Income Report – June 2012
Hello and welcome to our income and traffic report for June 2012!
We’re a bit late…but this blog was started in May 2011 and we are now officially more than a year old! (This is our 19th income report…we actually backdated our income reports when we started the blog to give you a feel as to how things started off for us.) We wanted to let you know how much we’ve appreciated your comments, suggestions, and support over this last year. I’d also add that we never expected AdSenseFlippers to grow to the level it’s at and we’re thrilled with everything that’s happened on this journey.
I’ll get into more about what we’ve been up to in June, but for those that can’t wait I’m happy to report that we brought in a total of $27,428.90 this month…our second best month since we began this journey.
Now…on to the details!
Note: Some of the links below are affiliate links where we will get paid if you like and purchase the services. Β You donβt get charged anything extra and we appreciate that so many of you choose to purchase through us!
Ongoing Projects
Since much of the work we do with niche sites is “outsourced” to our staff, Joe and I have spent quite a bit of time looking for other projects that are interesting to us, useful to our team, and/or requested by you. We’ve had amazing conversations, emails, and Twitter exchanges with many of you and those chats often turn into interesting ideas and projects for us to work on.
IntelliTheme
Most of the functionality in our upcoming WP Theme is in place and we’ve rolled it out to our sites for testing and tweaking. I’m pretty hungry for data on improvement, but it’s still pretty early and John The InternΒ Β is “refusing” to give me hard numbers…only telling me that initial results look “positive”…ugh!
I can tell you that software development can be frustrating from a marketing perspective. You initially have this “grand vision” of what you want the software to do, but then you’re forced to chop up the path to that end goal into small, baby steps or bite-sized chunks. Early on, the functionality and the look/feel is so basic and far from where you want it to go that it’s hard not to have the wind knocked out of your sails. Even though our UI is still a bit ugly and needs to be cleaned up, we’ve finally gotten to the point that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I’m feeling much better about our efforts.
We’ve just started discussing product launch sequences, adding affiliates and affiliate management software, etc. and I’ve found it fascinating. We’ve decided to bring on our friend, Damian Thompson, as a consultant to help us walk through the pre-launch steps as we continue to move forward towards release. He’s been a great help initially in getting us to think through the process and we look forward to continued work with him as we drive this project home.
Our “Nameless SERP Evaluation Tool”
We’ve had our developer create both the 1A and 1B version of this tool and now it’s up to Joe and I to add all of the variations of data we want to check to determine the chance to rank. This is not a light undertaking. We want this to be able to “replace ourselves” when it comes to picking niches that are winners, so it could end up costing us quite heavily if we don’t get this right. We’ll be hammering this out and tweaking it over the next 4-8 weeks. This period will be critical and will determine whether or not this thing will be usable for us.
Building A Niche Site Empire
Ok…so I know our niche site guide isn’t brand new, but we DID just cross the 10,000 download mark which was very exciting for us. We were also able to convert the guide into Kindle format and get it published on Amazon. (Allowing us another form of distribution and giving us a chance to test out the process for Kindle ebook creation)
Making Connections
We’ve been in contact and have reconnected with quite a few people in the industry in June and have had some emails and chats with some super-sharp guys and gals over the past few weeks. We’ll mention them here and give you a chance to check them out as well:
Dulce at DavaoBloggers.net – We first met Dulce at Startup Weekend Cebu, but she reconnected with us in June to invite me to sit on a panel for Social Media Day Davao. She’s the president of the Davao Bloggers group and is potentially looking to have a StartUp Weekend event here in Davao. We’re excited about the idea and offered her our help in getting the ball rolling.
John from JetSetCitizen.com – We got an email from John asking if he could do an interview with us for his blog and ended up sending him what I thought was our most in-depth interview yet. The way he asked the questions made me want to give better answers and I think it worked out pretty well all around!
Steve at SteveScottSite.com – A popular blogger in a similar niche and space as us. We’d both seen each other around the blogosphere, but I needed some help with content, reached out, and we’re now working on something together…the results of which we’ll have together soon!
Mike at MikeFromMaine.com – We’ve followed Mike’s progress for months as he slowly built out hundreds of niche sites and just recently started to turn the corner. (and a profit!) He doesn’t post as much, but I’m expecting a GREAT revenue report from him for June…definitely one to watch!
