I’ll be honest with you, the month of October has been life changing for me. It all started at the Fincon11 in Chicago at the beginning of the month. What’s weird about this, these kind of conferences usually create a great buzz and give you some motivation to keep going forward but it all fades pretty fast. So most people get back home with tons of great intentions that eventually become… nothing because you are too busy watching Dr House . But this time, it was different for me as I did something most people don’t do when they come back from a conference.

I took action

The first action I took was to improve my level of writing on TFB. I hope that you have noticed a difference as I take twice the time I used to when writing a post. They are longer, offer more insightful information and are meant to be more useful. Each time I write, I make sure that you can actually get something out of the post (such as my private advertiser management series). I don’t write just because it is Tuesday anymore .

The second action I did was to take adsense off the TFB posts. You will still see some adsense blocks in the side bar and on a few very old pages (that earn me the lion share of adsense revenue ). The reason why I wanted to lose money on purpose was to gain more readers. I want to have my top screen clean of ads as I want to make sure that new visitors want to hang around and read more than one post. So far, it is going great as my newsletter subscribers have increased ;-D.

The last action we took as a team is to establish quarterly priorities. We have tons of projects on our board right now but we were working on too many sites at the same time. Therefore, some of our time was lost and also had a decrease in motivation due to the fact that “nothing” is moving really forward quickly. Now, we have a maximum of 3 priorities (projects) per quarter.  This has made a huge increase in our productivity and the rate at which we are developing our projects .

How does this translate into my company’s income report? Here are the numbers!

What I like the most about an online company is that as soon as you take action, you see results within the first month. But the best part is yet to come as the actions you take now have an exponential impact on your results in the years to come!

Traffic: 241,196 visitors (+20%) and 323,056 pages viewed (+19.75%)

Traffic is on fire for October! There are 2 things that explain this:

a)      The stock markets have gone back up and most of my sites discuss investment topics

b)      I got hit by the Panda again… but this time, quality won the fight!

Yup! I’ll discuss that in another article but Google ran another Panda update in the middle of October and I got all my previous rankings back. This is why my traffic had gone up by so much in so little time . The good news about the first hit is that I have learned to keep my readers on my blog longer and have them sign-up for my newsletter. This is a big accomplishment as our company grew stronger in during rough times and is now ready to crush it while we get a boost of traffic ;-D.

Google Adsense: $1,628.55 (-3.05%)

This is my September payment. Since traffic was pretty similar from August to September, I’m not surprised to see about the same payment amount. However, I can tell you that with the panda update, my next adsense cheque will be higher. This should continue as my traffic is definitely picking up at the moment (my last 15 days is better than the first half of the month).

Private Ads: $8531.45 (+2.47%)

Using all the tricks mentioned in my newsletter about how to increase my private income, I have another month over $8,000 in private advertising. This is pretty good as one of my biggest advertisers lost one of his clients which resulted in canceling a healthy campaign on almost all of my sites! This is why it is so important to keep contact with many advertisers at the same time .

Brokerage deals & Affiliate: $927,59 (-49%)

Months come and go and they all look different for brokerage deals and affiliate programs. While Market Samurai and Questrade still do wonders for me, I have several ups and downs during the year. This is why I have decided to push on the brokering side of the business a little bit more. Keep reading further down and I’ll tell you more about it ;-D.

Niche Websites Revenue: $200.78 (-67%)

This is not a big surprise to come down to my $200 average right now as I didn’t close any big deals this month for my niche websites. I keep working on new sites (my latest on is almost finished!) and I didn’t work on promoting them at all. With the recent panda update, I’ve seen my traffic go up and I have now more than one site with over 1,000 visits per month without even trying! When I work on promotion (probably in Q2 of 2012), I’m convinced to bring these numbers into the thousands of monthly visits ;-D.

Cost of operating the biz: Roughly $4,000

I’m not good a bookkeeping (this is why I have an accountant right?) but I know that my expenses are roughly $4,000 for the month (this includes my pay for the day of blogging). In order to be fair, you need to factor your hours in there too. If not, you are not calculating real profits . I detail the cost of running my business in this post .

Total income: $11,087.59 (-6.33%) so roughly $7,000 in profit!

Since I have a partner, this makes $3,500 in profits for roughly 16 hours of work in a month (this is the time I spend writing as the rest of my time is calculated in the cost of operations). I’m now making $218.75/hour writing … how cool is that!

Opening up a new service for YOU!

