Million Dollar Portfolio

Halloween is over, the weather is getting colder now and the next big holiday is Thanksgiving. Fall and Winter are pretty mild around here but already we have seen some good heavy rain. With the holidays coming up it represents a prime shopping time and I think even in an economy that is doing as poorly as ours, people are still going to be buying gifts for other people. In fact, historically, credit spending goes up during these months.

That being said, you should be working on ramping up your affiliate campaigns through PepperJam Network and NeverBlueAds to take advantage of any online shopping people are going to do. Keep in mind also, more people spend time indoors and (potentially) more time on their computers which means you can convert more traffic than usual during the fall and winter.

To make money online, you need to first drive traffic to your site and then convert that traffic to monetize it. That means eyeballs are not enough, you need to get  them to click and buy.

And now without further Ado…

Traffic Statistics

I always like to start out these reports by explaining my traffic. As usual, Google Analytics doesn’t provide the whole picture so I’m just not going to use it anymore. These statistics come directly from my web server using software called Webalizer. Since Webalizer has direct access to the server itself it tells me much more about the traffic on my site including 401 errors, 301 redirects and much much more.

So for the month of October I had 15,784 page views from 7,037 visits. The interesting thing is the majority of visits are split between US and “Network” whatever the latter means, I do not know. I always like to see where my traffic is coming from as it gives you an idea of your global reach and readability. Nearly 2% of my traffic came from the Russian Federation last month.

The Proficient Investor, my other blog also has some good statistics. For October, PI had 22,203 page views from 6,615 visits. As you can see PI, which is a financial/investment blog had more page views than MDP which I attribute primarily to the current fiscal crisis facing this country.

Revenue Report

The following is combined income for both blogs. I document earnings here for your benefit. I can talk all day about SEO techniques, writing quality content and how traffic is going to make or break your online business but I also want to show that anyone can make money online and i’m not just talking about blogging. Income can and should come from multiple sources. Revenue should actually be higher from TLA but they pro-rate sales to the time when the ad was first bought. So even though my current price is $18, if you bought a recurring ad when the price was lower, you get that lower price month to month.

Text-Link-Ads: $84.83 (from 9 ads on PI, 2 ads on MDP and 3 post level ads)
Amazon.com Seller: $14.70 (used DVD sales)
CafePress: $52.96
Adsense: $.02 (anyone still making money from google adsense?)
Kontera ContentLink: $1.29

Total:  $153.80

Not my best month ever, but Text Link Ads continues to be the leader in earnings. TLA is the easiest thing I have ever done to earn money online. Sign up for their program, slap in a wordpress plugin and then all you need to do is get traffic to your blog. The wizards at TLA take care of the rest.

As for the total revenue being less than last month, I’m not really worried about it. October was a tough month for me personally as my “day job” got in the way of my blogging! I also wasn’t able to work on any CPC/PPC campaigns due to time constraints.

What you should take away from this however is that if my blog continues to produce similar results month after month, it’s definitely worth the time I do spend on it. At this rate, assuming an average of $150 a month, that puts $1800 in my pocket for the year.

Keep creating original content, driving traffic to your site and then maximizing the return of that traffic and you’ll have success. There’s no real magic behind making money online but you don’t want the only purpose of your site to be making money…it doesn’t work like that. Find your niche, write what you are passionate about and the rest will fall in place.

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