As many of you know this is the part of my wealth building ambitions where I charter my attempts to create more and more passive income streams that will increase my monthly income. This is being done by building up my online business portfolio of various niche websites; each one targeting very specific strategies for making money online.
October was an interesting month to say the least. There were more surprises from Google and a few other let-downs. But all-in-all progress wasn’t too bad. And most importantly my Amazon-based site is finally starting to show signs of growth!
Here’s what happened in October:
Niche Website Income Report – October 2014:
Here’s my income and expense report for the month:
As I mentioned in my post last month, one of the things I’m very excited about with the way my income is going is that it is practically coming from 100% passive income sources. Seriously! This month I hardly had to answer any emails, post any posts, or dicker with potential advertising clients. All my sales and all the money I made was completely automated through affiliate links.
Man, does it pay to be the owner!
Here is a closer look at my income sources for the month:
Adsense = $480.89. Adsense was still pretty steady for the month. But I am concerned about decline in revenue. Unfortunately Google rolled out a few algorithm updates in October that I believe adversely affected my two big niche sites, NS1 and NS2. When Google does this, it affects the amount of traffic coming to your sites and that has a direct impact on the amount of money you earn. I was working on adding some more content to NS1 but I had to back-burner the project for a month due to some other higher priority projects. But I’ll likely come back to it in November, and hopefully some fresh content will help to boost the presence of the site.
Clickbank = $294.64. Last month I did really, really well with Clickbank and NS2. However that income seems to have tapered off. Perhaps all the visitors who usually visit NS2 and clicked on this affiliate link have reached their peak.
Personal Capital = $200.00. I was lucky enough to get at least two more conversions this month. Though I think there is a lot of potential here with this product, I’ll probably start experimenting with other affiliate products to see if I get better conversions.
Amazon = $76.21. Though it wasn’t a huge increase in income, I’m pretty excited about the bump in sales on my Amazon site (the one I call NS4). Here’s a closer look at what’s going on there.
My Amazon Site Finally Gets Some Love From Google!
A few months back I was just about ready to write-off NS4 as a failure. But I have a hard time giving up and crafted a few strategies to resuscitate it back to life. Thankfully those strategies are starting to show some progress:
Higher Rankings = More Traffic!
Even though I’ve had my Amazon site for about 8 months, it’s been very slow to penetrate the top 10 with Google.
But thanks to those recent changes with Google, something unique has happened: A few of my articles made it on to the first page of Google. Including my primary keyword – finally!
Here’s a quick snapshot from SEMRush:
Awesome! That’s a lot of rank-love in the last few months!
What could be causing this wonderful increase?
- Perhaps the Google algorithm changes worked to my benefit for this website and actually increased my positions as opposed to reducing them (like they did with NS1 and NS2).
- The other thing: It’s almost Christmas time! People are way more likely to buy stuff around the months leading up to the big day.
Either way – I’ll take it!
Even though the site is not receiving an overly dramatic amount of traffic each day (about 70), I am seeing more conversions in my Amazon account. Thankfully since the products I’m promoting average around $200-$400 each, that’s about $12-$24 commission per sale.
Adding More Content:
While all of this is going on I’m also working with my writer to get new fresh content for NS4. I’ve got a pretty good list of low competition keywords and I’m trying to get 2-3 new posts up each week.
More good content will just increase the number of keywords I’m ranking for, and that will only help bring me the traffic I need to boost those Amazon conversions.
Experiments:
Like I started in my last update, I thought it might be fun to highlight a few blogging observations and things I’ve noticed this month:
Does Google still value exact match keyword density?
One of the things I advise to people trying to crack the Top 10 of Google is to actually research what’s in the current top 10.
While doing this myself recently I decided it would be interesting to check the number of times the exact match keyword I was looking for appears within those top 10 articles. As it turns out, they almost never do. (This is of course very dependent on the size of the keyword phrase.)
Google has been warning website builders for some time that they will place more emphasis on synonyms rather than exact match text. I believe this is somewhat related to what’s going on with NS1 and NS2 versus NS4.
Does the Google Disavow help?
Is everyone familiar with the Google Disavow tool? That’s the tool where Google allows you to submit bad links to your site to Google in an effort to try to disassociate with them in hopes that your ranks will improve.
Despite its intentions, the Disavow tool has widely been criticized by many website owners as not working very well. Regardless I decided to try this on NS3. NS3 has a horrible link profile.
I can vouch for the tool – I was able to submit my bad links and have them disavowed within 3-4 weeks without any trouble.
One problem – it didn’t really seem to do anything to help my site. It’s overall ranking and traffic stats are still pretty bad.
Do blogroll links help?
Another fun experiment I’m trying is to see if sitewide blogroll links can make an impact on your ranking. This is a strategy that I’m borrowing from The Hoth (you can pay them a boat load of money to do this for you). However I’m doing this on the cheap with Fiverr. What I’ve done so far is to interview dozens of niche related sites to my NS3 site. I found about 3 that pass my quality inspection and placed a link to my site on it.
Unfortunately I need to give this experiment more time to see if it actually works. According to my Google Webmaster Tools account, the links have not been indexed by Google quite yet.
Readers – Did anyone else notice any dramatic changes in their website’s rankings or traffic due to the recent Google changes? Any positive impacts?
Image courtesy of Aurelijus Valeiša / Flickr
Wow! I’m impressed and inspired with all your blog earnings! good job, man.