Last week, I produced a 3 part series on how to manage private advertisers:

The first part was about knowing your site

The second part is about building your media kit

The third part is about making money without working your ass off!

There is also a 2,250 words complement to this series for my newsletter subscribers

I created this series as I knew that there were a lot of interest in private advertising and you wanted to know how I manage it. In the meantime, I tried brokering some ads for a fellow blogger. I used to this at large a while back ago. I had stopped during last year as I was too busy with other projects. But now that I have a full team working with me, I opened up the business.

In a single month, we were able to generate $650 worth of deals (this includes two 6 month agreements and 2 new Paypal subscription). We could have jumped this to $1,650 but we had technical difficulties while adding a specific widget. With this great success, I’m opening up my offer to other bloggers  in limited numbers (as I want to ensure a high quality service along with high quality advertisers ).

Here’s the deal:

I have a huge load of advertiser contacts and am well known in the industry (I’ve been blogging since 2006!). Therefore, it’s easy for me to generate more advertising opportunities and my sites are pretty full right now. So I am offering to manage and negotiate the ads for you for a very small price.

What I offer:

- I find, negotiate and manage advertising space for you.

- I also handle the renewals.

- It’s not exclusive so you can continue to find and close deals on your own.

- So less time spent on your blog, more money for you, how does this sound?

What I’m expecting from you:

- I want blogs that are PR3 and above (Sorry guys but Google sets the rule on this playground)

- I want 1 year of history (I want to deal with serious bloggers only and the threshold is usually 6 to 12 months before a blogger quits)

- I want bloggers that will put the ad in place within 24 hours

What’s the cost?

My process is pretty streamlined so I don’t want to charge you an arm and a leg for that. So here’s how it works: I take 1 month worth of advertising as a commission that is renewable on a yearly basis.

So for a monthly deal (through paypal subscriptions), I take the first payment in full and then, set a paypal subscription to pay you the following months.

For 6 month agreement, I take 1/6 of the deal and you keep the rest. If the advertiser renews in 6 month, you get the full payment (I will only take another commission if we can keep the advertiser on board the year after).

For 12 month deals, I obviously take 1/12 of the payment and you are good to go for 12 months .

Interested? Shoot me an email at thefinancialblogger at gmail dot com

I’ve already got 2 new clients for November, so I’m already at 3 and will take a maximum of 10 clients right now so hurry up!

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Yeah, I just gave up my teaser right away… I had an awesome month… but I’ll ask you to read the full post to see how it really went Let’s just say that I’m pretty happy about the outcome!

Network Monthly Traffic: 200,993 (-1.8%) visitors and 269,719 (-2.5%) pages viewed

My whole network traffic was quite stable this month as compared to the month of August. The only disappointment is that I should have seen an increase in September as vacations are over. I’ve taken a careful look at each of our sites and I can’t say what went wrong in September.

On the other hand, most of our sites talk about investing at different levels (dividend stocks with The Dividend Guy Blog and What is a Dividend, techno stocks and dividends with Intelligent Speculator and a niche site about covered call etfs. Since the stock market has tanked since April, I guess people are not too keen on investing right now. That’s sad as this is definitely the time to invest. If you are not convinced, I suggest you read 6 reasons to panic but 1 reason to invest.

Adsense Income: $1,678.23 (+9.7%)

As I mentioned in my previous blog income report, I was going to make a few attempts to improve Adsense. All I did is change the color and add image options here and there and this is how I got an increase of almost 10%. My biggest adsense income earners are:

Experiments in Finance

The Dividend Guy Blog

Intelligent Speculator

As you can see, investment topics pay pretty well when it comes down to adsense. At the beginning, we tried some more general personal finance or pay off debt articles on some sites and it didn’t work well in terms of adsense. Even if the click through rate is the same, advertisers pay less on budgeting or frugal topics vs investing (and credit cards ;-0 ).

One of our most recent projects; The Dividend Growth Index should do well in adsense. This project is over @ The Dividend Guy Blog and I have gathered 8 dividend bloggers to pick 3 stocks each that we will cover and follow quarterly. I think that if you are looking into dividend investing, this is the first article you should read to start your research on stock picking!

Affiliate Programs and Brokerage deals: $1,833,82 (+0%)

Pretty stable month, I’m very happy about that. Since my eBook about Escaping The Rat Race falls into the product category, I’ve decided to include it in the affiliate programs and brokerage deals section. I’ll write more about it in another post but sales didn’t go as I expected.

