Empire Update: August 2011
August was a pretty boring month as far as my online business went. It consisted of my longest writing streak, with a grand total of 183,000 words written. Most of that went to backlinking articles for my original 8 websites. The Keyword Academy underwent a drastic change in curriculum in August to what they are now calling TKA 2.0. The new method now recommends making a single website which you are passionate about producing content for, as opposed to the old model of creating websites that are easier to rank.
The shift in mindset is necessary to ensure the my online business is sustainable for years to come, but I’m not quite ready to put all of my eggs into a single TKA 2.0 site. Moving forward, I’m going to continue promoting my 8 “low hanging fruit” websites heavily, while experimenting with a much broader 2.0 style website around something I’m interested in.
However, I have decided to take my top two performing websites (of the eight) and turning them into authority sites in their niche. As a first step I’ve already purchased a few products to make a video review and create some truly original content. If all goes according to plan I will have 3 authority sites spread across completely different niches. Two will have highly manufactured link profiles, one will have much more on-site content in an attempt to attract natural links.
August Earnings:
August continued the record breaking trend in earnings despite the fact that advertising dollars are known to dry up in the late summer months. I’ve started tracking my traffic and earnings a little more closely and I definitely noticed my average eCPM to drop dramatically towards the end of the month.
For the first time in August I broke the 6.5% commission bracket in the Amazon Affiliate program selling a total of 54 items. Overall, my income broke down like this:
Adsense: $349.61
Amazon: $44.62
Chitika: $5.54
TOTAL: $399.77
Just 0.33 cents shy of getting my $400 dollar badge, but I’ll take it. (What sucks is the last day of August was one of my worst performing days since March. Literally one extra click would have pushed me over the edge.)
In August, I had a total of 9,636 visitors across all of my properties, a 30% increase over last month. I put together this chart to track my traffic and earnings each month.
| April 2011 | May 2011 | June 2011 | July 2011 | August 2011 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Income | $84.19 | $92.44 | $119.61 | $299.65 | $399.77 |
| Visitors | 866 | 2021 | 3822 | 6914 | 9636 |
Personal Life:
During August I pushed hard to get ahead in my article writing because I had several freelance jobs scheduled at the end of the month as well as a trip to Florida for a couple weeks. As I’m writing, I’m at the airport in Atlanta heading off to Kansas City for a job, then I’m off to Florida.
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