My November 2013 Online Income Report

November was an outstanding month on so many different levels. My November online income increased 10% over October and I earned 2 awards. My website was voted as one of the top 25 affiliate marketing blogs of 2013 by Affiliate Summit.

Adsense

I am impressed and pleased by my steady increase in Adsense earnings. I have never used this as a strategy for monthly income before I created my niche website iHvacZone. I have seen my monthly income from Adsense increase every month.

I have always read about Spencer Haws at NichePursuits and how he was making thousands of dollars each month from Adsense on his niche websites. But I never really understand how you could make money from Adsense until I actually tried it.

The amount of money that I am making right now is not very much. But it is a start. Most importantly is that the income is increasing each and every month. The increase is corresponding to the increase in visitors to my niche website. The more I grow the niche website then more visitors and more money from Adsense.

For November 2013 I earned $7.11 from Adsense.

Book Royalties

This source of income has given me one of my highest ROIs. I wrote several books almost two years ago and published them on Amazon. Since the time I published them I have done absolutely nothing to promote them. Yet they continue to produce income each and every month with no work on my part.

In my list of ideas that I want to implement is to write another book on real estate investing for landlords. When I get this book finished then I can look forward to seeing my monthly income from book royalties increase.

In November I earned $63.84 from Book Royalties.

Affiliate Marketing

I have said it before and I will say it again that affiliate marketing is my bread and butter. This is how I got started. If you are looking to make money online it is the one area that has the lowest cost of entry. You sign up as an affiliate for a product and then promote the heck out of it. Get people to purchase from your promotions and get commission checks.

The good news from my affiliate marketing this month is that I am starting to see income coming in from the new sites that I have started to promote several months ago. The websites I created to promote these new products are starting to get ranked for different longtail keywords and I am starting to see sales as a result.

The best news is that my income from promoting Rogue Fitness has dramatically increased this month. They pay a very low 5% commission but they have so many products that you can easily pick just half a dozen of them and start promoting just those product. Another advantage is that they have some products that cost several thousands of dollars. If you sell a $2,000 product then you can get a nice $100 commission check. Now if you can sell one of these products a week then it becomes an very nice income stream every month. I came a few dollars short of earning $100 in commissions from Rogue in November.

I also saw my first sales from promoting stand up paddle boards. It actually took several months before I saw my first sell. Now that I have that first sell under my belt then I can expect even more in the upcoming months. I am looking forward to growing this market because I think stand up paddle board is a growing market and very few people are promoting it. It is a market where you have the opportunity to be the big fish in a small pond.

Overall in November I earned $1,911.53 from Affiliate Marketing.

Product Sales

There is nothing more satisfactory that producing a product and having people purchase it. Better yet is having people that purchase your product, send you an unsolicited email saying that they enjoyed your product. I got 3 of these emails in November. I want to thank those that emailed me. I make sure to respond to every email that I receive.

My most successful product is my Amazon Affiliate Bible. This product has sold over 730 copies at $17. It has grossed $11,866 in sales. All of this is from just one product.

There is advantages in producing your own product. You have complete control over how it does. In the beginning I tried to heavily promote it based on what I knew back then about promotions. (Which wasn’t very much considering what I know now). Now that it has built a reputation as a solid product I still get sales every month.

I have started writing Amazon Affiliate Bible v2 but have stopped my writing here lately. The reason I stopped is because I have been so engrossed with getting my map and meal plan sites up and running. Maybe in Q1 of 2014 I will have time to get it completed.

In November I earned $262 from Product Sales of my own products.

My November 2013 Online Income Report Total

For the second month in a row I have earned over $2,000 online. I am excited because November is a 10% increase over what I earned in October. Not bad to see a 10% increase in income in just 30 days. I am right at earning $75 per day online in November. I am looking forward to getting this number back up to $100 per day. Here is my total online income report for November 2013.

$7.11 Adsense
$1,911.53 Affiliate Marketing
$262.00 Product Sales
$63.84 Book Royalties
———
$2,244.48 November Total

My Major Accomplishments in November

Last week I received an email from Affiliate Summit letting me know my website was voted one of the top 25 Affiliate Marketing blogs in 2013. You can read about the award at Affiliate Summit.

It was quite an honor to have been nominated. They did several weeks of online voting to determine the best blogs. It is amazing to know that my Ratracegrad website was voted as one of the top 25 blogs. Let me share a direct quote from Affiliate Summit when they announced the awards.

After months of open nominations, the results are in and we are now ready to announce the top 25 affiliate marketing blogs of 2013.