Chris Guthrie from MakeMoneyOnTheInternet.com – We’ve connected with Chris several times before, but it had been a few months since our last chat and we finally sat down to be interviewed on his podcast. (coming soon) After the interview, we started talking about a few different ways we might be able to work together and had some interesting ideas pop up…more on that later? π
Thomas from FlippingEnterprises.com – We’d both run across each other on the WarriorForum and Flippa a few times, but we finally got a few minutes on a call together. His company brokers the buying/selling of website on the higher-end and is #1 on Flippa in terms of revenue for 2011. A really interesting guy and it was nice to hear that we might have some aligned goals and ways to work together in the future.
Ophelie from Flippa.com – Ophelie noticed the attention our blog post “The Problem With Flippa” was getting and left a few interesting and helpful comments. We started emailing and talking about improvements they’re making and how they’re looking for better ways to get their message and changes out. Sweet!
Bjord and Lindsay from PinchOfYum.com – We were introduced via Adam in May, but I reconnected as I realized they had just picked up and moved to Cebu City, Philippines to teach at an orphanage. They run an excellent food blog that has a ton of personality and quite a bit of income, according to their income reports…definitely worth checking out.
Corbett Barr from ThinkTraffic.net – I’ve followed Corbett for a while and I was impressed with his recent site redesign. As we’re considering the same on AdSenseFlippers I wanted to connect and let him know I thought it was awesome and ask if he would do a blog post covering the conversion numbers on his site after the change.
Traffic To AdSenseFlippers
We had 17,206 visits in June…an increase of exactly 2 visitors over May. Even though we sold quite a few sites in June, traffic seems to be holding pretty steady, even looking at these first few days in July. I was really hoping for an up-tick over May’s numbers, but I know that we fell a bit short on content again in June and that probably didn’t help to drive much traffic to the site. Here are our top content pages for June, in order of visits:
Income Report May 2012
Best SEO Resources For Niche Sites
In Defense Of Google Traffic
I Want Your Monies
Podcast Statistics
We’ve cut back the creation of our podcast episodes by half, but were still able to pull in 10,614 downloads for the month, much of that coming from previous episodes through a residual effect. While we love putting out new episodes, we were starting to feel a little burnout with putting out an episode each week and have backed off to every other week. We may go back to a weekly format in the future, but for now we feel like we’re able to put better content out if we do it a little less often.
AdSense Earnings
Our earnings went up slightly, even with quite a few website sales in June. We pulled in a total of $3,262.17 for the month, with our best day at $166.47 on June 27th and our worst day at $70.18 on June 10th. Earnings steadily continue to grow and we should have more sites available for sale in July, 2012.
Flippa Sales
We didn’t have any Flippa auctions again in June, but we’re excited to try out their new “Verified Earnings” feature with a new auction in the next couple of weeks. We’ve talked to a few of you that are looking to run your first auction on Flippa here soon and we really recommend listing to our latest podcast episode 26 coveringΒ how to sell your websites on Flippa.
Private Sales
After holding off and having a pretty slow May, we put a bunch of websites and packages up for sale and ended up selling $22,312.60 worth of sites privately in June. The package option seems to be off to a great start, although their higher price tag keeps them from selling quite as fast as the individual sites. We listed sites for sale twice during the month and, both times, we were able to sell almost all of our sites listed within 24 hours…not too bad!
Niche Site Gold
Our Niche Site Gold newsletter is starting to pick up steam with just over 800 email subscribers. Each week, we go through the process and statistics over a few keywords and niche site domains and then offer those domains up for sale. We were able to sell a total of 12 domains for $600 in June. The best part is that we’re hearing these domains are being put to good use and we’re excited so many others are taking action in creating their niche sites.
Affiliate Sales
After our bump for the discount on Long Tail Pro last month, we saw our affiliate revenue go down a bit to $1,254.13. We didn’t really have anything new that we’ve tested or found effective and many of these purchases came through our Resources page. We’re basically sticking with what we’ve got unless something really compelling comes along!
Summary
We had a GREAT month in terms of both progress and overall revenue and we were pleased to finish out Q2 strong. We’ll be looking to improve our traffic and brand exposure in the next couple of months to see if we can reach new audiences and develop new relationships with other bloggers, podcasters, etc.
