Residual Income Online – March 2010

Introducing Quarterly Income Reports
As I stated in my last residual income stream report for the month of February I am going to switch to a model of breaking down my numbers on a quarterly basis from hence forth. Considering this is the first week of April this will obviously be my Q1 2010 report and I must say that March was great. It was by far my best month ever for residuals and it certainly proved that my backlinking work paid off. Incidentally it also showed how significant the eHow UK bug was impacting eHow earnings as my earnings there increased a ton over February.

EHow WCP No Longer Accepting Articles
I’ll have touch on this again I’m sure in another post. I like to be comprehensive and not piece things together but today I logged into eHow and found that they are no longer signing up new members to the eHow writer’s Compensation Program and are phasing out new article publication for existing members over the next week. This essentially means that my 82 published articles there will no longer get any bigger. Not that I’ve been on any torrent for publishing there since about September but I’ve enjoyed inching the number up every month. It is quick money for each published article if you know what to write about.

What is currently clear is that to continue publishing to eHow we will all have to sign up with Demand Studios and agree to their Terms Of Service which are a bit different than eHow’s current TOS. Most notably in my book is that all earnings will be very similar… and writers will not retain ownership of their articles on the new publishing platform. This is not that big a deal if you never move you’re articles around like me but for many it is a big deal. People want to retain ownership of their work not give it away especially since there are so many places they can publish while retaining ownership rights.

Anyway, I will at least be satisfied that my current will continue making money just as they have before especially now that they are earning so much every month compared to months past. As for Demand Studios, I will give them a shot for a good 10 articles or so and see what I think. I don’t move articles around the web so ownership rights aren’t that big a deal to me but I like knowing that the option is available. Also, I’m not convinced the earning pace is as good at DS but that is merely pessimistic speculation.

For more on the migration for eHow writers to Demand Studios follow along Crunchy Data’s Residual Income Content Writer blog as she cover’s these situations very thoroughly as demonstrated by her coverage of the eHow UK fiasco. You can also look at Write For eHow’s post: Changes At eHow.

eHow Residual Income Report
Despite the constant drama at eHow I have had by far my best month ever there for residual income. As the pace for earnings there accelerated in February they continued to accelerate in March as the lingering problem of eHow UK continued to fade and as the gradual increase in backlinks to my articles expanded. Last month I stated that my raw earnings and earning pace (residual income per 1000 page views) were the best they’ve ever been at eHow, well March topped both of those numbers from February easily.

My eHow earnings stats for March 2010 are below:

• 80 published articles earned at a combined rate of $14.05 per 1,000 PV – up from $11.78 in February. Last month I stated that the $11.78/1000 PV to be a rebound due to the fixing of the eHow UK bug. This month I am led to believe that the rebound has continued to take effect. Possibly the bug fix occurred in a rolling manner slowly taking affect to my articles in small bunches. March must have had most if not all of my articles fixed as my earning pace was so high compared to February or any other month for that matter.
• Page views for my published articles expanded month over month by 28 percent. More page views earning at a faster pace has led to a remarkable increase in this particular residual income stream.
• 80 percent of my earnings came from 23 percent of my articles – up from 22 percent in February. – Always pleased to have this number higher.
• 20 percent of my earnings came from 48 percent of my articles – up from 36 percent in February.
• 30 percent of my articles had no earnings at all – down from 42 percent in February. – Last month I wanted to see this number drop down into the 30s, looks like I got my wish and almost some more; 20’s next month maybe?
• Overall, 9 percent of my published articles have never earned a penny (7 articles). This is a slight improvement from last month. Additionally I feel moving these articles will be too much effort than it is worth. We’ll see if they ever earn anything. If they don’t then no big deal.

My eHow Earnings Pace
08-2009 - $8.84 per 1000 PV
09-2009 - $9.76 per 1000 PV
10-2009 - $10.19 per 1000 PV
11-2009 - $10.25 per 1000 PV
12-2009 - $10.41 per 1000 PV
01-2010 - $8.30 per 1000 PV
02-2010 - $11.78 per 1000 PV
03-2010 - $14.05 per 1000 PV

I’m curious where this pace will settle at. I can’t imagine it will keep going up every month though it would be nice. :)

InfoBarrel
Of all the paces that I write for InfoBarrel was the one that really took the back seat in the month of March. During the month I was immersed in my Xomba Bookmarks Experiment and because of two different vacations and routine backlinking work I do I barely participated on InfoBarrel at all. Despite that I was pleased to see my raw earnings there rise month over month to an all time high for me, my earnings pace declined a bit month over month, and lastly my visitors increased month over month to an all time high for me. All three things combined led to notably higher income. No crazy big increase but nice nevertheless.

Ironically I made some comments on the forum over there and possibly here on this blog that my pace there was less than I would have expected early in the month but they rebounded quite nicely. The first week or so was really slow I guess. Possibly this was just random chance at play.

