December Earnings Breakdown
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
It’s been a good solid couple of weeks since I’ve posted anything here, but I’m back! Did you miss me? Took some time off for the holidays. Hope yours were as good as mine!
There’s so much to do and so much to talk about that I’m not sure exactly where to begin. We’ve got December’s earnings numbers to talk about, my new Quick Index Software release, and of course…Google’s up to no good again! So let’s dive right in with earnings news.
Yesterday I posted Decembers Snaphot Earnings numbers. I was very happy with the numbers. The holidays are always a great time to own Adsense sites, and this year didn’t disappoint!
Just to recap the numbers:
Adsense Stats:
Number Of Websites: 325
Page Views: 109.877
Earnings: $3,007.31
Amazon.com Affiliate Stats:
Total Sales: $11,515.19
Total Commissions (less returns): (at 7%): $794.87
Items Shipped: 244
Items Returned: 19
So this month’s total earnings come to:
$3,802.18…or about $123 per day.
It’s interesting to look at these numbers and compare them to November’s numbers. As far as earnings go, I was up over $1,100 over November, but that’s not the most interesting thing. Let’s compare each stat…
- Page views in November were 81,405 vs 109,877 in December… up 35%
- Adsense Earnings in November were $2,158.73 vs. $3,007.31 in December… up 39%
- Amazon Commissions in November were $532.46 vs. $794.87 in December… up 49%!
- Amazon items shipped in November were 157 vs 244 in December… up 55%!
So what do these numbers tell me?
I’m not completely sure! But I find it interesting that page views increased 35% and Adsense earnings increased 39% which is roughly in line…you’d expect earnings to increase proportionally over the holidays because advertisers are willing to spend more on advertising to capture the eyes of all those Christmas shoppers.
The real “Wow” moment is when looking at the Amazon numbers. They really shot up higher than you would have expected based on the increase in page views. I mean, wow! 55% more items bought, and 49% increase in earnings! That’s huge.
But again, we can attribute this wholly to the holiday buying season.
December was a great month…and January started off amazing too….for the first four days. Here’s January’s first four day breakdown:
- Jan 1: $103 in Adsense, $7 in Amazon = $110 Total
- Jan 2: $153 in Adsense, $15 in Amazon = $168 Total
- Jan 3: $114 in Adsense, $1 in Amazon = $115 Total
- Jan 4: $95 in Adsense, $43 in Amazon = $138 Total
That’s an average of almost $133 a day! Great! I thought to myself that December was strong and January is just building on that strength! Which is amazing since the Holidays are over…
But then the wheels came off the bus. The next four days shook out as follows:
- Jan 5: $70 in Adsense, $2 in Amazon = $72 Total
- Jan 6: $44 in Adsense, $4 in Amazon = $48 Total
- Jan 7: $34 in Adsense, $0 in Amazon = $34 Total
- Jan 8: $46 in Adsense, $19 in Amazon = $65 Total
Those numbers are a disaster! It’s so hard to go from making $120 a day in December, to suddenly $54 a day last week. Once again it’s Google messing around with things and I’ll discuss that tomorrow!
What else’s going on at MarketingFool.com?
As promised I’ve got some goodies to share with you! I may have taken some time off during the holidays from posting articles on the site, but I wasn’t idle. I finished building my Quick Index Software that allows you to get your new sites indexed at Google instantly and at the snap of a finger.
And as promised I’m making it available for free to anyone that subscribes to my newsletter (also for free). Just fill out the email form at the very bottom of any page of my website and I’ll automatically email you download instructions.
If you’ve already subscribed, you don’t have to do it again. I’m going to email all subscribers a download link later today.
I’ll talk about the software in more detail within the next day or so, and you can read about it now by clicking the software box at the bottom of the page.
December was a great month, let’s keep the momentum going! Welcome to 2012, and…
Keep on building!!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
PS..if you liked this, or any of my articles, please share them below on facebook, twitter, digg, or whatever social networks you like. Spread the word good people!!
Adam smith
10. Jan, 2012
Hi John. Firstly great website.. Full of information which has sparked some great ideas. Iv developed my own WordPress plugin that does your old 404 error trick. The only thing now.. How do I get google to index pages which don’t exist. I have created a sitemap with all the keywords for the site.
E.g http://www.bestwashingmachines.com/Samsung-wx2334-front-loader
And uploaded that to google webmaster tools but I worry about internal links on the website as there will be none?
How do you get around that?
Also, you say you have over 300 sites. On average how many keywords does each target? And would it be more beneficial to have 10 sites each with a 1000 pages targeting different keywords?
One last thing.. When you are choosing your keywords, do you tend to just go after product names or do you go for things like “which is the best Samsung front loader for stains”? How do you find these keywords?
Sorry for the load of questions but my mind is flying a mile a minute at the moment 🙂
Thanks, Adam
The Marketing Fool
10. Jan, 2012
Hey Adam! Glad you’re enjoying the website.