Sites Created: 202 (182 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $3,262.14 ($3,007.07 last month)
Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($0.00 last month)
Private Sales: $22,312.60 ($0.00 last month)
Niche Site Gold: $600.00 ($100.00 last month)
Total Affiliate Sales: $1,254.13 ($1,637.34 last month)
- LongTailPro: $728.26
- HostGator: $200.00
- Virtual Staff Finder: $75.01
- Market Samurai: $46.56
- SubmitYourArticle: $23.40
- CTR Theme: $30.49
- GoDaddy: $50.43
- SECockpit: $27.88
- SEOMoz: $25.00
- SENuke X: $44.10
- Whoosh Traffic: $3.00
Total Income: $27,428.90 ($4,744.41 last month)
How did your month turn out? Β What would you be focused on if you were in our shoes? Please leave us a comment below or use the button to send us a recorded message…we’d love to hear from you!
Discussion
How many searches per month must a keyword have to be worth going for when building a website? I assume you use Google Keyword Tool, what areas to you check when checking a keyword? Just United States or the whole world?
We local at exact match searches globally, but set it to the US so we have an idea what percentage come from the USA as our content targets that audience. For specifics, please download our guide and follow the keyword research section:
http://adsenseflippers.com/all-posts/building-a-niche-site-empire-guide/
Hey,
Thank you for posting this! 2,000 sites is crazy! how are you only pulling in 4k per month from adsense?
Lots and lots of our sites earn nothing or next to nothing. We continue to sell off our “winners” and the low-end sites are left over.
Hi
You build a lot of sites every month but you are not selling many on your site or filppa these days?
Is there a reason for this slow sales rate? maybe your holding bestsites back to grow them after having got hit by penq?
Hey there!
We sold over 22K worth of sites in June, have a Flippa auction going right now:
https://flippa.com/2790065-119-last-30-days-4-7k-uniques-17-adsense-sites-no-work-1-no-reserve
and will be listing another 60-80 sites within the next 24 hours…so we’re definitely still selling sites! We held off on selling sites in May as we wanted to make sure there weren’t any residual effects from Penguin that would burn the buyers, but we’ve been back in business June/July.
The reason you’ll see that we create many more sites than we actually sell is because we have a failure rate that keeps some sites from ever being valuable. We’ve held onto quite a few sites that aren’t really earning enough to be valuable enough in a sale. If they make next to nothing, we actually let them drop/expire at the end of the year. If they’re making just a little, we’ll just keep them and see if they ever improve.
Great Job Guys and thanks for sharing:) How many adsense sights do you have to make that kind of money?
Hey Jay,
We’ve built more than 2,000 websites.
Hey guys. Thanks for sharing all your sales figures it’s been great tracking your progress. Just a question though, would you be willing to share your total expenses for each month as well?
Simon
We’ve said before that our cost per site is about $40 to $50. Other than that we do not disclose costs.
Thanks for the link here and the amazing interview. That was definitely one of the top interviews I have had on the site. I really appreciate the effort!
You’re welcome John! Be sure to stop by again.
You’re doing it great! Could I ask you something? How do you do to increase the CTR in your newest sites?
Great question — it usually takes tedious A/B variant testing of multiple layouts that honestly we don’t do. So we are creating a theme that will do it for you — it’s called IntelliTheme. Stay tuned for details.
Great month – congrats guys! May I have a question? How many websites are making for you more than 10$ a month (from adsense of course)?
Thanks in advance for your answer!
BR, Chris
More than $10 a month ever? Or in the last 30 days? Sites come and go all the time (we don’t sell these sites, we look for sites to sell that have steady income numbers). Because we sell sites, any number I give you would sound a bit off because we don’t hold onto our best sites.
I’m interested in average amount of sites which make more than 10$ for at least three months.
Approximately 350 of our sites have made at least $10 in any 3 separate 30 day period according to our all time AdSense data.
Keep in mind the AdSense feature for site reporting only goes back to June 24th of 2011, so the numbers might be slightly tainted. So this actually may be an under reported number that effects all the sites we made from December 2010 to June of 2011.
Great post guys! I wonder what kind of team size you guys have to develop 202 new sites. Keep it up!
Hey Miki!
It varies a bit as we have staff that work on other projects as well and do some cross-over, but we have 12 in-house staff attached to the project and 3 contractors that work for us directly. There are some inefficiencies we’ve noticed since we’ve grown, though….those kinds of things tend to happen as you scale.
Hey Justin! Thanks for the shout out! π Hope all is well for you and the team in DC.
