bad for a few hours of work! I’ll be repeating this experience with the Best Dividend Stocks for 2013 with an enhanced eBook. The key will be to provide even more value so I increase the number of downloads. Since my newsletter is twice as big now as it was back in January 2012, I expect to hit it hard! Then, in this free eBook, there will be references to my Dividend Growth book. This should lead to more sales!

Adsense Income $2,838.33 (-31.63%)

This is the sad result of having Google hit me right in the jaw by hurting my most Adsense prolific sites. I’m down by $1,300 from my record month but still pretty close to the $100/day mark. I know that with my latest modifications, I’ll be able to get back my $100/day and, hopefully, start earning over $3K again this January.

Now it’s your turn, tell me, what have you done recently on your sites to make them better?

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Last week, I read an interesting piece from Kevin @ Invest it Wisely. He highlighted the upsides and downsides of sharing your income with others. As he mentioned, most people are voyeurs and love to see how others are doing. I’m pretty sure that if you offer to tell your neighbour how much you make and how much you have in debt, he will be delighted to buy you a coffee (but don’t expect the same transparency in return!).

People like reality TV as they like to know what people are doing with their lives. Somebody else’s life is definitely more interesting than yours, right? We all want to know how this guy is able to pay for his new car or go on vacation and we really would like to know about our boss’ salary.

This is Why Sharing Your Income is a Good Marketing Strategy

The fact that people want to know makes the idea of transparency a great marketing tool to bring people on your side or to get other’s peoples attention if you share your personal income. You will automatically have the dance floor to yourself and have your moment of glory… if, of course, you are making a great income!

Several successful bloggers are sharing their income report in order to attract more readers.

Several brokers and financial advisors use the same technique to show they make money in order to attract new clients.

Reality shows are based on the same concept to attract their audience and it works perfectly!

If You Share Your Income, You Must Have a Better Plan Than That

Sharing your blogging income is definitely a great way to grow your readership. However, if you only do it to gain more readers, you are making a big mistake. This is what I had done last year and it wasn’t worth it. Sharing your income to get more RSS or newsletter subscribers is not a good marketing plan. You need a better plan than that.

When you share your income, you don’t always attract the people you want. You will also attract jealousy. This is why the benefit from sharing must be higher than simply getting more traffic on your blog.

Pat Flynn’s example is perfect:

His income reports are among the most read and popular posts on his site.

Each income report includes tons of affiliate links and tutorials to use products.

If he used a different ID for links showed on this income report than others used on his site, I’m positive that the ID linked to the income report would generate at least 50% of his overall sales.

It’s also an amazing way to do natural link building:

Income report articles usually get several natural links from other bloggers who comment or just mention how great your month was. Then, if you include links towards tutorials and articles that will generate affiliate sales in your income report, you are building an amazing web around the keywords you wish to rank for.

So the better plan enables you to:

#1 Improve your traffic

#2 Improve your affiliate stats

#3 Improve your keyword ranking on money generating articles

This is why and how people share their income efficiently. And this is where I failed last year in reporting my income. Since The Financial Blogger is not all about making money online but my personal blog where I talk about personal finance as well, it’s harder for me to make money through “making money online affiliate programs”. I was able to boost my sales on Market Samurai but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the hater threats.

In order to fully benefit from the power of an income report, I should have taken more time in the detail and write more “making money online affiliate articles” that would have generated more sales. It’s definitely a catch 22: you are looking to improve both your traffic and earnings with your income report while you need to publish strong numbers to improve your traffic & earnings J.

Sharing Personal Income is Totally Different

In my opinion, I don’t see much downside in sharing my personal income with my friends and family. I’m not walking in the room and bragging about my salary. But if someone asks me how much I make, I will give him the exact number. I don’t see why I wouldn’t. You will probably tell me that I may lose friends because of jealousy. You are probably right. But I don’t see it as a downside. If someone is your friend simply because he thinks he makes as much or more than you, than he is not really your friend in the first place. If all it takes to end a friendship is a number written on a pay stub, do you really need this person in your entourage? I don’t. I would rather keep real friends with real values. As for the others, well… too bad for them!

