Staska.Net

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My Online Earnings for April 2007

with 9 comments

I am a bit late to report my online earnings for April 2007, mainly because I wanted to have a more detailed look of how each of my blogs was doing.

To do that, I had to make a breakdown of all earnings per blog and check the traffic each blog was generating from the begining of this year. I have all the figures now, so the results tracking exercise should be much easier from now on.

Here are my online earnings results for April 2007:

online-earnings-april-2007.jpg

Combined April traffic for my blogs was 137 605 page views from 110 201 unique visitors, which gets me something like $10 eCPM overall.

2 blogs – cellphone blog and computer blog – are responsible for something like 90% of my traffic and earnings.

The cellphone blog earns the most, has the highest traffic but a pretty low eCPM – $7.59 in April, $8.98 in March. Computer blog has 1/4 of traffic but a really great eCPM for the past two months – $30.36 for April and $27.66 for March.

The eCPM difference is mainly due to the affiliate sales. I have made over $200 in affiliate commissions both in March and April and all of that came from the computer sales.

I didn’t make a single affiliate sale through my cellphone blog. Mainly because I keep getting automatic rejections (probably due to “Lithuanian” registration in CJ and Linkshare) from all the affiliate programs that wireless carriers (e.g. Cingular, T-Mobile) or retailers like InPhonic (Wirefly) are offering. Even though these same carriers and retailers are buying links through TLA on my blog.

Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to keep trying.

While overall April results are pretty good and showed 10%+ increase over March online earnings, the CPC income from AdSense and Chitika actually went down. The day was saved by increased affiliate sales and Text Link Ads.

And I really don’t like that, especially since my traffic went up 20%+ during the same month. I noticed this trend in the mid April already and I think I found the culprit. I took some steps to improve the situation and will report when I’m sure about the results.

And now it’s time to get back to work. The last Page Rank update had a nasty surprise to me and I’ll have to do some thinking of how to proceed further.

Written by Staska

May 5th, 2007 at 2:32 am

Posted in Main page,My Results

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  • http://www.45n5.com 45n5

    congrats on the upswing in earnings ;-)

  • http://blogosquare.com Hans

    I tried having some good sponsors on my blog through text-link ads but still none. For this, I lowered my rates to as lows as $20 per month. Perhaps it’s because TLA display high-rates blogs first :(

  • http://www.staska.net Staska

    Thanks Mark. You did pretty well yourself this month too :)

  • http://www.unmatchedthemes.com Shane

    Have you tried Amazon’s affiliate program? Just got an email from them yesterday pushing their cellphone offerings, and the nice thing about Amazon is that once you send someone over there, you get commissions on everything they buy, not just what they clicked over on.

    You might also want to try AuctionAds or eBay to Go (or both). (Check out this blog for a cool way to use eBay to Go.) There are obviously a lot of cellphones on eBay, so this might be a good option, too.

  • http://www.staska.net Staska

    If you are talking about Blogosqure blog, there’s no wonder that you did not get any sponsors earlier. You had a new PR 0 blog with unimpressive Alexa rank.

    But now that you’ve got your blog to PR4 and quite good Alexa rank this should change soon. I would actually wait until Alexa get’s below 100 000. You are moving in the right directions and with recent traffic spikes should get there pretty soon.

    Then I would manually update my TLA Alexa ranking and ask for the price increase.

    I think the low price not always helps to sell links. Just look how many blogs are selling links for $20 and how many for $100. And on which page you show up in the default price ranked list.

    Also now, that you have a PR4 blog with OK Alexa and Technorati ranks, Review Me can be an interesting option. Blogs about blogging category is quite good for them.

  • http://dereksemmler.com derek

    Staska, grats on the increased earnings in April. It will be interesting to see how May performs after making a few tweaks to try and resolve the drop in Adsense/Chitika.

    TLA is a great resource for bloggers and has the potential to be a very solid money maker. The blog I have it on is a PR4 and Alexa is still improving, although I lost two advertisers recently but then sold my first private ad placement.

    Best to you for May!

  • http://www.staska.net Staska

    Yep. TLA is a real good earner so far. But the beginning of May delt a setback for me here.

    First Google, instead of increasing my Pagerank to PR 6 on my biggest (PR5) blog as I was hoping, dropped it to PR4 instead. And from January I at least doubled, maybe even tripled the number of good quality backlinks to that blog!

    Then my real big Digg (40K+ pageviews in 24 hrs)from the end of January stopped counting and my Alexa rank dropped from 90K to 120K+ .

    So now my both key TLA metrics are significantly worse then they were in April. We’ll see what that does to TLA earnings

  • http://dereksemmler.com derek

    It seems there were quite a few surprises in this latest PR update. My newest blog went from PR0 to PR4 while my more established blog only went from PR3 to PR4, which I am still happy with but had hoped for more.

    I’m looking forward to your May update.

  • Staska

    Sorry, Shane,your comment got lost in moderation for a while (I have a filter to automatically put the posts with more then 2 links there) :oops:

    Yeah I tried Amazon some. I have their Omakase Links links on my cellphone blogs and I am trying to take advantage of their latest offer. But it didn’t really worked so far (my total amazon earnings for more the 6 months are something under $10.

    Same with the Auction ads. I tried them, but removed after 6 weeks, when 1200+ clicks netted me something like $10.