March Earnings Report

March 31, 2008

It is that end of month time again.  The Internet moves in minutes and hours, but the blogging world seems segregated into months, because most blogs are archived by months.

The time frame that defines an important characteristic of a medium really becomes the benchmark of that medium.  Months are a common unit in sales as well as in blogging, because they break time up into managable, usable, comparable chunks.  Very few places compare sales performance week by week or day by day.  To contrast that, a day-trading investor would use days as their chunks of time.

Anyway, as I said blogs flow in months, and this month has been disjointed.  I took a holiday, and grew very disillusioned with blogging, because it was taking a lot of time while bringing limited success.  So I came back and decided to scale it back.  But even after saying that several times, I haven’t lost subscribers.  It seems people are still interested, or have too much apathy to unsubscribe.

So anyway, I should give a monthly report and tell you how it has gone financially…

I have several websites, AndrewMesser.com, Ah, Mr Bond! and Traffic Experiment, and they each earn money differently. So instead of reviewing what AndrewMesser.com earned, I will tell you about all of them.

AndrewMesser.com

I advertise in three ways on AndrewMesser.com, and those are Google Adsense, Project Wonderful and AdToll.

The money spent on Project Wonderful was actually used to advertise the Traffic Experiment, not AndrewMesser.com.  So you can see why I got a bit disillusioned with the blog.  With a good reason, I have decided not to spend excessive time on the blog, or to try to be what I am not.  I will just be being me - after all it is MY blog for me and about me.  Primarily though, it will be about my various experiments on the Internet and how they are (or aren’t) successful.

Ah, Mr Bond!

I saw the BANS concept before I started this blog, and if you haven’t heard about it, you might want to check it out.  BANS stands for “Build A Niche Store” and it is a simple website creation tool that helps you create a niche store around the Ebay affiliate concept.

I started Ah, Mr Bond! as my first BANS page, and it was gradually developing when I got bitten by the blogging bug.  Because I hadn’t earned any money from it I didn’t keep developing it, which was selling the concept short - because it has now earned some money.  It has Google AdSense ads on it, but the main drive is the Ebay affiliate links.  These are administered through Commission Junction.  So here is why I am going to spend the time next month to finish off the site and get all of the content done:

You can see that Commission Junction and Ebay are now the most successful earner for me, and that they are the closest to actually sending a payout too - when you consider the different threshholds.  I know that I haven’t put the time and effort into Ah, Mr Bond! and that it could be a lot, lot better than it is.  I reckon that if I do put in the effort, the results will come.

You will see my progress here, friends!

Traffic Experiment

This is a new project, and go there to find out more.  Basically, it started up this month, and has now ads or other income, so there isn’t much to report there in regard to earnings.  However, I will probably throw Project Wonderful onto the site next month, and I might revise the algorithm and remove the “beta” label too.

I am proud to announce that there are 6 registered sites, which was achieved with very little advertising other than at this blog.  So it will snowball from there.  If you haven’t done so already, head over there now and register because you may be able to earn yourself a free, permanent link back to your site, from a potentially highly trafficked site.

So…

I have done marginally better on the Internet this month than before, and with very little effort seeing as I was away most of the month.  Having shown that, I am going to focus my efforts on the things that earn best, and I will help you all out by keeping you informed about what works best!

Posted in Monetizing