I’m always surprised to see how taboo money is. You have more chances to know about your friends sexual fantasies than their salary! I see it with a totally different set of eyes. If someone makes more than me, then I’m curious to know what he does that I don’t. How he got there, how things went for him (it’s never easy). It makes great story and you can learn a lot from these people. Unfortunately, this is very rare that you can have such conversations…

Final Thoughts on Sharing Income

Each month, I’m motivated by the desire to share more information with you. I want you to know how I make my money online and how I reach my goals. I also want you to know that it’s not always easy and that I fail from time to time. On the other hand, I remember that if I’m not strong enough, if my plan is not big enough, there will be more downsides to sharing my numbers than upsides. This is the reason why I’m still sharing my Adsense income and continue my Blog Evolution Report. It’s not as bold as an income report but you can get a lot of information from it. One day, I might go back to the full income report… I just have to build a strong plan behind it so it’s really worth it J.

What do you think? Are you willing to share your income with friends and family? Would you share your business revenues?

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Yeah…last month I told you that I would stop publishing my blog income report. This month, I’m telling you that I’ll be sharing a part of it . If there is one thing that is constant in my business model, it’s definitely the fact that I keep changing my mind. I think it’s important to rethink the way you do things constantly even if it means to go back to your project and making even more modifications. This is why I will be telling you about my adsense income at the end of this article. Since I want to boost my adsense up to 40% of my total monthly income, this would give you a pretty good idea of how much I make on a monthly basis.

Traffic Improvement

The end of April was a bit challenging for us because one of our sites was hacked for 3 solid days. It was showing a malware alert before you enter the site. Do I have to tell you that I missed several thousand visitors during those 3 days? It was quite challenging to solve the issue as it wasn’t clear what the problem was. Here’s what we did:

-          Run free malware detection tools… without any real indication (you get what you pay for, right?).

-          Check Google Webmaster Tool to see what was going wrong… Google was telling us that we had 24 (!) pages affected by malware. We couldn’t tell which pages were delinquent.

-          We then contacted our host (Liquid Web) to ask them to run tests on their end. They were very helpful and first found that it was probably created by a plugin or a code added to the WordPress theme. Since WordPress is used a lot by bloggers, it is a platform targeted by hackers.

-          It took them 2 days to clean all pages and make sure that the malware won’t come back.

With spring coming, we always see a small drop in traffic. When I combine the malware event to the natural slowdown, I can say that my traffic has been quite steady. We didn’t make any major changes on our side to improve our traffic either.

Affiliate Program Strategies

I haven’t worked much on affiliate programs this month as I was finishing my eBooks (more on that below). This is how I collected a few checks from Market Samurai, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, INO and Questrade (here’s a good  Questrade Review).My experience with displaying 1 single link toward ProBlogger’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog really proved that you should think of adding excellent resources to your epic posts. About a month ago, I wrote a huge post on how to Survive Google. In this article, I explained various strategies used to create a sustainable business that is not fully dependent on search engine traffic. A simple mention of my most favourite book to learn how to build a strong blog was enough to “pay me” for having written this post. If I do this more often, I would not only become richer but I would also help a lot more individuals. There is a huge difference between plugging an affiliate every time you can and telling people about a product you like and use. The latter is truly helpful for everybody and this is how affiliate links should be managed.

Newsletter Projects

Last month, I mentioned that I was working on a newsletter funnel project of 12 emails. I’d say that half of these emails include at least 1 affiliate link. They are all pointing to legitimate products that can truly help readers. Since I’m now done creating the email funnel, the test is now running to make sure everything goes smoothly. Testing is crucial when you want to sell products through your newsletter. You want to make sure that your message hits home and that people see the benefit of registering for products instead of seeing them as annoying ads.

Now that this project is almost over, I’ll be able to concentrate in May on my other newsletters (such as TFB!). I have several topics in my “to do” list

Niche Site Central

My EMT Training site continues to impress with a total income of $36.87 for its second month. I’m surprised since I have absolutely no network in the medical or job/career field to use to boost the traffic. I’m still not getting many visitors (slightly over 300 for the past month), but the Adsense stats are awesome. I was also able to generate an affiliate sale of $20.99. I think the combination of Adsense and affiliate programs is awesome. The EMT exams are not easy and people are definitely looking for help. Mock exams and audio resumes are a great help if you want to pass that exam. I guess the key point in designing this niche site was to aim at a need people had (pass that exam in order to get a job). Since this need is quite important, people are willing to invest a few bucks to make sure they pass the first time.

