Residual Income Report – December 2009

December seemingly came and went quickly. It’s almost a whole week behind us know. In fact by the time I get to publishing this residual income report surely it will have been a full week into 2010. I cannot lie December was an interesting month and a really bad one in many ways. The biggest reasons behind this are personal but to some extent I was disappointed with my earnings too. Then again I’ve never been blogging or writing online for money during the holiday season.

Personally my wife and I had a tough time about a week before Christmas when our beloved little kitty died. I won’t go into the detail here but if you are interested you can stop by my longevity blog and read all about on my post Living Longer and Genetics.

Once that happened I pretty much lost all motivation to write and really didn’t do much of anything until really this week. On top of that I was sick twice during the month and my productivity was much lower than what I would have liked.

I don’t want to moan and complain all over this blog but I might as well finish off my dissertation on my residual income disappointments by noting that it is true, no matter your work ethic holiday traffic sucks. My longevity blog saw a decrease in traffic by roughly 20 percent while my traffic to my eHow articles declined by roughly 10 percent.

My InfoBarrel articles unfortunately I cannot vouch for because December was my first full month writing for InfoBarrel. I had hoped to close out December with well over 100 InfoBarrel articles, each one essentially sending backlinks to my eHow articles and my blog posts but around the 20th of the month I slowed on my publication schedule and ended up only finishing the month with 90 articles published since the 18th of November.

I don’t know what normal traffic levels for those articles would be in any other normal month so I’ll just assume they’re roughly 15 percent below normal as well.

Despite the low levels of traffic for the month I must say that I’m quite happy with my earnings. Over the course of the entire month from all sources combined my earning increased month over month by 0.6 percent. That’s not too bad considering I got way fewer page views than in previous months.

Over on the eHow forums so many people were moaning and complaining about low earnings. In fact a number of people are convinced that eHow is responsible for slighting it’s writers on compensation. I disagree. They are honestly in some transition with the new eHow UK website they are rolling out but overall my page views there held up better than my own blog that I own. Not only that but my earnings per page view at eHow once again climbed to the highest level it’s ever been at for an entire month. November eHow earnings saw my dollars per 1000 page views hit $10.25 and in December my dollars per 1000 page views climbed to $10.41. I’m very pleased with that.

My longevity blog for whatever reason seems to be languishing. I think it’s because I’m targeting very difficult medical niches and have yet to crack the top ten search ranking for anything beyond long tail keywords. I’m working on it however through some of the backlink techniques I’ve described in previous posts on this site.

Many of my InfoBarrel articles in December backlinked many of my posts on that site and I have expanded some of my article submission work to backlink the blog posts as well. I also have a long term goal of going back through all my old posts and laying down some solid SEO on each and every post. I’m talking about changing the titles of many posts, changing the anchor link text in posts, adding bolded keywords, and grabbing better backlinks for good money making posts. This however is a long term plan which I won’t be able to get done all at once.

I had a question pop up in the comments a couple days ago asking about my InfoBarrel earnings for the month of December. I last discussed my earnings there about two weeks ago. Since that time I posted a few more articles on IB and am currently sitting at 94 publications. None of these articles are even two months old and most are not even one month old. Hardly any have any backlinks pointing at them at all outside of internal links from other InfoBarrel articles. Having said that my InfoBarrel articles are earning me less on a dollars per articles basis than my eHow articles. I believe this is an oddity due to the quick influx of page views you get right after publication and due to the fact that the first month or so your contextual ads are not exactly perfectly matched up to your content. I expect this to increase in future months.

Because Adsense doesn’t allow you to publish CTR and eCPC I won’t say exactly what I’m making there in those terms but I will say it is more than my Longevity blog and less than at eHow. In January I expect my numbers to increase simply because normal traffic should start hitting my pages as well as I expect to slowly start sending some backlinks to my InfoBarrel articles just as I’m doing with eHow and my blog.

For my first 6 weeks on InfoBarrel I made nearly $8. You are absolutely right… don’t rub it in. It’s not much, I know but I feel there is potential here because many of my articles there were posted just before the holidays and they didn’t get viewed hardly at all because of search traffic. I’ll be honest too. Many of these articles were not as geared for search as I would have liked either. They were geared to send relevant links to my eHow articles. I didn’t need them to be SEOd to do that… I wish however I had at this point… in any event.

eHow Earnings Breakdown – December 2009

As I’ve done in past months I’m going to break down my eHow earnings a bit for comparison sake.

73 published articles earned at a combined rate of $10.41 per 1,000 PV – up from $10.25 in November.
80 percent of my earnings came from 23 percent of my articles – down from 24 percent in November.
20 percent of my earnings came from 34 percent of my articles – down from 45 percent in November.
43 percent of my articles had no earnings at all – up from 31 percent in November.

All in all, my trends were basically down for the month other than my coveted dollars per 1000 page view. I have my suspicion that this is due to the low traffic volume of the month… but then again who knows.

Breaking down my result overall just a bit I wanted to say that my top ten articles for over all earnings have made a cool $14.90 per 1000 page views and they account for 43 percent of all of my page views and 64 percent of my overall earnings to date. Considering I have taken the time to send backlinks to every article nearly twice at minimum from InfoBarrel I think it’s time to start focusing on these top articles and a few “notable” articles which are not in the top ten to really help increase my eHow earnings.

I parsed my article results into potential performers and found that I have and addition nine articles which are not in my top ten for earnings which combined have been earning at a rate of $17.86 per 1000 page views. The potential searches for these articles based on their main keywords are actually greater than my top ten and I only selected articles which have been getting page views so I think I can focus on these too and increase my earnings dramatically.

To that end I plan on sending more anchored backlinks at these 19 eHow articles, which I feel can be milked for a lot more money, with good backlinking promotion from InfoBarrel and from a few article submission sites. Furthermore there is one article in particular on eHow which I’m going to do my very best to heavily market. I’m talking like 4-5 times as heavy as the others because I feel the article has the potential to make more money than all my others combined. To this date the article has been earning at a rate of $46.67 per 1000 page views and with a little more ranking in the search engines I believe I could be making almost that every month on this one article alone. I’ll report back on progress on this article in the coming weeks and months.

To close out this epic residual income earnings report I’ll leave once again with my goal progress bar for all sources of online income combined. My goal is to duplicate my full time monthly income with just online residual income. The last couple months I’ve kind of plateaued and things didn’t change this month. My overall residual income online increased only slightly over November and I achieved 1.87 percent of my long term goal. That was on significantly lowered traffic due to the holidays and thus I expect January to be quite better. In fact I’m already off to a noticeably faster pace even after a slow couple days right after New Years.