One main disadvantage of being transparent is telling the truth… even when the truth sucks! We sold about 22 copies in one month which is a disaster in my opinion. After the first week, I immediately went back to the drawing board to see what didn’t work and there is a ton of things. The good news is that I am convinced that the book is good, it was just not marketed well! (that’s pretty awkward for a guy who has a bachelor’s degree in marketing-finance!).

Besides that, my first (free) ebook about Dividend Investing recently reached 12,000 downloads and it is generating direct and indirect affiliate income of about $200 last month. In total, I’d say that writing this ebook had generated around $1,300 to $1,500 in commissions so far.

Private Advertising: $8,325.59 (+86%)

Whoa! This is where my bread and butter lives! Back in September, after seeing my main VA going on maternity leave in August, I decided to concentrate on my private advertising business. This has generated some massive deals.

The key with private advertising is to be able to offer a wide variety of sites with quality content. I have a huge network with all my sites and each time an advertiser contacts me, I offer him package deals throughout all these sites. I’m currently building a series on how to sign advertisers, build a media kit, as well as negotiating and following-up with your private ads. This should  come shortly but in the meantime, send me your questions so I can build a complete series!

Niche website revenues: $621.94 (+504%)

This is another area that I am pretty proud of! While Adsense income is getting more and more stable (roughly $100 per month across all my sites), I was able to sell some private ads on some sites. I will go pretty slow on private advertising on my niche sites as this is not the purpose, but in the meantime, a few more bucks won’t hurt either ;-D.

For the record, most of my niche websites took less than 20 hours of work to be completed. Therefore, if you are thinking of creating one, you can follow this guide line:

#1 An hour to write an outline. This include:

- The keywords you are looking for (read how to use Market Samurai if you have any questions)

- What is going to be shown on the homepage (description, design, layout + logos)

- Ad placement (Adsense, text links, affiliate programs, etc.)

- Which categories you want to develop

- The name of each article to be written (including the title with one of your targeted keywords along with possible links to other articles to reinforce internal backlinks)

#2 An hour to outsource part of the work:

- I usually outsource the logos (go see Peter at Logos for Website)

- I sometimes pay for a few articles as well (usually, you can get decent articles for $20-$25 per article)

- My partner does the techno part of it (installing wordpress, plugins, etc.). We tend to maintain a similar process for all our sites so it’s not too hard for him to “run the routine”.

#3 Thirteen hours of writing:

- With all your categories, article titles and targeted keywords defined already, this should be enough to write about 20 articles.

- If you are willing to drop $300-$400 for articles, you’ll get a total of about 35 articles total (outsourced work + your own).

- This only includes writing and editing. No posting, linking or adding images.

#4 Five hours of publishing:

In my opinion, it is very important to take your time to publish your articles, add pictures (and complete the alt text to describe it!), link back to other articles and optimize your keywords (without keyword stuffing).

As you can see, with about $500 (including logos, staff writers and other outsourcing tasks), you can build a niche website within a month. Now, how much will it generate after that? That’s the tricky question. If you don’t do anything, chances are that you will reap about $10-$15 per month from the site. Therefore, it comes down to a 24% dividend yield ($120/$500) from your investment. It’s not that impressive but that’s only the beginning .

I’ll cover more in my next newsletter make sure to subscribe! (the box in the top right )

So now’s the time to see how much I made in September!

Total monthly income for September: $11,837.64 (+51%)

Yup! That’s it! Almost 12K!

But there is a slight problem with that number… it’s the second best month of the year but I should have been much higher. Why?

Because I’m lazy!

I have more than $700 in cheques in my pocket (which I received over the past 3 weeks) but I was “too busy” to deposit them! Therefore, technically, September should be my biggest month with at least $12,537…. Oh well, they will be deposited in October ;-D

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After a disastrous month of July, we are finally back to normal! My previous blog income report was quite disappointing as we were running cash flow negative. This was the first time it happened to us since we started reporting our income and probably the first time ever in the short history of our online company.

But this month, we are going back up to an interesting level. While most people argue that blogging is not passive income, I can tell you that I can’t agree with them. In August, I took about 2 weeks of vacation and so did my partner. If you make the calculations, we work only half of the month and we made 38% more income than in July (see results below). On top of that, since one of my VAs is on maternity leave at the moment, the cost of running my business dropped around $4,250. Therefore, we made over $3,000 profit by not working. Not bad huh?