Now, the real challenge will be to generate traffic as I’m convinced that if I can multiply my traffic by 10 (getting 3,000 visitors/month), I can also multiply my income by 10 (and make almost $400/month with this site!). Link building will be a hard path to travel but I have a few ideas in mind.

eBook Development

I’m “officially” done! I’ve written 2 eBooks on the same topic: 1 Canadian and 1 US version. This was quite a challenge, especially writing the second version. I had to revisit the entire book and erase several chapters and rewrite others. What I found the most difficult about it was that I needed to find the additional motivation to revisit something that I already completed. The book is now off for final editing and formatting. I’ll share more thoughts on strategy (and how the sales went) later. For now, let’s just say that I am very happy to have completed this very important step in our business plan. This will enable me to work a lot more on other projects!

Current Project in Progress

Next month, early in June, is our annual meeting. We will have to discuss how the company is doing so far this year and what will be done throughout 2012-2013. We usually start our discussion a month in advance through email to bounce various ideas and topics we want to discuss during that meeting. We have limited time to think about our business during that weekend and need to be as efficient as possible. By doing a 1 month brainstorming session, we have the opportunity to build a huge list of topics to cover and not forget anything. This is definitely the biggest project I’ll be working on this month: preparing the next 12 months for my business. We usually cover topics such as:

-          Operating costs (potential savings, optimization)

-          Security (server, backup, password management)

-          Revenues (trend, strengths and weaknesses)

-          Projects (new sites, products, newsletters)

-          Overview of our current sites (we look at each site to determine what should be done to make it better)

This is definitely one of the most exciting moments of the year for our company!

Adsense Income: $3,126.40!

For a second month in a row (sorry, I couldn’t show you March’s income stats!), I reached an average of over $100/day with Adsense! In fact, during April, I only had 6 days below the $100 bar. These usually happen over the weekend! When I look at my stats, I only wish I could understand why I go from aRPM(revenue per mile impressions) as low as $0.46 to as high as $29.64. Part of the answer probably lies in the site topics and type of visitors. The rest of the answer is probably in the ad placement. I’m actually working on a big piece of how I manage Adsense throughout my network and I’ll provide more details next time out. In the months to come, I’ll also create additional channels to narrow down my stats. I currently have 1 channel per site, regardless of the size or the ad placement. In a perfect world, I’d need a different channel for each ad placement to know exactly where I make money and where I’m just bugging readers.

If you have any specific questions, send them to me!

And if you want to learn more about my online business, you simply have to register for my newsletter:

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Hey, what’s up?

We are starting the March Madness with a big announcement today! But if you want to know what I’m talking about, you’ll have to read until the end of this post to know what I’m talking about J. Do you remember my 2012 blogging goals?, well one major step has been accomplished in order to reach the average of $15,000 per month that I’ve fixed as a milestone to achieve in 2012. Don’t jump too fast, I’m not telling you that I’m starting my streak right away. So let’s look at the number first and then, we will see what is so important in my business!

290,518 Visitors (+17%) and 403,023 Pages Viewed (+16%)

We are definitely on a roll in term of traffic. All our major sites have taken a few more visitors per month and I’m surprised each time I look at my traffic stats! On top of that, some of my niche websites are starting to get some tractions and I don’t count them in this stats. For example, Canadian Dividend Stock got over 4,500 visitors and What is dividend is surfing over 3,300 for about 4 months now. The secret behind my success? Quality content and heavy internal back linking! Each time I remember that I’ve wrote an interesting piece about the same topic, I link it back on my new post. This doesn’t take much time but it brings continuous SEO to your site.

Adsense: $2505.89 (+22.72%)

If the traffic goes up, Adsense follows! This is one of the basic rules you have to remember while monetizing your site: you need Google’s traffic to make Google’s dollars. I’ve slightly modified my color theme for The Dividend Guy Blog (by taking off the red url and changing it to grey on the big ads) and it worked perfectly. I’m now looking to make this switch on every channel to see if I’ll see the same result. At $2,500/month, I’m now shy of $1,000/month to reach my goal of making $3,500/month with Adsense. The secret to gain the next $1,000 monthly is quite simple when you think about it:

-          Increase your SE traffic

-          Increase your CTR with better color theme and ad placement

-          Write SEO friendly articles about things that pay (such as investment or credit card ).