Doing well, Bjork! Hope all is well for you in Cebu…feeling settled yet? π
Excellent month guys, good to see you bouncing right back up there π
I finally got around to reading your 5 steps to easy keyword report which is great and one of the simplest and easiest to understand guides I’ve seen. The market samurai videos are great but there’s about 10 hours worth of them and its a lot to take on board in the beginning.
I have market samurai and think that’s a great tool but do you think others such as long tail pro or the brad callen one I can’t remember are quicker to use for finding worthy keywords or is it just a case of getting used to one piece of software?
It’s just what you used to. I personally love LTP but my staff use the Google Keyword Tool directly as they find it more reliable.
I made just over $600 in June, you must have some VERY popular sites to pull in $27k+ a month. π
Well keep in mind that’s not all AdSense revenue. The majority of income comes from sites sales, which are very popular!
another great month…. 22k in private sales is pretty sweet, congratulation guys! looks like you made some good connections also with some smart guys
Thanks buddy! Looks like the next round is on us!
You guys did a great job on the Long Tail Pro front π
Very jealous haha
Keep it up guys,
greets from Sydney
Thanks Ralph, LTP is such a great product it sells itself. Now if we just had a million dollar product that sold itself we could retire!
Great month guys, a few more like this and you will actually be able to afford my ridiculously high consulting rates! π
You know it brother! Nice to have a war chest to spend on talented people helping us conquer the world!
Great stuff, guys, especially nice to see how the niche site direct sales are going strong. Again and again we see this happening that instead of teaching people how to do something, you do it for them and collect the money.
One thing I’m thinking just off the top of my head … you are selling these sites way too cheap. My scientific basis for this statement is, they sell too fast π
Your market niche here is _hot_, no doubt about that. I recently checked out Mike From Maine’s site and his sales page as well, it it doesn’t look like he is ‘stuck’ with many losers, either.
Sell on, guys.
You’re right Dave, the 20x multiple may be too low. However with the machine we have and the cost of goods, it is a great business model. As a friend of mine always says “pigs get fat hogs get slaughtered”. Being greedy can lead to your ultimate downfall.
my 2c is 20x is plenty and that’s being achieved because of the reputation and branding.
The “normal” valuation is much closer to 10x for less know sellers.
Its a niche and Jo and Justin are nailing it. The idea of aging the sites a bit more and getting a higher valuation makes more sense than trying to go to 25 or 30x and loose members of the tribe in the process.
What an awesome month! We made a bit over $5400 this month, so we’re definitely on a decent pace as well. I’m very interested in your SERP Evaluation Tool. Sounds like a great idea and I’m always looking for new tools to make things better and faster for us. And a WP Theme too? Can’t wait to see how that turns out.
Thanks Josh, we are working hard on all three fronts. I imagine the theme will be done way before the eval tool, but both are exciting. Stay tuned for more.
Great! I’ve come to know that anything coming from you guys is pretty much golden, so I’ll definitely be looking out for it.
Congrats on an awesome month! It sounds like you definitely have a ton of work ahead of you for the 1st page software as it’s got to be super hard to be able to come up with concrete “rules” as to what you can rank for and what you can’t. However, once you’re able to do that I can totally see you guys crushing it with that!
Thomas
Thomas, your right — concrete rules may not be the way to go. We might want to give users the flexibility to use their own scoring to fit their own process. We’ll see how that works out.
Definitely the ability to adjust the “rules” would be a great feature. I think it would also be helpful though to have default settings for what you and Justin personally use to judge keywords too so newbies can get an idea of what to look for in a keyword. Definitely see a lot of potential in this idea – hope to hear more about it soon!
@thomas Your right the rules have to be adjustable as they will vary with time and for example I dont mind a low local monthly search in a micro niche with a high CPC
I dont think any tool will be able to cover all angles of evaluation but even if it gets me to the point where it suggest keywords based on a lot of number crunching it will save a lot of time.
presets might be beneficial too. for example if a SERP is easy to rank for a review site, authority site, etc.
Using the data points from the SERP results and maybe running those across a statistical average of the quality of an
1)authority (“x”%percentage of content is focused on 1 KW,
2)review(“x”% or “x” amount of content is review
3)microniche ( less than “x” content total)
4)average niche (what u guys do 3-5 contents)
or
5)hybrid authority/niche ( between 5-50 contents)
each preset can be tested with example
“x”incoming links to site
“x”outbound links
“total pages”
“social media reach/relevancy”
“good SEO, Title, URL, KW match”
“PR”x” of incoming or outgoing links”
Did i go a little to deep on this one? lol
Hi Guys!
