Make Money Online Status Report for November 2009

Well, here is my monthly make money online status report where I share with you the results of my making money online efforts.  November was an incredible month for me, but before my feet leave the ground any, I wanted to state that what has happened this month is simply amazing.

Who would have thought it would be so easy to make money online?  Not me!  I sure didn’t think so.  I had seen the AdSense numbers rolling along at less than a $1 a day for the longest time.  Now they are setting a pace at around $2 to $5 per day, but that isn’t what’s important here.  What’s important to know is that with the right mixture of SEO, keywords and search traffic, you too can make some good side money.

I say “side money” since everything you do online is subject to the whims of many factors you simply don’t have any control over.  It makes me wonder what the next month will be like, and this month is a big surprise to me.  If people happen to be searching for information that you’ve written about, and have ranked for in the search engines, you’ll see an upswing in traffic.  If none of the content you’ve put forth matches, well, you don’t get anything.

Search traffic is a fickle bitch.  When it’s good to you, it can be really good to you.  When it isn’t, you scratch your head and wonder if there is something you did wrong.

Anyway, let’s get on with the numbers.

AdSense - $80.36 (WayneJohn.com drives just over 50% of that)
eBay - $1,636.75
LinkListings - $7.00
Client Work - $251.00
DiggityHost.com – $17.48
Chitika – $18.37 – Sign up with Chitika
LongTailVideo – $0.58 – Sign up with LongTailVideo
OpenX Market – $0.03

That brings this months total earnings to $2,011.57.  That’s a 225% increase over October, which is absolutely fabulous, however we’ll have to wait and see how December turns out.  Like I said, search traffic is fickle and can turn on you like that. *snap*

I keep mentioning search traffic for a reason.  It’s what I’ve been focused on for the better part of this year.  When you begin to understand how search engines (Google) index content (SEO) combined with what people are searching for (Demand), it can open up a world of possibilities for you.  I’ve only begun to realize exactly how powerful these three elements are when combined correctly.  I’m still learning too.

Falling in love with Chitika

eBay is the obvious winner for November as it was for the prior months, but you’ll also notice a few new items in the list as well.  Chitika is starting to work for me, and looking at this months AdSense revenue compared to last month, you should notice that there hasn’t been any real degradation of AdSense revenue by including Chitika ads on my blog.  In fact it’s adding to my overall revenue nicely, bringing the revenue my blog alone brings in to nearly $100 per month.  I would have never expected that from my own blog.  A niche site with good keywords, yes, but my own personal blog, never.  But there it is none-the-less.

Therefore, with the results of a single month showing a good improvement over last month, I’m going to continue to recommend Chitika to those that are only running AdSense so far.  Diversification is important, and the more items you have working for you, the better.  So why not visit Chitika and sign up?  I think you might be leaving money on the table if you haven’t explored them as an option.

What’s LongTailVideo?

LongTailVideo.com is a new inclusion into the mix.  Part of the reason that my post frequency has dropped is directly due to my own unfamiliarity with WordPress.  There are so many widgets, plug-ins and great themes out there that do so many different things that it takes a bit of time to explore all there is out there, and I still don’t have a good idea of all that is possible.  But, LongTailVideo is in use on the video page I recently put together, and the video you see in the top-right portion of every page on my blog.

When you play a video, you’ll see ads display along the bottom of the video, much like YouTube does.  You can close them if you want to also, which is nice.

Those ads are served up from LongTailVideo.  It wasn’t easy-cheesy to get set up, but it wasn’t terribly difficult either.  I purchased a license for $85 for the video player control you see in use.  I felt it was necessary to gain full control over the video display as the license gives me complete player theme control and removes the manufacturers watermark from the display.

We’ll see how far the video thing I’m doing goes.  I obviously have no plan at all for it, and really this is a big effort to understand it more so when I do get a plan, I’m ready to roll.

OpenX Market

OpenX market is also new this month, and it is the system that controls all the ads being displayed on my blog.  If you hover your mouse over the 125×125 ads, you’ll notice they are linked to advertising.waynejohn.com, where I’ve implemented an OpenX system to manage the ad display on my blog.

OpenX gives me one place to add and remove ads on WayneJohn.com, and in the near future, every other site in my collection.  I can see the number of impressions and clicks each ad I’m displaying has received for any given time period.  The ads can be ever-present, or swap themselves in and out based on a percentage of total impressions.  Right now, everything is set to 50% so that the ads I display are cycled through evenly.

OpenX also has a marketplace function where I can offer my ad space to any advertiser within the OpenX marketplace.  Advertisers can bid on my ad spaces and have their ads shown here.  I’ve noticed some “cheap insurance” ads being displayed a while back, and that’s what generated the few pennies for this vendor.

But like I said for LongTailVideo, I have no major plan yet, just getting acquainted with the variety of options that are out there.

Make December a great month!

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