Here are our stats now:
 Network Monthly Traffic: 204,643 (+10%) visitors and 276,678 (+10%) pages viewed

Traffic has been good in August for most of our sites. Our main leaders at the moment are EXP (Experiments in Finance which I don’t speak much about) and The Dividend Guy Blog. These 2 sites were barely affected by the Panda update and to be honest, EXP traffic is up by 15% since January!

To be honest, I didn’t do anything to increase my traffic in the past 3 months since I was working intensively on the launch of my eBook. Therefore, I’m just glad to see that I’m getting over 200,000 visits/month again!

On the positive side of things, my RSS and newsletter subscribers are increasing too. Therefore, it means that I’m able to grab new visitors to stay longer on my sites and encourage them to connect with me. I’ve also made a resolution to improve the frequency of my newsletter postings by giving additional free and exclusive content. This should also help to increase my number of visitors. I didn’t want to make it just a “resolution” so I have actually made a plan to write more and I already have a list of topics to write about. By the way, if there’s anything you want me to cover, just send me a quick email J.

Adsense Income: $1529.54 (-20%)

Yet another drop in income but I knew this was coming (remember, I’m posting cashed income, not earned on paper income) as this is the adsense payout for July. What’s cool is that the bleeding has stopped. After making over $3,000 per month, I’m down to an average of $1,500 (August’s payment will be similar).

But there is something very important that needs to be done with Adsense in the upcoming month. I have realized this while analyzing income stats per site over the past 8 months. One of my sites, The Dividend Guy Blog, is earning way less income than it was only a few months ago. However, the traffic didn’t drop that much. This is when I have realized that my CTR (click through rate) has dropped over the past month, resulting into less income.

What can I do?

The first thing I’ll do will be to play with the ad placement and colors. Sometimes, when you try a new setting, you increase automatically your CTR. I’ll also try to add images instead of only providing text link ads. I’ve tried it in the past with unsuccessful results but it won’t cost me much to try it again for a week or two . With over 1,000 ad impressions per day, the numbers meet the average quickly!

Affiliate Programs and Brokerage deals: $1,832.74 (+1190%)

As July’s affiliate payout was just awful, I’m now back to a “normal” month in affiliate program and brokerage deals. The many downloads (I’m at over 10,900 as I write this post) of my first e-Book Dividend Investing is helping a lot. I figure that I have made slightly over $1,000 in affiliate commission coming from this book. Not bad for a freebie .

In the upcoming months, I’ll add the sale of my eBook: Rat Race: 1 Year From Now, Will You Still Be A Rat?. I launched it earlier this week and it should be a great success. From all the comments I have received from my fellow bloggers, I think we should be able to increase our income on a steady basis with this book. I’m already working on the second book (my outline for the 4 books is settled already!) and I expect it to launch it before Xmas…

Private Advertising: $4,472.61 (+23%)

I’m back doing my renewals (man I miss my VA!) but it was definitely worth it! I used my recent day of blogging at home to clean up all my advertising renewals and follow-ups. At the same time, I was offering my advertisers the rest of my sites. This has worked pretty well and in single day, I’ve added more than $200 in monthly subscriptions. This is what I call a good day at work ;-D

Niche website revenues: $123.51 (-25%)

This month was solely adsense income. I haven’t worked on my niche websites for a while now but the traffic is pretty stable. I have discovered that it is much easier to do small “satellite sites” such as What is a Dividend and Covered Call ETFs and promote them through my network. They are natural references since they are related to my investing topics. It’s harder to get natural traffic with my home security system site or my second hand saddle one .

I’m currently playing with the thought of hiring a VA to do my backlinking strategy and directly copy Smart Passive Income’s business model for this part. After listening to Pat’s podcast, I’ve figured that I could use one of the resources he mentioned to hire a SEO specialist and have him work almost full time on getting back links. Since the game is being played at that level, it is almost impossible to have great rankings without putting more emphasis on SEO! I’m giving myself a few weeks to think about it (and pitch the idea to my partner while we are in Chicago at the beginning of October! For the Financial Blogger Conference ).

Total monthly income for August: $7,834.89 (+38%)

This number makes me feel more comfortable about my online business . On top of that, I had a check in my pocket of $470 that I didn’t have time to cash in August. Therefore, I could have hit the 8K mark once again but it is making a great start for September .

With the launch of my first eBook yesterday, I hope to reach another month of 8K moving forward! I’ll concentrate on promoting massively my book for the upcoming months while writing the second part of my series too!

I hope you had a good month too! Keep it up!

