December 2009 Earnings Updated and Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone! I finally completed my December tally and due to a boost in Amazon income, my income increased about $70 from November! All in all, it was a good month considering I didn’t get much work done over the holidays. I decided to format my earnings page a little differently. I consolidated the year’s earnings and will start over for this year with breaking down each source of money. Here is December’s totals.

Dec 2009:

• Adsense: $375.72
• E-product: $191.52
• Amazon: $152.30
• Chitika: $2.51
• Ehow: $15.05 (18 articles)
• Clickbank: $20.17
• Ebay: $11.76
• TOTAL: $769.03 (GOAL: $950)

For the year, I did about $4100 total for the year, but I still need to finalize that. I probably spent about 75% of that on expenses – reports, memberships, sofware, tools, domains, hosting, etc. Hopefully my expenses will be less this year since I know better how to do niche blogging. I do get tempted by shiny things (PPC and CPA) but I am forcing myself to get a passive income first. Besides, stuff like PPC is hard to monitor when you are away at a JOB all day!

The main thorn in my side though is that Xfactor site that performs brilliantly whenever Google decides to place it on page 1. As of now, that site is back in the doghouse somewhere around #400. Totally ridiculous. I don’t really understand what is happening but I have heard of something called the yo-yo effect with Google. Basically, I am probably tripping some filter they have which makes me bounce in and out of getting ranked well. This site is not any different that any other Xfactor site (5 pages) so who knows. At it’s best, I was earning $30-40 a DAY. But that only lasted a few days before it was gone again. I think I am just going to stop worrying about it and build backlinks. I think it will come back some day – I might need more high PR links pointing to it or something.

So what are my goals? Basically, just keep putting up more and more content.  I have many domains that haven’t even had Wordpress installed yet. I would like get to close to $2000/mo by the end of the year.  I also have a couple of bigger projects in the works (well, brainstorming…). I’ll keep you posted!

I am probably going to outsource even more as well. I gave oDesk a try and found 1 person who does a good job with blog posts/articles. With my day job though, I can’t assign a ton of work because I am not able to communiate while at work and keeps things moving. So I have done a couple of small jobs just one at a time. oDesk is free to use if you are paying per project. I believe you pay in order to use the hourly payment option.

Anyway, here is looking to another successful year! Best of luck to everyone.