My latest tweet: @ @ ah, that's interesting and explains a few things.

October 3rd, 2011Money, Niche Sites, Random, ReportsAdem 4 Comments

A good start but then…

At the start of the month I thought I was heading for a bumper niche site payday with my main site bringing in almost £100 in the first 3 5 days. ‘Woo Hoo’ I thought but then something bad happened and I was punished by Google with the site getting a ‘minus 60 penalty’. I wasn’t sure what had happened but after doing some research it looks like my backlinking and site structure had come under scrutiny from Google and I had contravened their policy. At the end of the day it’s pretty hard to pinpoint it to one specific thing but I believe it was because I built up too many backlinks too quickly, used the same keyword for most of my links, and also commented on some poor quality blogs.

The majority of my backlinks came from commenting on blogs, some of which were just a bit spammy, I’ll admit to that, so I know that was wrong but it’s interesting how Google works this out. If I were a competitor then I could spend some time spamming comments with my competitors details and hopefully see if Google would apply a penalty to them.

Tricky times but it’s all a learning curve and has influenced my link-building policy for the future. I am only commenting on blogs that are relevant to the niche I’m in, and yet again only useful comments that add some quality. The other thing is not to focus too much on keywords for backlinks and instead think about how a novice would write. They wouldn’t jam in keywords and instead it would all be a lot looser and more organic. Lessons learnt then and as usual I’m taking this a month at a time.

So now onto the numbers:

August Income September Income Difference
Niche Site P £384.83 £127.27 (£257.56)
Niche Site F £11.24 £50.98 £39.74
ademdjemil.co.uk/blog £2.86 £1.98 (£0.88)
Niche Site C
£0.00 £1.54 £1.54
Niche Site P2
N/A N/A N/A
Niche Site E
N/A N/A N/A
TOTAL £398.93 £181.77 ($282.65)
(£217.16)

As you can see my overall income has taken quite a knock but that was always the risk with having one major earner so I’m not going to focus on that and instead focus on the positives of getting my other nice sites rolling.

Site F has seen a big jump in earnings which was partially helped by a £16.85 click late in the month (someone clearly isn’t using AdWords that effieciently) but even without that it was a good rise and I’m very happy with that.

Site C also saw a few clicks and started bringing in revenue and the aim as always is to increase this amount much like I have done with Site F. This means I now have 3 niche sites earning me money and we’re on the way to spreading the revenue and leaving me at less risk of suffering the same fate as this month.

I have submitted Site P for a but I have read stories of it taking years to get back up the rankings so I fully expect my earnings to drop next month too.

Aims for the future

So I’ve got three sites earning revenue and as you can see from the above table I’m creating Site P2 and Site E, which if you’re good at maths, will bring me up to five sites  (excluding my blog). The route I will be going down is to create many sites each earning a small percentage of my overall revenue, and ideally I would like to have ten sites up and running and earning money by the New Year.

The thing to remember is that all this revenue is extra to my usual 9-5 job and for the moment if I make no money or suffer a drop in my AdSense income then I am not greatly effected (apart from my pride) but if I can succeed and keep building more sites then this could be something that would require more of my time in exchange for the income it brings.

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'4 Responses to “September Income Report”'
  1. Making good progress Adem. While it looks like a step backwards (because of the earnings difference), take site ‘p’ out of the equation and you had a good increase! Even with the mammoth click (wish I got some of them!), Site ‘F’ is still past the ‘$ a day’ hurdle, and I’m looking forward to seeing next months results!
    Thomas Sinfield´s last post ..Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Marketers

    • Adem says:

      I’m happy that Site F has made good progress as it shows that it wasn’t just a fluke with Site P and that I can make money from AdSense.The aim will be to see if I can do this for C too, but I’m sure along the way I will build some unprofitable websites, but they will just be learning curves again.
      Adem´s last post ..September Income Report

  2. Payt says:

    Still not a bad month mate really. I follow quite a few people on twitter who have been at this longer than us that are barely making anything near £180! I’m looking into other stuff outside of adsense at the moment while my adsense ticks away

    • Adem says:

      It’s quite a basic formula and mostly depends on the niche you pick to begin with so that’s where quite a few people go wrong. If I wrote about things I knew and enjoyed then I wouldn’t be making any money!

      I’m continuing with AdSense whilst I get a few more sites up and running, but I’ve also been playing around with Amazon Associates, which has brough in a few pennies, but in the right niche could be a big earner.

      I did apply for the Ebay Partner Network, but none of my current sites fit the criteria, so I was refused but will definitely go back into this when I can.
      Adem´s last post ..September Income Report