Thanks! I hope I can double it soon.
Nice work overall MMD – gotta love passive income, or as close to passive as you can get. I was impacted somewhat by the algo changes though nothing too terrible. Interesting to see another instance of where the Disavow tool doesn’t accomplish what it’s meant to do.
Sorry to hear you got affected by the Google updates. Was that for FR or your other sites?
At this point I’m not sure how the Disavow tool helps. It your ranks don’t improve, then what good is it?
Amazon has to be the Holy Grail of passive income. Great job on the passive income. At 70 visitors a day, that’s pretty impressive.
All the other website builders I read about all claim that the right Amazon affiliate product will blow away anything you can earn in Adsense. I’m pretty convinced I have that right product but just have to increase the traffic numbers. I’d love to get it up to 100 or 200 visitors per day.
Thanks for sharing this! It’s always good to see what other bloggers are doing and that there really isn’t one right way to make passive income with your blog. Keep up the good work, and the new site looks great.
You’re welcome. I’m hoping that this positive streak continues to be an upward trend for my passive income.
I definitely saw changes in my search traffic over the past month or so (on my main site). It had me scared for awhile. Now I’m hitting my main season, like you said, as people look to buy things for Christmas, amazon earnings go up, up up!
Thank you Christmas and all those people who love to buy stuff off Amazon!
Wow great job!! Super motivating!! So you have four different websites, right? Does this one (my money design) make the most? I’m thinking of buying another domain name but I haven’t narrowed down what I want the site to be about yet. It’s insane how much info there is to learn when it comes to making money online!! Thanks for the motivation!!
Actually I’m up to 7 websites. I usually don’t disclose my earnings on My Money Design or the other 2 sites, but its about the same as the 4 niche websites.
That’s great that you might get another domain. If the site is going to be geared towards making money, then you should go into it with a plan for how you’d like to monetize it (Amazon, Adsense, etc) and then base your articles on those keywords.
MMD, you are one of the people I look up to. You may not know, but you’ve inspired me! I believe that your site is the one to watch out even next year. Keep it up!
Thanks Jayson! I really appreciate comments like that.
Keep bringing these updates MMD! Even though I’m not doing niche sites, I love reading about your though process as you build out these sites. Gives me things to think about that can relate to what I’m doing. Thx!
Thanks Brian. I do try to stuff quite a bit into these updates that I believe most bloggers could find helpful.
I’m glad I’ve found your site and just in the nick of time: I’m working on an Amazon affiliate idea of my own and I am completely clueless (I think the technical term is “super noob”) so I’m researching like crazy to make sure I don’t make too many stupid mistakes. Thanks for the updates and the motivating stats!
I’ll be curious to see how that site turns out for you Myles. Hopefully you can capitalize on the upcoming Christmas months even with such a young project.
Great work MMD – loving these updates and I am really happy for you with your continued success.
Do you have any sites that are getting traffic from places other than Google?
No, all my sites are getting all their traffic from Google. Unfortunately that is something I realize could be a problem later on, and I’ll need to work on it. I notice a lot of people really singing the praises of Pinterest traffic. Maybe that will be a good place to look next.
Good job on the increase in online income. On average how many hours does it take to manage all 4 sites? Do you consider the hours worked as part of the expenses? Still experimenting with Amazon links, but no real change in the results.
The 4 sites really don’t take too much time at all because I only ever really focus on one out of the 4 sites at a time. For example I’ve been spending most of my time working with NS4 while I’ve done hardly anything with NS1-NS3. Once I’m done posting new material to NS4, I’ll probably cool off there and then turn my attention back to NS1.
I don’t count my hours worked as part of the expenses. If I did that, I’m afraid the whole effort would be in vain 🙂
Good luck with the Amazon links. Just gotta keep trying to drive the right kind of traffic to those links.
Great work MMD. I think you are doing great with your websites, thanks to the great traffic. I am really moved by that. Continue doing the excellent work.
I love to see people building niche websites outside of their main authority websites because it creates more revenue to grow the authority website until it turns a profit. I used to build these niche websites and flip them for a profit in order to put the money back into building an authority websites. Keep up the great work.
What’s funny is that for me its the other way around. I seem to make more with my niche sites than I do with this site. But I take responsibility for that – I don’t try very hard to make My Money Design very commercial.
I’ve got some niche site ideas brewing as well and reading posts like yours every now and then gives me a push to get on it. It’s really impactful sometimes reading your posts on these niche websites as opposed to say, Pat Flynn, because Pat’s numbers just seem so out of this world. Pat’s got great material and resources, but sometimes the biggest inspiration comes from people who are on the way there to niche website monster status 😀
Thanks Steve. That makes me proud to be a source of inspiration.
I totally know what you mean about relating to smaller websites as opposed to the mega-status ones. Just today I read through the latest Pat Flynn income report and it just blows me away. $36K from just BlueHost? In one month? That’s absolutely incredible and I think that’s wonderful he is able to do this report after report. But I know my own conversion rates and when I reverse engineer how many visitors I would need in order to potentially get $36K in commissions, it just completely overwhelms me.
There are a number of “smaller” bloggers out there that I follow who are more advanced than me in terms of income but not quite as extreme. I love reading their posts because whatever they are trying always seem to somehow fit with the next thing I need to try in order to get to that next level.