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Income Report – December 2011

We’ve had a much quieter month in December than we’ve had in recent months and we’ve used that time to reflect on 2011 and have taken some of that time to decide where we plan to take our business in 2012. Knowing that we would get less value on our sites with Flippa sales, we decided to not offer any auctions, take the hit for December, and then add more sales in 2012. We’ll be covering some of the highlights from this last year in this report and laying out a gameplan we’ve come up with for the new year to help keep us focused and on track. Overall, we were able to pull in $11,844.65 for the month of December.

2011 In Review

Traffic

We’ve had an amazing run in getting AdSense Flippers off the ground and creating a ton of value through niche websites. We were able to pull in a total of 1,151,472 visitors this year across all of the sites and networks of sites…not too bad! 67,430 of those visitors were to AdSenseFlippers.com which is great considering the blog was only started in May and we’re at around 15K visitors monthly over the last few months.

Revenue

Our total earnings for the year came in at $112,011.84 and we created (approximately) 1,250 sites with costs at right around $60,000.00. That’s not bad, but you also have to consider (with current AdSense earnings and potential earnings on sites created the last 90 days) we’re sitting on around $4,500/month in AdSense income, which is worth around $90,000.00 to us in site sales. Ultimately, our $60,000.00 in spend created around $200,000.00 in value for us overall. This of course does NOT include the time spent by Joe and I working on the sites and AdSenseFlippers which was considerable. Luckily, TryBPO has continued to “pay the bills” so to speak, allowing us to work on this project without relying on it for personal income or having to subsidize the outsourcing company.

Brand Expansion

Since starting the blog, much of our traffic has come from others linking to us or people wanting to read more about us based on our forum posts or blog comments. We’ve been implementing Pat Flynn’s approach to “being everywhere” by starting the AdSense Flippers Podcast, putting out a few videos on our YouTube page, and being fairly active on Twitter. We monitor the “brand” a bit and are always checking out blogs that are mentioning us and leaving (hopefully) appropriate and thoughtful comments where we can and that’s helped us to engage quite a bit with other bloggers.

Networking

In a complete switch from our model with TryBPO, we’ve spent a good part of 2011 in actively reaching out to our peers and making connections that have really helped us to expand our business and help others as they work on their business goals. From meeting a number of guys in the DC, talking with Dan and Ian from the LifestyleBusinessPodcast, and going back and forth with Spencer from NichePursuits, we’re very happy with the connections made in 2011 and are looking to expand that in 2012.

2012 Growth

We’re a bit hesitant to lay out all of the things we want to do in 2012 before we’ve started some of them…we think it’s much better to report things as they’re happening so that we’re more likely to actually get them done. Still, we think it’s important to have goals or a roadmap on what we’d like to accomplish for the year so that our monthly planning meetings can be better organized to hit longer-term goals.

Traffic

We’d like to more than double our traffic across the entire network to more than 2.5 million visitors. Of that, we’d like to get up to more than 250,000 visits to AdSenseFlippers and another 100,000 visits to web properties we haven’t yet created. We’d like to see more than 150,000 downloads of our podcast. (A tall order from the 8,122 we currently have from the first three episodes!)

Revenue

In terms of revenue, we’d like to break $180,000 in website sales and more than $120,000 in additional revenue from AdSense and alternative income sources for a total of $300,000.00 or more on the AdSense Flippers project. Our plan should keep our costs under 150K, earning us a decent profit for the second year in operation.  While aggressive, we’re thinking that our increased site creation, website sales, and alternative income sources should get us there before the end of the year.

Branding And Networking

We’re really looking to expand and test through different mediums for delivering content in 2012. A first step was getting the podcast up and running last year, but we’re looking to put out more regular episodes in 2012 that relate to and are around our core business. We’re also looking to further expand the brand through video content that will be on the blog and on other web properties that haven’t been created yet, as there seem to be some steps that lend themselves better to video when it comes to creating niche sites. We’d also like to reach out more to others in the industry by offering interviews, guest posts, etc. that can help bring AF to a new audience.

As you can see, we have a big 2012 in store and we’re really excited to see how everything plays out. Now…on to the income details!

AdSense

As you can see, our income remained pretty consistent throughout the month with a fairly large dip right around Christmas. Our best day was towards the end of the month at $151.87 and our worst day was Christmas Eve at $72.99. We finished the month on a strong note that’s continued into the first few days of January.

Flippa

We didn’t offer any auctions in December, thinking that not as many buyers would be looking to pick up networks of sites with the Holidays coming up. With our model of offering at $1.00 with No Reserve, a lack of buyers could end up costing us quite a bit of money and we didn’t think it was worth it, especially considering we were still having some success selling sites directly. We do plan to offer one or two Flippa auctions in January, although they’ll most likely be towards the end of the month.

Private Sales

We did surprisingly well here this month, pulling in $7,151.80 total, especially considering the fact that we’ve had some development issues with the page and the AdSense integration that have carried on through the first part of January. Our BuyOurSites page was pretty bare in December too, although we plan on adding quite a few sites here in the next week or so that will be available for sale.

Click here if you’d like to be informed when we add new sites to the page!

Affiliate Sales

We had some carry-over on the LongTailPro sales into the month and some of the BuildMyRank sales and recurring commissions are starting to stack up. We agreed to an interview with our friend Vic Dorfman for his Smart Keyword Research course and had a few sales there as well which was great. You can check out the interview with him here.

Another interview we did was with Chris Guthrie from Makemoneyontheinternet.com. He’s a great guy and he decided to do interviews with a BUNCH of people in the niche site space including Cary Bergeron, Pat Flynn from SPI, Spencer from Niche Pursuits, and others. He decided to put all of these interviews together and share the juicy details from all of us in one package which was a pretty cool idea.

You can pick up all of the interviews for less than $20 here. (aff link)

Summary

We knew that December would be a slower month for us in terms of revenue, but were pretty excited to see we still were able to squeak out more than 10K for the month. We ended up taking quite a bit more downtime in December than we were planning on, but I think that’s really refreshed us for a great start in the New Year and we’re excited with our prospects for 2012.

Sites Created: 135 (136 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $3,514.52 ($3,813.02 last month)
Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($2,770.00 last month)
Private Sales: $7,151.80 ($12,701.56 last month)
Total Affiliate Sales: $1,178.33 ($1,534.57 last month)

• LongTailPro: $452.73
• SubmitYourArticle: $48.20
• BuildMyRank: $369.30
• SENuke X: $44.10
• Smart Keyword Research: $264.00

Total Income: $11,844.65 ($20,819.15 last month)