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Another month flew by and it is now time to present my monthly blog income report for the month of July! I knew this was coming, but I’m still disappointed by the results from July. Summer is always slow and this year was no exception…

Traffic: 186,392 visitors (-9.34%) and 251,466 pages viewed (-7.61%)

Traffic took a small dip but this has nothing to do with being banned by the Gmen or anything else. It is just that computers don’t compete well with summer vacation! I totally understand that! The finance industry in general as well is always a pretty slow period. In fact, seeing my visitors dropping faster than my pages viewed is somewhat of a good sign: people are staying longer on my site and read more pages. So, I’m pretty happy to go through the summer at this rate until now.

Google Adsense: $1,914.12 (-3%)

I have currently noticed a drop in CTR (click through rate) on some of my sites so I will definitely review my ads displayed in September. Since this is the money I have received from Google, this number comes from my month of June.  I can tell you that the July stats look like smaller numbers and this is where I noticed a lower CTR rate. Is it vacations, the type of ads displayed (you don’t control Adsense blocks) or the actual ads displayed? I’ll have to take some time to review all this.

What I like about having so many visitors is that I can try a new display and know within a week if it works better or not. I’ll share more about this in September!

Brokeraging deals & Affiliates: $142 (-88%!)

This is definitely the cause of my drop in income. I usually average between $1,000 and $2,000 per month and July has just been terrible for affiliate income. While some checks are still pending, I didn’t generate as much as I was expecting obviously! I guess the fact that I have restructured TFB this year didn’t help as I am slowly switching my readership.  I know that most readers wanted to know more about how I make money online and manage both a career and my online company but I have lost a few readers along the way too.

I’m not going to be pushy on the affiliate programs as I don’t think it’s a good way to make money. I’ll continue to mention products I believe in and that I work with but nothing more.

Private Advertising: $3,638.01 (-1%)

I made about the same amount with private advertising so it’s pretty much business as usual. I didn’t sign any new contracts but everything is being slowed down by vacations. You start something with someone then he leaves for vacation and comes back 3 weeks later with a pile of stuff on his desk. You know the feeling, right?

Niche Websites: $165.56 (-22%)

Niche websites are doing pretty well and I’m starting to see some serious improvement in terms of traffic and pages viewed. I guess it will reflect in income at a later date. I actually didn’t do anything on them for the past 2 months and now I am sure that they will generate over $100 per month on a steady basis. We are currently working on 2 more niche websites along side the eBook and one of them should be able to be launched within the next 2 months. It should definitely bring more income by the end of the year.

This has been quite an adventure to start niche websites as I didn’t know much about them back in January 2011. At first, I started with some basic (read useless) niche websites and now I understand that in order to be successful, it’s not only a matter of putting together a few pages stuffed with keywords. You need to present great and complete content.

I’ve also started to work on some more keyword research with Market Samurai and I have tried various backlinking strategies for What is a Dividend. I’m already seeing an increase in traffic but I want to wait a few months before I share my results with you. I’m pretty happy about this site as I now get between 3,500 to 4,000 visits per month and the traffic doesn’t show many peaks so it is growing steadily.

Total Income: $5694.13 (-16%)

Yeah… that’s my worst month of the year and the first time I am cash flow negative (you can review my blog expenses for more info). I’m not too worried as I mentioned yesterday in my 7 secrets about writing an eBook, the major flaw of writing a book is that you lose focus on the rest of your business. Therefore, I didn’t do anything else but write in July and I was still able to gather almost $6K. August should be a bit slow as well as I am taking 2 weeks of vacation and my partner does the same thing.

So What’s the Plan?!?

In August, we will basically finish our first eBook and prepare its launch. Since we will both be on vacation and most of you are away as well, we decided to launch the eBook in September. There will be a pre-sale through our newsletters (you can subscribe in the newsletter box on the right column of this blog). I would rather wait one more month and launch it right. We have put too much effort into it to miss our 1 week of sales! In the meantime, I’ll start writing the second eBook (I want to finish my 4 eBooks by the end of the year… ouch!).

