August 2011 Income Report

I only started working with ‘niche sites’ in mid-May so this is only my 4th income report (see May, June, July) so it’s still early days and there is still a lot of experimenting to do to see what success I can make from this. What has dawned on me is that I’ve been very lucky with my first niche site I made and the money it has brought in (ranking #1 in Google for it’s keyphrase), and conversely with other sites I’m working on it shows that it’s not as easy replicating that success.

The Numbers

	July Income	August Income	Difference
Niche Site P	£340.36	£384.83	£44.47
Niche Site F	£8.22	£11.24	£3.02
ademdjemil.co.uk/blog	£3.27	£2.86	(£0.41)
Niche Site C	NA	£0.00	£0.00
TOTAL	£351.85	£398.93 ($645.29)	£47.08

Almost £400 income for August! It didn’t look like that was going to happen based on figures for the first half of  the month and I posted ‘Niche Site Update‘ on 14th August explaining just as much. Look at the graph below and you will see what I mean:

I got back to creating some new backlinks, installed a couple of new plugins and that was it really. Were these contributing factors or just a fluke? I’m not too sure but something happened and I’m happy it did because I’m able to post another great income report here. The plugins I installed were:

• Strictly Auto Tags - This automatically adds relevant tags to your post when you publish it.
• SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 - This can add incoming search terms to your sidebar or specific pages which helps with SEO and longtail keywords.
  

Another Good Month

The £398.93 ($645.29) earned this month has made me very happy but I’m going to be incredibly busy with my actual job this month so it will be a real test of the sites as to whether I can keep that up and post an increase for the September Income Report. The way I look at it is that I’ve earnt over £1000 from my sites in less than 4 months and if I didn’t earn anymore then it was great fun whilst it lasted.

The Future

Site ‘P’ is doing as good as ever and I’m sure there is scope for improvement, but I’m happy site ‘F’ has shown a small improvement and broken the £10 barrier. It can do better but it is in a competitive niche and I will have to do something special to stick out but it has already paid for its domain purchase so everything else onwards is profit. If I can make 10 sites like it then that’s another £100 extra income a month, and I have heard of some people having hundreds of smaller sites each earning a small percentage of a big profit. I’ve added site ‘C’ to my ‘portfolio’ now and the aim for this month is to get some income from it even if that’s just pennies. It will be a start and give me something to improve on.

A Word of Warning

I had a bit of a frightful moment last weekend when I got an email regarding site ‘P’ and thought I may have to take it offline for trademark infringement which not only got me crapping my pants but also wondering what I would do without my main income stream. The email was fairly vague but was from an official person involved with the subject of my niche and said they had a few points to discuss.

Old readers of this blog will know that I was threatened with legal action in 2009 for an anonymous comment on this blog and was on the end of some heavy-handed emails which have left me a little cautious and pessimistic about the Internet and the law. I replied to the email and I’m happy to say all I had to do was remove a logo and the situation was resolved. The person even gave me some advice on the site and pointed me towards someone within the company who could give me more information. Bonus!

The lesson learnt is not to think the worse, but to also be careful of copyright and trademark infringement when creating sites. If you get big then someone will come knocking. Some will be nice like the people I dealt with this week but others with dish out legal threats and get you to close your site down. I know had some letters last week and had to remove his main earner so be careful out there.

How did you do this month?

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