January Wrap-Up

January turned out to be a pretty crazy month, with all sorts of suddenly jumping up and demanding attention. I’d hoped to crank out tons of content but I ended up spending more time switching sites to the new dedicated hosting plan than anything, which was necessary and a good thing moving forward but doesn’t produce much in the way of visible results.

Below are the monthly numbers for assorted metrics such as content created, traffic, and income. I originally intended just to report that stuff for this site but I realized pretty quickly that it made more sense to look at all of my affiliate sites as a whole. Since much of the affiliate marketing gospel I preach here is to diversify and work on multiple things at once, it seemed silly not to report on the collective efforts.

I’m also lumping in results from my poker blog, which is going to skew things a bit, as it’s been around for awhile and generates traffic and income accordingly. I went back and forth on whether to include it, but I’d rather this be an accurate journal of what affiliate marketing can do for you, over time, than a selective account that includes some of my sites, but not this one, or that one.

As far as the sites I’ve currently got in the active hopper as of the end of the month (in addition to this one), here goes:

• Cisco Certifications
• Flip Thy House
• Oddsnark
• Patio to Pool
• Pig Iron Malt
• Science Fiction Robots
• Sound of a Suckout
• Vroomchatter

Across all those sites, I posted 165 pages of new content, for an average of a bit more than 5 new pages a day. I’d like to bump that number up in February, but I can live with it as a baseline, as I’ve already touched on the fact that January was a bit of an anomaly, as far as everything going on.

As far as traffic, the sites collectively got about 25,000 unique visitors for the month of January. That metric is out of whack, though, because the poker blog and Oddsnark skew it heavily, since those got about 95% of that traffic (and a lot of the traffic is junky in nature and not targeted nor good, but that’s another ball of wax). Moving forward, I’ll be able to pull better month to month traffic numbers for each site, but switching hosts makes that hard this month, as I wasn’t smart enough to capture all of the old data before making the switch.

Here’s a breakdown of affiliate income for the month:

Google Adsense: $73.98
Text-Link-Ads: $65.00
ReviewMe: $50.00
Commission Junction: $201.79
Direct advertising buys: $300.00
Partnerlogic (poker affiliate program): $441.45

Total income: $1,132.22

Expenses for the month were as follows:

Dedicated server hosting with HostGator: $175.00

Domain name registration: $80.00

Total expenses: $255.00

Net affiliate income for January: $877.22

Which is both good and bad, as far as the bottom line. It’s nice to make money, but the bulk of the profit came from my poker blog. If I simply looked at the new sites I’ve launched, it’d be a much skimpier profit, like $100 or so. To be fair, though, almost all of my efforts on new sites have been focused on building sites that are focused on search engine traffic, and those won’t start bearing fruit until they get out of the sandbox and are fully indexed in assorted search engines.

Overall, I’m fairly satisfied with how January went, but there’s definitely room for improvement in February. I simply need to crank content out and fight the urge to launch new sites or fiddle with existing ones. I also need to be a bit more mercenary about my time, as the schedule is going to get even more hectic if I’m also fixing up a house to flip on the side, in addition to all my other schemery.

January Wrap-Up and related information can be found in Ramblings