These blogs stay on top of trending topics, they’re informative and resourceful, and they offer the best advice for other marketers to follow.

As we grow our brands and businesses online, we can certainly learn a lot from each other. It’s best to learn from the people we know and trust, so we want to thank each blogger for all of the information they share, and commend them on all the hard work they have achieved this year.

I want to thank every one of my readers for following my blog. I hope I have lived up to the expectation that I share valuable information with my readers. I am going to continue posting every week to my blog in 2014. My goal is to continue to grow my readership.

I started this blog in February of 2013. I made only one post for the entire month of February. I started posting more regularly in March of this year. Now about less than a year I have gone from zero readers to averaging more than 120 unique readers every single day. I thank you all for being on this journey with me.

Another award I got was from winning a contest on Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income website. Pat Flynn interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk on the release of his new book Jab Jab Jab Right Hook.

After the podcast Pat Flynn announced that he was giving away 50 copies of Gary’s book. All you had to do was to post examples of how you had either “jab” or “right hook” in social media and provide a link to your example. I shared my 12 page resource guide that I put together last month.

From all the comments, Gary selected 10 people to be a winner. The remaining 40 books would be done through a random drawing from everyone that posted an example. Over the weekend I got a notice from Gary Vaynerchuk that my resource guide was selected as winner #4 from the 10 he selected.

Yeah! I was so pleased beyond measure that I was selected from 372 entries. This just was icing on the cake after my blog was awarded one of the top 25 Affiliate Marketing blogs of 2013. Here was the incredible Gary Vaynerchuk selecting something I put together for my listeners as the 4th best example out of 372 entries.

What made it even more special is that I am considering starting my own podcast in 2014. I want to interview Pat Flynn but was not sure how to approach him. I was thinking of just writing 2 really great articles for his new niche website and sending them to him unsolicited. When I won I was told to email Pat my address for him to send the book. In the email I asked him to send me a list of 5-6 items that he needed to have done. I would look over the list and pick something I could do for him and get it done. I would do it without asking for any form of compensation. The only goal is that I would like for him to entertain the opportunity for me to interview him sometime in 2014 when I start my podcast. I am waiting to see what is on his list when I get the book. Hopefully I will get it before Christmas so I can spend my holiday time reading and consuming the information in the book.

Overall November was a great month. I increased my online income by 10% over October. I got two really impressive awards in November. Looking forward to a great December.

Next Steps

If you have not read my previous posts about my two current projects you can read it here. In that post I talk about my two “major” projects creating two totally unique websites.

Since I made that post just three days ago quite a few things have happened. I got a new quote back from TopTal which is more in alignment with a price that I thought clearly reflected the amount of time it would take to complete the scope of work. It helps having over 10 years of programming experience because it allowed me to actively be involved in the negotiation and point out very clearly what I thought would be a good estimate. Today I put a $500 deposit down to start the project on building my map website.

I should be selecting the programmer from TopTal this week. The scope of work calls for completion in just 11 man days of work. I don’t know if the programmer will work 5 days a week or just work 11 straight days or just a few days a week until completion. Hopefully by Friday I will know the answer to this question. If I can get a programmer started next week it is possible to have my website up and running possibly by end of 2013 or first week of 2014.

The other major progress was that I was getting quotes back from multiple programmers on creating me a custom Thesis theme for my meal plans website. I was getting discouraged because my lowest bid was $1,600 and the highest was $5,000.

I was not looking forward to spending this much money since I am spending several thousand dollars already on my map website. So Friday I purchased a custom Thesis skin called Marketers Delight. I spent the weekend learning Thesis 2 and trying to customize my new meal plan site MyEdesia.

While looking around I found a young college student that created his own website on Marketers Delight and Thesis 2. He was blogging about his learning web programming and development. I clearly loved his website. So I reached out to him on his contact page asking if he would be interested in customizing Marketers Delight to look like the design my graphics guy put together for me.

I heard back from him last night. This morning before leaving for week I sent him the graphics file and am waiting for him to respond. If I go this route then all I am asking him to do is to setup the home page to look like my graphics design and then make the blog pages look like his website but using my color palette.

Not a very challenging project so I am hoping he quotes me a price that reflects a “starving college student” wage. If this pans out then I can get him started on building my meal plan website. Once he is finished then the last thing I need to do is to get content for the website. So any good cooks out there please email me about creating recipes and taking pictures of the finished food product to put on my website!!!

Overall I am looking forward to using December to start planting the seeds that will be harvested in 2014. I have great plans for these 2 websites and I expect they will be bringing in several thousand dollars of income each month by this same time in 2014.