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4. Income Report – June 2011

Income Report – June 2011

Before you skip down to the bottom to see how our June turned out, I just wanted to thank you for all of the contact and encouragement we’ve had from you over the last month.  You’ve shown a tremendous amount of support and the ideas shared have been interesting and actionable.  We hope that as we continue to learn and grow that we can help you as much as you’ve helped us through this process.

That being said, we’ve had a really exciting month!  We were able to increase our AdSense earnings by close to 40% and increase our Flippa website sale earnings by more than $1,400!  We had our first $100+ day with AdSense and then did it again…and again…9 times in total with our best day at $134.22 on 6/30/11.  More than our earnings, one of our greatest successes this month had to do with the addition of agents and the replacement of ourselves as bottlenecks in the process.  If you’ve followed along with our Keyword Research Strategy Part 1 and Part 2, we’ve now taken ourselves out of 50% of Part 1 and around 70% of the work in Part 2.  At this point, we still want to get rid of Part 1 completely and, if we can do that successfully, we’ll only be left with gauging first page competition and then picking out the keywords we want to target each week, including purchasing the domains.  That would get us down to around 5 hours of work per week with 30 sites per week…easily scalable to 50, 70, even 100 sites per week eventually.

This month, we’ve come across a project/group that we found particularly interesting on Facebook.  They’ve grown organically to over 40,000 likes, have a very engaged audience, appeal to young people and foreigners (Westerners), and have very little presence outside of Facebook with no real monetization to speak of.  We’re in the early stages of talking to them about ways we might be able to help them grow and start earning with their labor of love.  I’m unsure of what our goals might be at this point (Acquisition?  Investors? Advisory role?) but will definitely keep you updated as the discussions continue.

Adsense

Our average daily earnings climbed to $93.43 per day for the Month of June, and can be largely attributed to our 89 sites from April starting to hit their stride, averaging $5.85 per site for the month of June.  You’ll notice in the following chart that our average earnings per site for April/May sites is a bit down, but this is largely attributed to the fact that when I began the process, I started with the PURCHASE DATE of the URL’s to determine which month the accounts start in.

This is probably not the best date to use, as we started falling behind a bit on site/content creation and they were actually put up a couple of weeks behind, but no matter.  The change wasn’t too much, as you can see.  Also, we ended up selling off all of our December sites in the month of June and will no longer have long-term tracking on their numbers, of course.  We plan to sell our January sites through July/August.  This means that it will take longer for us to realize the long-term tracking on our sites but, of course, gives us a great cash injection to continue growing our network of sites.

Our expectations for July are quite high, as we expect to average over $125 per day, based on our historical averages.  Here are our updated projections:

Flippa

We again listed our first network of sites with a BuyItNow option and it got towards the end and someone snatched them up.  For the next sale, we decided to not include the BIN price and see instead what the market would determine was fair value.  We were amazed to see that sites with less earnings went for considerably more and to watch the bidding extend more than 24 hours from when it was supposed to end!  We’re considering this a quite successful test and will continue to explore not using a BIN option in the future.

We’ve still failed to pick up buyers before listing the sites for sale on auction at Flippa, but we’re not quite sure the reason for this.  We lay out the same information, but think it’s because we lack a large enough network of buyers to get someone to purchase.  So, instead of going through the extra work of listing the sites for sale on our website here first, what we’re going to do is email everyone on our email list once the auction has been listed on Flippa.  This email will contain a code that, when used on purchase, will include freebies like additional content, $50 – $150 off the Flippa purchase price, etc.  That way, we’re still able to reward you for being a part of our regular readers without the additional hassle of listing everything for the sale twice.  Nice, right?

Click here if you’d like to be notified of any website sales at a discount before we list them for sale on Flippa. You’ll also get a report showing you exactly how we make these sites, for free!

Affiliates:

So we FINALLY get around to swapping some of our sites from AdSense to Amazon products and we get the dreaded California email from Amazon.  Ouch!  It’s not that terrible for us of course, but we really do feel for those of you who get a good portion of your revenue from the Amazon affiliate program.  You can check out Chris Guthrie’s answer to the problem if that helps.  Note: We are not tax professionals and cannot give legal advice.

We did switch a couple of our other sites over to both a lead provider, ABC Leads, and a very small, direct household goods company.  The household goods company gives a much larger percentage than Amazon, but they’re quite small and their page layout doesn’t seem to be great for conversions, unfortunately.  So far we’ve received $50 from ABC Leads (an improvement) and $0 from the smaller company (disappointment).  We’ll continue these tests for a couple of months and will report back when we have more data to review.

Also, we ended up with a Market Samurai sale this month!  We don’t do much in the way of promotion, aside from affiliate links sprinkled here and there, but we believe VERY strongly in MS as a keyword tool of choice.  Editor’s Note: We’ve switched over to using LongTailPro for keyword research as it’s faster and more reliable.

Summary:

Sites created: 116

AdSense Earnings: $2,802.82 ($2,026.37 last month)

Flippa Sales: $4,795 ($3,390 last month)

Affiliate Sales: $96.56 ($0 last month)

Total: $7,694.38 ($5,416.37 last month)