October Income Report

I’ll start off with saying that I haven’t been very productive during October and it’s been my poorest month so far on my niche website journey. This was partly due the fact that Site P felt the full brunt of last month’s Google -60 Penalty and the site is basically dead in the water now. I put in a reconsideration request but that was turned down, and then to make matters worse Google have banned AdSense on that site so it is making no money now.

What did I do wrong?

The site I created wasn’t scraped or copied and did provide a lot of useful content, but as my first ever niche site I now know I went about making it the wrong way. My main error was focusing on one target keyword and that was my downfall. I optimised my content for this one term, most of my backlinks used this main term, and basically Google didn’t like it. It worked fine in the short term but then they got me and the site is worthless with virtually zero chance of getting it anywhere useful in the rankings.

I have not given up totally on the niche though and have decided to create a new site on the same topic but go about it the right way. I’ve chosen a new domain as I didn’t want to risk any negative backlinks to the site, and I’ve started to write the content from scratch. I did an amazing amount of research into the topic so it seems a waste to let it go completely especially as I know its potential but annoyingly someone else has also spotted this niche and created a similar site with similar content. It’s not a clone but a lot of the articles,wording, and structure is very similar to my site so I’m a little peeved but alas it’s all fair game and I can’t really say anything.

The Numbers

	September Income	October Income	Difference
Niche Site P	£127.27	£25.30	(£101.97)
Niche Site F	£50.98	£51.42	£0.46
ademdjemil.co.uk/blog	£1.98	£2.93	£0.95
Niche Site C	£1.54	£7.60	£6.06
Niche Site P2	N/A	£0.01	£0.01
Niche Site E	N/A	N/A	N/A
TOTAL	£181.77	£87.26 ($139.05)	(£94.51)

I added Site P2 and Site E to the table last month but I haven’t done much with them and already have the feeling that they perhaps aren’t the best niches to be in and that I was maybe a bit hasty in getting the domains without doing as much research as I could. I’ll still do some work on them though and see what happens.

The Positives

From the above table you can see that all my other sites made increases, and I’m especially happy with Site F as last months figure included a £16.85 click which artificially boosted the figures. If I get another good month like this then I will see about optimising the site and seeing if there is further room for improvement.

Site C is in the same boat too, and took a big jump in profits. Not massive but enough to show that there is scope for improving that site too and that it’s worth sticking to.

Affiliate Income – an alternative to AdSense?

I did have a surprise last week when I looked at an old Clickbank account I had and found I’d earned over $30 from a long forgotten site I made at the beginning of the year which shows there is money to be made from affiliate sites and perhaps I should investigate further into affiliate schemes which would help diversify my income streams.

I have started work on a new site though that will be based around affiliate products and I will primarily be using the Amazon Affiliates scheme for this as opposed to Clickbank.  I’m quite looking forward to this as I will be learning more and be approaching things in a different way as I will be relying on my content to sell the products rather than adverts.

Next Month?

As Site P will be registering a big fat ZERO in earnings in then I fully expect November to be my worst month of earnings and hopefully that should signal rock bottom with the only way up from there and to be honest that’s quite a good thing as I am able to start from scratch. Fingers crossed that’s the case