In order to achieve this, I’ll play a little bit more with Market Samurai in order to find topics where I can write series about and start ranking for additional keywords. I haven’t done this for a while but I think that it’s import to go back to this strategy in order to increase my Adsense income. The good news is that I’ll be making more in February than I did in January with 3 days less! I can’t wait to see how much I’ll do in March with those extra days!

Broker / Affiliate deals: $1,767.60 (-16.26%)

This has been a very slow month in term of brokering deals. I was expecting to close an additional $10,000 worth of deal this month and it didn’t go as planned. The arrival of Caleb is probably a part of the answer. The other part is that I wasn’t too greedy and I didn’t go after any advertisers this month. This is probably why it has been a slow month. However, I’ve my VA coming gradually coming back from maternity leave that will help me with this. She will be handling most of the admin behind all my private deals and broker services. Hopefully, I’ll have better news to share with you in March!

Private Advertising: $6,419.06 (-2.02%)

Then again, this is not the biggest month in term of private advertising. For some reasons, I’ve lost 2 major deals (that would have included my own sites + my clients). The sad part is that both deals were lost due to “acts of God”. It wasn’t related to bad negotiation skills or a bad move in term of business relationship. It was 2 unrelated events happening on my advertiser’ side and both of us didn’t have any control over it.

Niche Websites: $286.95 (-5%)

If there is one awesome point in this month is definitely the fact that my niche websites are growing steadily. We start to see some interesting traffic and the sources of income are not coming solely from Adsense anymore. With Sunil’s method, I’ve recently developed a new niche site for EMT: EMT Classes. Since I’m on paternity leaves, I’ve the luxury of working each night on my sites while I watch over Caleb. This allowed me to build a whole site with about 70 unique articles. Instead of paying to build my site, I’ve simply taken a lot of my own time and build it exactly the way I want. This is a big challenge as it’s one of our only niche sites that is not related to the financial world. However, it follows my niche sites rules:

-          It’s a sizeable niche: there are a lot of searches for everything regarding paramedic courses and EMT jobs.

-          People are ready to spend: EMT students want to make sure they past their exam and they are willing to pay a few extra bucks to make it happen.

I’ll tell you more on this later… if EMT is a success .

Expenses: roughly $4,000

Since I’ve taken a lot of my time to create EMT, I haven’t spent much to operate our business. So the cost of running our operation is fairly stable once again.  I don’t expect to spend more on my business this year as most of our projects can be done within a $4K/month budget.

Total Income: $10,692.55 (-0.11%)

I’m a bit disappointed in February results to be honest. I know I’ve worked hard during several nights and, unfortunately, results don’t happen overnight. Instead of working on immediate revenue generators (such as running after advertisers), I’ve preferred to think about the future of my company and take action that will assure a sustainable business model.

On the other side, February 2012 revenues are kicking February 2011! (I’m +32.10% as compared to last year). The best part is that my cost structure hasn’t increase by a cent! In fact, my cost forecast for 2011 was even higher! But I better be careful; March 2011 was a killer month last year so I better be ready to make some extra effort in order to make it!

So what’s up with the announcement, Mike?

On yeah… a thousand words and still no news about this big announcement J. I’ve actually achieve one of my 2012 blogging goals already: I bought not 1 but 2 sites!

Fabulously Broke (Read the introductionary post here)

Everyday Minimalist

I really like FB as the previous author was embracing a lot of my values and I miss writing about personal finance stuff as TFB has become a more entrepreneurial blog now. I’m expecting to write on this once a week and write an exclusive newsletter every 2 weeks. So if you miss my personal finance thinking; you will find it again on this blog .

As for everyday minimalist, you may laugh because it’s definitely not my bag. However, my partner is a little bit more toward this idea. Since both were selling in a package deal, we thought it wouldn’t hurt to buy both of them (there is also a great synergie between the 2 sites).

Those 2 sites are a major addition to our company as each of them qualify under the major sites criterion. I’m giving myself 2 more months to fully integrate them into our business model, but I’m sure I’ll bet able to make a killing with those 2 new sites . Watch out for killer traffic stats in next month blog income report!

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I really feel like Kung Fu Panda while writing this post.

I feel like him because I LOVE eating and I made some delicious dishes over the past 2 weeks…

Oh wait… this is not where we should be going with the post.