So this fall will be crazy!

image credit

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For the past 3 weeks, we have been running without our main VA as she was at the hospital. Thankfully, she and her baby are not in danger. It was ‘just’ a kidney stone. I was glad to find out that she was able to return home and get some rest. In the meantime, it is crazy how much it had impacted our business! Yup, you guessed it, this monthly blog income report is not as spectacular as the previous one. It’s not all due to the fact that we didn’t have our main VA going after advertisers but it is a piece of the answer. Let’s take a look at the numbers:

Network Monthly Traffic: 205,610 (+19%) visitors and 272,183 (+15%) pages viewed

This is great news since we are entering the worst part of the year in terms of traffic. Usually, people go on vacation or are outside during the summer and we always see a drop in traffic. It seems that a few (not all of them!) of our sites recovered from The Panda Update. Also, the launch of Dividend Investing, our first free eBook helped drive significant traffic towards The Dividend Guy Blog. We got some social media buzz (Stumble Upon and Tip’d), which explains the lower growth in pages viewed when compared to visitors.

To be honest, I don’t believe in social media promotion. They are good for increasing the number of backlinks but people coming from social media rarely stick around. Most of them jump from one site to another without reading much. Their goal being to Stumble sites in order to improve the importance of their user account so they get more traffic when they submit one of their sites. Since most people on those bookmarking sites are using a similar method, nobody gets high quality visitors like YOU, my loyal readers .

Adsense Income: $1973.75 (-20%)

This is probably the last drop due to the Panda update. Since most of my traffic jump was caused by the buzz generated around my eBook and a bit of Social media promotion, people didn’t click on Adsense; they downloaded the book! Which is pretty great overall since I have now over 7,300 downloads since June 1^st.

On the other hand, I have also noticed that I suffered a drop in my click through rate (CTR). While I can’t discuss my numbers, let’s just say that my CTR for the past 2 months are way below my 12 month average. This could be explained by 2 things:

-          My high CTR pages were deranked by Google in the Panda update

-          The advertising package during summer time is less attractive to readers

-          People got used to the ads displayed and they now tend to ignore

During the summer, I’ll work on a few things to get back to the $100/day mark. In order to achieve it, I’ll work on the following points:

-          Working on SEO on high adsense potential articles (I’ll write more about this later on)

-          Changing my ad displays and colors (maybe try images as well…)

-          Adding work on SEO for my niche websites (which should become my best Adsense income earners 12 months from now)

Affiliate Programs and Brokerage deals: $1137.05 (-50%)

I told you that summer was bad for our business, right? Well affiliates are pretty bad too! I didn’t receive many cheques this month. Was it due to the 2 week Canada Post Lock-out? It could be a possibility. However, I noticed that most of my big income generators slowed down this month.

Sad enough, I don’t have much time to take care of my affiliate programs right now. I would rather concentrate on content creation and the writing of my second eBook (I’m about half way done now!). Affiliate marketing is great, but selling your own product is much better! This is why I’ll concentrate on creating my own products for the next 6 months. My agenda is pretty full as I plan to write 5 eBooks (a series of 4 eBooks on financial independence + the “sequel” to Dividend Investing, a more advanced investing book).

Private Advertising: $3683.56 (-36%)

This is where we missed our Virtual Assistant the most. We weren’t as fast at closing new advertising deals and also couldn’t renew 2 good contracts. Losing private advertising space happens almost every month. Bad economy, cuts in marketing budgets or simply the end of the advertising campaigns are part of our day-to-day business. However, we are usually able to add more contracts than we lose on a monthly basis. June slipped though and we are down to 3.6K from a high time record of 5,7K. Still averaging between 3K and 5K per month in private advertising, pretty good!

Niche website revenues: $212.03 (+250%)

This is probably the most positive thing happening in our business right now: diversification continues to prove itself right! While some of our bigger websites are slowing down, the smaller ones are picking up. I didn’t work on any new niche websites projects nor any promotions in June and still, the income generated from these sites jumped over the $200 bar for the first time. Traffic is slowly growing, especially for What is a Dividend, which is showing a few high number of pages viewed and time on site (about 3 to 4 pages viewed and 3 to 5 minutes per visitors). I think that what we have learned from our other niche websites was correctly applied to this one. I just can’t wait to see how this site will perform once we start aggressive promotions and backlinking strategies for it!

Total monthly income for June: $6,794.36 (-35%) $10,514.33

It’s crazy how we become greedy over time! Not so long ago, a near 7K monthly income would have made me jump for joy! In 2010, our average monthly income was between 5,5K and 6K per month and now complain with a ‘slow’ month of 6,8K .

I am definitely disappointed but was nonetheless expecting a drop in my income since the Panda update. It just didn’t happen as fast as I expected! The Global economy is also slowing down and one of the first things that is being cut is marketing budgets! This is why I need to move forward and leave the private advertising model. Unfortunately, I feel that this will take me a good 12 to 18 months to do. In the internet world, this feels like a decade!

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