If you look at my latest earning reports, you can see that I’ve been making slow but steady progress at increasing my websites’ revenue through Google Adsense and eBook sales. I seem to be coming up short in affiliate programs, though. I’ve been running a variety of Commission Junction ads on a couple of our sites for just under a year now. In this time, there have been 222,059 impressions but only 276 clicks – for a CTR of 0.12% which is pathetic in itself. Even worse is that not one of those 276 clicks converted into a referral or sale so I’ve made a grand total of $0 for the entire year on CJ. I’m not sure if the advertisers I’ve been choosing aren’t a good fit for the websites they are on, or if I’m missing even more basic than that. I’m completely at a loss why my site visitors will click on AdSense ads for a topic on my sites, but completely ignore very similar affiliate ads in the same location.

Now you may be thinking – “there’s more affiliate programs than CJ, T.J.”…. Sure there are. Google has an affiliate advertising add-on to Adsense. Can you guess how much I’ve made off of them? If you guessed $0, you’re right! Last month I made I applied for several others: and they all told me the same thing: denied. Even WalMart!

I will admit that I’ve done a little better with WidgetBucks and Amazon averaging about $2.00 and $1.25 a month respectively. With WidgetBucks‘ $25 sign-up bonus, and a $50 minimum payout, I’m only 10 months away from my first payout, and two years after that until my 2nd payout. I think I’d be doing much better if I had a site that meshed better with one of the categories. I’ve got some sites in the works that may bring the monthly total up significantly. Amazon makes it a little easier to get payouts if you’re willing to take it in Amazon credit. The threshold there is a measly $10, meaning I’ll get paid in another 7 months.

Don’t get me wrong – I know there is money to be made in the affiliate business. John Chow made $6,579.67 from it last month, and it was his #2 moneymaker after private ad sales. I just think that the site needs to align better with an in demand big-ticket affiliate product. Web hosting, advertising networks, and expensive hardware and software all seem to lend themselves to the affiliate game than cute babies or gluten free recipes. I would imagine a site about AutoCAD or PhotoShop could make a pretty penny with an Amazon affiliate link to those high-priced products. John Chow obviously gets affiliate bonuses for people who sign up for advertising networks using his affiliate links. I’d love to have a site about Plasma TVs, but that market is a little saturated. I need a great product that is in demand, high-priced, under-represented online and has an affiliate program with high% payouts. I wonder if anyone has an affiliate program for dentures?

Adsense: $34.21
eBook Sales: $44.87
Amazon Affiliate: $0.
CJ Affiliates: $0.
WidgetBucks: $1.05

All time highs for both Adsense and eBooks. I think Jenny McCarthy’s media blitz really helped the eBook sales and traffic to the Autism/gluten-free cooking site considerably. I’m happy to say I finally have a month where I made over $1/day with AdSense, a goal I set for the 2nd month of CuteBabyFix.com being online – it’s six months late, but at least I finally made it.

WidgetBucks is a new advertiser that I started with about 1/2 way through October. I already have $1.52 for Nov, and hope to see steady increases as the months go on. If so, it will be my 1st decent profit on an affiliate program so far. I have made NOTHING through Commission Junction despite averaging over 30K ad impressions per month. I thought I had some great product placement in October, however I only had a click through rate of 0.22% and no conversions… pathetic! Hopefully WidgetBucks’ run-in with Google won’t come back to bite me in the butt!

Other October highlights include PageRank promotions of both CuteBabyFix.com and Woggle-Bug.com to 3 (from 1 and 2 respectively). I’m pretty jazzed about that, especially since many blogs took a huge PR hit this update. We continued to see a slow steady trickle of traffic from being posting on National Review’s Corner Blog, although nothing like the 3K hits we got in 2 days at the end of September. I think it helped bring our average RSS reader count up to 18. Finally, we hit the magic $100 number in our adsense account, so we’ll be getting a nice Christmas bonus from Google in December.

The most interesting observation is that I’ve had my best financial month ever, yet my traffic either stayed flat or dropped (depending on the site). I think there were two main things that brought that about. First, the Jenny McCarthy thing really drove more targeted traffic to Woggle-Bug. People were really looking for what we had and the cookbook eBook sales reflect it. Second, I dropped about 1/3 of my competitive ad filter from my AdSense settings. I got a lot more $0.01 clicks, but also a lot more clicks overall, boosting my total revenue for AdSense. This month I’ll weed through the rest of the list and see if the trend continues. I’m definitely skeptical of blocking the low-paying clicks after October’s income improvement.

Future plans: With my next major goal being $300/month, I’m hoping to make math work in my favor . With two active sites (I really haven’t monetized this one much) making an average of $1.36 a day, I’ll need 18 sites to hit the $300/month goal. Assuming we can keep performance like October’s going, I could do it with 7 sites. My goal for November is to get two more sites up and running, and post more regularly to this one (so I can monetize it as well). The new sites will be a Mormon Clip Art site (which I’m seeing fairly low CPM ads for so far, but I’m hopeful to find other revenue streams) and the re-birth of our Removing Cat Pee site (which I lost in a bad server crash). I may also try my hand at another couple of eBooks, as we’re having some great success with the Gluten Free Cookbooks. I know it will take a while to get the sites fully populated with content and making decent money, but getting the structure in place will be the first step!