At the end of March I had posted 123 articles, only two higher than the month prior. I should also note that I have a good handful of additional articles posted on IB on different accounts which are not tied to my Adsense code. I use these articles for links only, not for earnings. I don’t want to water down my Adsense account with articles with no potential to earn. In the future I may develop this topic a bit more but not now.

My InfoBarrel Earnings Stats and Pace
Dec 2009 - 90 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $14.61
Jan 2010 - 110 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $15.33
Feb 2010 - 121 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $16.99
Mar 2010 - 123 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $14.77

Now that eHow is out of the picture I will slowly start refocusing my efforts here. In fact I just joined The Keyword Academy and will be doing some experimenting here on IB as I try some of their tips. I have yet to delve into Self-Hosted niche blogs on Wordpress but will use some of my experiments on InfoBarrel to start this plan off. A lot of what is said on the Keyword Academy is known by many but for Wordpress blogs they have a great system for supporting all the members with good backlinks. The membership fee may be worth it for this reason alone. We’ll see.

Wow, that was a tangent. Anyway, you can read more about the Keyword Academy from Lis at Passive Income Online who finally convinced me to join. Hurry, time’s running out for the low cost membership as their prices are rising this month on the 6th. As an aside I’ll say many of my experiments won’t be on my main IB account as these will be experiments for niche sites that I’ll be putting together in the future. I will however add the IB stats together for these quarterly income reports however.

Xomba
I’m not going to say much here on Xomba as I recently posted a major update on my one-month mark on my Xomba Bookmarks Experiment. I closed the month out with a small earnings spurt there though it wasn’t much. I only earned around $10 at Xomba for the month but I guess this has the potential to rise in the future. We’ll see. Since all earnings here are exactly my Adsense stats and it’s against TOS to share this info I’ll say that my earnings pace has dropped off what I experienced through the first 10 days of March considerably however the conversion rate of Adsense page views to clicks is still the best of all my properties online. Unfortunately it’s tough to get Adsense page views there because of the 50/50 split and due to the brevity of 50-100 word Blurbs / Bookmarks.

Nevertheless, I’ll take my $10 and see what happens in April. I will continue to post Bookmarks on Xomba but will slow my pace considerably. I’m pushing 279 Bookmarks there in roughly 44 days; I see 300+ by month end but 500 is a long time off compared to what I expected from this site a month ago. I hope things get better there though because I like the site quite a bit for what it is.

My Longevity Blog & Other Niche Sites
As we all know my main residual income blog is my Longevity blog which focuses on teaching you how to live a long life. Like the anchored backlink there? :) This site is my bread and butter and will be so pretty much for ever as far as I can tell. It is hosted on Blogspot and thus my only costs associated with it are the domain registration fees every year. My earnings for this site have been expanding greatly month over month this year as I’ve noted in my last residual income report in March for February.

I had a problem with this blog for a while in that most of the traffic to the site was coming from Google to a page that got PSA ads. I kept tweaking the page and couldn’t switch the ads over so I just took them off the page completely and moved on. Because of this my Adsense page views dropped but my Adsense page views became more efficient and my site’s CTR and earnings per 1000 Ad page views increased remarkably.

I’ve also done some extensive backlinking on many of the pages with more backlinking currently happening. As a result my SERP ranking is getting much better for all my other pages and the entire site is performing so much better. I will continue backlinking this site from InfoBarrel, Post Your Own Articles, and many Article Directories as I’ve described time and again and in great detail in my ultimate guide to residual income. For the month of March my search traffic was the most it has ever been to the site and my earnings per search visitor are as high as it’s ever been by a long shot. I expect the trend of increasing earnings and increasing the sites earning pace to continue into April.

Ironically, one of my vacations this month allowed me to work on a niche site that I have had dormant for over a year. When I built the site (blog) it was just a personal site that happened to be a niche topic. Well, I worked on it during a weeklong vacation in March with no purpose in making money on it but I did anyway. It seems that once you learn how to make residual income online you can’t stop even when you aren’t trying. I will continue expanding on this site little by little in the future and possibly optimizing some of my older posts. I’m not sure what kind of money this can make but because it’s personal and something I did before I was looking to make money online I will continue working on it for enjoyment and take the residuals as an added bonus.

Similarly, I will slowly introduce some niche sites into my arsenal of online properties which follow the Keyword Academy model and in time I will discuss these a bit. But for now there’s nothing in place yet.

Overall Online Residual Income Stream
Overall my online residual income streams have expanded greatly in March over February. Everything was up month over month in raw earnings and most were up on the pace as well as the search visitors and ad page views. Below you can see the graph for my residual income goal. Remember there is no published number what the long term goal is other than it is a duplication of my day job income. My long term goal is to make as much online as I do at the office. Of course you don’t know how much I make at the office so that keeps things at least a little vague.

Last month I had achieved 2.81 percent of my long term goal; March I achieved 4.83 percent of my long term goal for an overall increase in residual income online of 71.5 percent month over month. Nice.

You can also take a look at my past residual earning recaps if you care to here and I’ll recap once again in about three months. In between however you’ll get nuggets here and there. Good luck everyone and work hard. That’s how it’s done.