There is another reason why I feel like Kung Fu Panda….

It’s because I’ve kicked ass in January!!!

It’s really about the income (I’m pretty stable on that side) but it’s more about how quickly the business evolved in a single month:

-          I’ve made major advances in my book.

-          I successfully monetized my mailing list for the first time.

-          We closed some great deals through our advertising management service.

-          We found a professional designer to do both our book layout and a mini site to sell it.

This is why I’m so excited!!! But the stats for January are cool too! Let’s look at them:

246,790 Visitors (+21%) and 346,292 Pages Viewed (+25%)

Ahhh, it feels good to be back to normal! This shows similar stats to the ones published back in November. However, we had a few server difficulties with some of our sites during the month of January. Therefore, I expect next month to be even bigger. I’m actually preparing a few great posts about servers and hosting services. If you have any questions, now’s the time to send them .

February’s stats should be a lot bigger due to the inclusion of our latest purchase too. I’m not going to disclose the site name since the transfer is currently in progress (so it’s not quite ours yet lol!).

Adsense: $2042.03 (-13%)

The Adsense December payment was obviously smaller than the previous month but stats have come back for January. There is one thing I find particularly interesting: my niche websites are starting to contribute more significantly of late. In January (for which the payment will land in February), What is Dividend and Canadian Dividend Stock generated over $150 in Adsense! If I can continue to increase their traffic, these 2 sites will become cash cows as well . I’m now waiting to see their PR increase to include a few private adverting deals on them!

Broker / Affiliate deals: $2,110.88 (-29%)

While I didn’t receive many cheques in January, the bulk of my income for this segment came from my broker activities. I’ve closed a total of $10,775 in advertising for my clients which generated a profit of $1,426. My profit is still higher than my 8.33% commission rate since I get paid for full commission on a 6 month deal (and the client gets the full 6 month renewal if I renew the ad). With this month, I’m getting closer to my $2,000/month objective for 2012. What will help me is that I’ll have a VA take care of managing the deals starting in February .This is why I expect to be able to rack up a steady $10,000/month worth of advertising for my clients (hopefully!). I must admit that since the beginning of this “official” program, I never thought of making this much with it!

Private Advertising: $6,551.47 (+14%)

I don’t want to go crazy on private advertising. I’ve written it many times but my goal is to keep an average of $5K-$6K. I see a trend from advertiser to aim for 6 month and 12 month deals. I can’t complaint about this trend since you get more money upfront and advertisers usually renew 6 month deals. They get a rebate by paying upfront while I get assured that my ad spot is taken for the year. If you want to know how I manage my ads, I suggest you start by reading my “build a media kit” series.

Niche Websites: $302.07 (-57%)

Here’s good news and bad news at the same time: the good news is that I was able to generate for $267 in adsense for the month. The bad news is that I wasn’t able to generate any big private advertising deals. So the “stable” income is increasing but it doesn’t put more money in my pocket either! I definitely have a long way to go before I meet my $2K/month objective. I’ve made some great progress but I still need to tweak all my sites to make it happen.

Expenses: roughly $4,000

About a year ago, I wrote about my cost structure. Many of you were skeptical on why I was spending so much on my company. I was forecasting a total cost of 66,7K which never happened (my main VA went in maternity leaves and was not replaced). This is how I got down to spending roughly $4K on my online company since then.

I can understand your skepticism since 4K/month seems a lot of money for a sideline. However, I want to outline that my cost structure has not grown for the past year while my income has. In fact, my last 6 months show an average of $10,833 while the last 12 months show an average income of $9,770. So the extra $1,000 of income is just pure profit in our pockets . In 2012, I expect to have an average expense of $5K per month (4K as a stable budget + random peaks according to our needs). For example, we will soon pay for another design for our ebook and mini site. This will cost about 2K in total.

Total Income: $10,704.38 (-3%)

I’m very proud of what we earned in January even though it’s not an astronomical number. Why? Because it’s the fifth month in a row we show an income exceeding 10K. This is also an increase of 43% compared to January 2011 (when we made $7,626). I’m posting our blog income progression with a comparison to the 2011 numbers (I hope that all the red columns will be bigger than the blue columns ).

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be home (as we’re expecting our 3^rd child to arrive anytime now!).

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