Residual Income Report – January 2010

January was a very interesting month for generating Residual Income. I use this term loosely here though because I worked my butt off in January so it wasn’t exactly residual. Not only did I do a mega backlinking campaign to increase eHow earnings dramatically but I also started backlinking my best performing blog posts, optimizing old blog posts for better on-page SEO, and optimizing my first ¾ of my InfoBarrel articles for better SEO.  A lot of this I discussed in my SERP rank update post.

I let on a couple/few weeks ago that my InfoBarrel earnings were fairly disappointing despite my mass output but I quickly came to understand early in January that though I was merely writing these articles for the backlinks that they would make money much better if I too took the time to at least format them properly and interlink them. Man that was dumb setting up some 90 articles without so much as thinking to bold keywords, use header tags or link related articles together. Anyway January saw the bulk of my effort to optimize these articles and as a result I saw a noticeable increase in traffic and earnings on my IB articles in the second half of January… the last week in particular was where I realized most of my InfoBarrel earnings.

InfoBarrel Earnings Report

Through the end of January I had written and published a grand total 110 InfoBarrel articles. 90 were done in the first 44 days that I was with the site, the last 20 were done in January. My earnings on a page view basis, including my Chitika earnings at InfoBarrel has increased every month I’ve been there and I look forward to see what happens here in February.

Adsense does not allow you to see specific conversion data but when mixed with Chitika and only taking search visitors into account rather than ad page views we’re talking about a different beast. This is a highly mixed number very different from the details presented in Adsense reports and quite a bit different than the numbers presented in my eHow earnings report. Because I only track this mixed number rather than my Adsense stats it is OK to divulge this info. My InfoBarrel earnings numbers are below.

November 2009 - $8.75 / 1000 search visitors
December 2009 - $14.61 / 1000 search visitors
January 2010 - $15.33 / 1000 search visitors

My search visitors increased just about 20% from December to January and so I hope to experience similar increases in the future as I’ve been finishing up optimizing these articles and will soon begin strongly backlinking them.  So far I've only really backlinked a few of them with any vigor.

eHow Earnings Report

This is the crazy beast that everyone has had their panties in a bunch over for a while now. I wrote last month that it seemed than in coordination with the decision to rectify the eHow UK fiasco it seemed the eHow earnings algorithm was changed to offset the lost revenue that eHow would be taking in.

At that time I posted the anomaly of my earnings at eHow and showed that despite increased page view growth and a strong historical trend of revenue / 1000 page views for the months of August through December 2009, my January earnings were well off the normal pace. The pace in fact only dropped around the 8th of the month or so and then I noticed through daily number crunching that around the 22nd-24th the month the earnings pace slowly began climbing back up in the direction of normal levels.

At that time I mentioned my assumption that the pulling of articles from eHow UK temporarily affected the eHow earnings algorithm. The last week of January was fairly normal in earnings / 1000 visitors and thus the end of the month saw a reduction in my earning rate there by a noticeable sum but it was not as bad as it looked like it was going to be around the 20th.

My eHow earnings stats for January 2010 are below:

• 74 published articles earned at a combined rate of $8.30 per 1,000 PV – down from $10.41 in December. This in my mind is a temporary dip due to the eHow UK fix. Normal earnings should be over $10 / 1000 visitors for me.
• 80 percent of my earnings came from 19 percent of my articles – down from 23 percent in December.
• 20 percent of my earnings came from 38 percent of my articles – up from 34 percent in December.
• 43 percent of my articles had no earnings at all – unchanged from November.
• Overall, 10% of my published articles have never earned a penny (8 articles).  In the future I may start lifting these from the site to publish elsewhere for backlinks.  I wrote them; I might as well get some backlinks out of them.  This will have to wait for now but Maybe in March.

My eHow Earnings Trends
August 2009 - $8.84 / 1000 Page Views
September 2009 - $9.76 / 1000 Page Views
October 2009 - $10.19 / 1000 Page Views
November 2009 - $10.25 / 1000 Page Views
December 2009 - $10.41 / 1000 Page Views
January 2010 - $8.30 / 1000 Page Views

eHow Earnings Algorithm
Do I know for sure there is no problem or long-term change to the eHow earnings algorithm? No, but I feel like things are back to normal. One week into February and earnings are back to their normal pace… higher even. Through 7 days I’m sitting at $11.55 / 1000 page views. I can’t complain about that.

Backlinks work for traffic as well as for earnings too it seems. My over all eHow traffic was up 27.5% over December 2009. I have since stopped focusing on sending backlinks to my best earners as I decided I would one month ago in my December residual income report as new projects are now on my plate. Maybe in the future I’ll send some more. I have a list of about 10 articles that earn a lot per 1000 page views but they don’t get many views. If some backlinks in the future can get them going then I’ll be doing really good at eHow.

Other Residual Income Streams Report

All of my other residual income streams had great success in January. I spent so much time optimizing everything on How To Live Longer and changing my Adsense ad placement that my earnings there more than doubled month over month on a better traffic mix and better conversion rates. Backlinks are amazing as are big, below the post title ads. :)

I have one particular niche on that blog which has had a traffic increase of 600% since November and I attribute it all to backlinks. If you all haven’t read my report on using InfoBarrel for Dofollow Backlinks please do right now and sign up.

This blog made money in January for the first time… I think I’m going to pull Adsense from it though. Everywhere I read from long-term experts who hound on the fact that Adsense is horrible for this type of blog (make money online) and now I can say I agree due to a little experience. I may replace some of my ad code with affiliate links but I'm not sure yet how I’ll go at that. This blog is just fun for me so money here doesn’t mean as much.

Alternately I’ve also set up a few niche sites which I’m trying to monetize and I plan on expanding the focus on this blog to more residual income ideas in the future. I am a financially oriented guy by nature and one day plan to finish the CFP charter process. Expect a small hint of financial info in the future as I expand the residual income idea from simply writing online for royalties to doing something with that money to further generate income… I’m thinking safe investing strategies. We’ll see where that takes us.

Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to those of you who are reading and commenting here you make me feel good. If you are finding any value here I hope you’ll take the time to send me some “anchored link” love. Can you say Earn Residual Income? Thanks. :)

Overall Residual Income Earnings

BTW: My monthly Residual Income Goal is up significantly this month. Last month I was 1.87% to my long term goal; this month my residual income goal is 2.62% achieved. Nice jump in earnings!