You’re on the right track making a sitemap (though I wouldn’t submit it to google webmaster tools because that helps google track down your sites if they decide to ban them for any reason – and they will). Instead I would add a reference to the URL of your sitemap in your robots.txt file because google always scans the robots.txt file. I’d also put a link to the sitemap on all your pages.
But that’s not enough…you’ve hit the nail on the head. You need actual links on each page to each other page in order to make the pages real. There’s lots of ways to do that, you have to just get creative. If nothing else, you can just hand code them in. I put as many as 50 links to other pages in my site in the footer of each page of my sites.
As to your other question, my sites don’t target a specific number of keywords. I usually type in my main keyword into the Google keyword tool. If you log into Google, the keyword tool will give you up to 800 related keywords. I’ll often just download all 800 and use them. I have a little tool that I built that replaces the spaces between the words with dashes and slaps an .html at the end (for instance, “cheap lawn mowers” becomes cheap-lawn-mowers.html then I just upload all those keywords to my sitemap. When Google spiders the sitemap, see’s the link to mysite.com/cheap-lawn-mowers.html it follows it, the 404 trick auto generates a page, and walla…the page that doesn’t exist suddenly does.
But that’s just a starting point…I’ve programmed my sites to autogen infinite other pages by fiddling with those 800 keywords….how I do that is beyond this comment but I do plan to explain it in detail in the future, as soon as I can figure out a good way to explain it :-p
As for your last question, I don’t do keyword research. I pick broad niches, like “lawn mowers” then just go scoop up the 800 suggestions that the google keyword tool gives me and go from there. I use .info domains that cost $.67 cents to buy, so I don’t pick and choose keywords, I just buy another .info domain and build another website. If I’ve got to choose between 10 different keywords, I won’t – I’ll just build all 10 sites. Why not? I believe in the shotgun approach or spaghetti approach, throw it all up on the wall and see what sticks!
Hope these answer your questions and hope to see you around the site!
Adam Smith
11. Jan, 2012
Hi John,
Thanks for clearing a few things up for me there, but I do have just a few more questions if you dont mind?
Firstly, regarding the 50 links at the end of each page – are these links the same on every page for that site, or do you have a script that automatically changes them on each page load so it looks like 50 different links?
Secondly, my sitemap is just a collection on the domain name + keyword saved in a .txt file. Is this sufficiant? If not, what is? And what is the importanct of linking each page to just a simple .txt file?
Lastly, and I can understand if you don’t want to give away any more information on this – when you say you create an infinate amount of pages from the 800 KW – how does this work? At first I thought you may be switching every letter in every word to create every concievable word possible – but 1. the computing power would need to be huge and 2. you would end up with millions of pages targeting random letters.
I really thank you for the information on this site – I hope someday soon to live soley from Adsense earnings and your website has made that dream seem a reality.
Adam
The Marketing Fool
12. Jan, 2012
Hey Adam,
The 50 links at the bottom of the page rotate randomly. I’ve got a script that does that automatically.
Your site map…by domain + keyword do you mean like yoursite.com/keyword.html? If so, that’s correct. You can use a text file as a sitemap but I recommend you create an xml sitemap instead because that’s the industry standard that Google likes to see. You can do a Google search to learn how to do it if you don’t already. It’s pretty simple.
The reason you put a link to your sitemap on each page is just to make sure that google finds it and spiders it.
Lastly, the infinite page thing is beyond the scope of a comment, I’d need a lot longer to explain. There are a zillion ways you can do it and I do plan on describing my method in the near future. I say infinite but that might be pushing it…let’s just say millions and millions of potential pages. 😉
Emanuel
10. Jan, 2012
Hi John!
Im happy that your december adsense earnings was that spectacular! I hope your earnings keep growing, even if google is messing arround with their algorithm again.
I tought you were MIA, lol. But I think is something wrong with my subcription because I am not getting notifications to my email I tried subscribing again but it says I am already subscribed. So I dont know whats happening. I would like to get your indexer software.
Honestly I got lazy on holidays I still have the same 23 websites, but I noticed some of the webites are starting to get organic traffic. Little 1 to 3 visits a week, I know is low but its a start. They are 1 month old.
I hope this 2012 will be a great year for adsense affiliates like you, and a great year for newcomers like me.
Take care!
The Marketing Fool
10. Jan, 2012
Hey Emanuel, nope not MIA just taking a little time off to relax with friends and family over the holiday. That’s one of the great things about Adsense, you can slack off whenever you want and income keeps rolling in! 😉
About your subscription, you use hotmail and they are notorious for blocking aweber autoresponders and email lists. You can probably check your spam folder and I’d bet you’ll see about 50 messages in there from me. You can change your spam settings to allow all email from marketingfool.com
In the mean time, I’ll email you download instructions for the software from my gmail account. Look for it in a few minutes, and if you don’t see it – again – check your spam folder. (edit: email sent – you should have it now)
I’m really looking forward to 2012! Hopefully we’ll both make a boatload of money!
Kaiser
26. May, 2012
300+ websites. How the hell do you manage? lol
The Marketing Fool
26. May, 2012
Whatdya mean?