Just a simple congrats on a good month.
Im mostly looking forward to see the first page tool. Intellitheme is intresting but no an area i struglle with at the moement. I do think it will have value thought. The most important thing for me is to be able to monitor that tool though. Not sure artifical intelligence has got to the point where it can outwit my ability to analysis CTR by ad placeent.. on the otehr hand π
Steve
Hey Steve,
The first page tool is further behind. It’s something we started working on later PLUS it’s turning out to be a bit more complicated. As long as it doesn’t start buying up domains for you we should be ok, eh? That would be scary! lol
LOL yes one step to far.. I do enough of that myself as it is…
Congratulations on another great month!
Thanks, Matt. How did your June shape out…everything rolling along?
I grossed $19.7K in June and had $6K in expenses, so, a pretty typical month all-and-all (a bit high on the expense side though, since I bought two websites).
Amazing numbers (both traffic and income) … A great bounce back !
Thanks, Salman…appreciate it!
Nice info here. The key to succeeding in any business is to connect with movers and shakers of the biz that will actually help you take your biz to the next level which you guys did – that’s great. I read the interview on jetsetcitizen and mehn Joe is just too good… the guy’s real enjoying. I hope to work with you guys soonest in Philipines. I like the country and i like you too.
Sheyi
Thanks, Sheyi! We try to be open to connecting with everyone we can…you never know where something great will pop up! I love talking to people who are brimming with ideas and at can put together a general plan to see it through.
Awesome, Justin. Your earning is very great to me, now I have to learn English to blog better and get more income. Thanks for sharing your monthly report to us. Keep sharing.
Really nice info, thanks for sharing π I appreciate that you’re breaking things down into categories, and not just giving totals.
No problem, Gary! We try to be as specific as possible…it’s helpful when we go back to review particular months if it’s broken down like that.
Pretty crazy month fellows, I got a bad feeling last month but glad you’re back to normal, I bet it was kind of expected right after the Penguin, everyone holding their breath. Must say now that the Penguin updates are passed that there seems to be a lot less competition in almost any niche. Although sometimes you see a PR0 site ranking for an insane tough kw but 100% sure they use redirects to rank those sites.
You should type in: unlock iphone 4, and whole page one is covered with PR0 sites lol.
For myself I still haven’t decided whether I go settle in Thailand or the Philippines, one thing is sure though, I definitely will move my ass in October or early November. As you might remember I started selling SEO at the Warriorforum in January and it’s running beyond all expectations so time to make my dreams come true. The initial plan was a niche emperium as well but that can wait. Maybe we start something soon as my VA team keeps nagging about it π
Hey Dennis,
Yeah, no real issues last month…just wanted to reassess after Penguin and see where we’re at before continuing on. We didn’t want to offer up any sites for sale until we were sure which were affected and which were not.
Thailand or the Philippines? I would suggest checking out both! Here’s a cool post about Thailand Vs. Philippines Vs. Bali:
http://www.tropicalmba.com/thailand-vs-bali-vs-philippines/
Thanks great read.
The reason I am a fan of Thailand is first cause I’ve been there for 3 months at Koh Samui, really great island, and secondly I like to have a place to live real close to the beach. Probably I’ll go live in some resort so I feel like I’m on holiday 24/7 lol. I checked Davao on Google Maps and couldn’t really find much beach, Davao city itself is about 20 miles from there. Also when zooming in at Cebu I hardly see any whitesand beaches. Maybe I’m blind or something lol.
Btw good attitude indeed, most would sell it as fast as they could just to get rid of it in fear of another update.
My month didn’t turn out so well but if I include the last 12 I might stand a chance! Seriously though, congratulations on a great month and thanks for all the content you’re putting out.
Great to see you’ve reached out to Corbett Barr and Steve Scott β two of my favorite bloggers. Can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with in tandem with those guys.
Hey Rob!
Sorry to hear your June didn’t turn out as great as you’d hoped, but thanks for the comment all the same!
It was just a quick email to Corbett as I’m really interested in hearing how the design change has worked out, but we’re working on something with Steve right now. Steve’s a super-sharp guy and I really like his honest, no-BS approach to marketing.
Thanks for the awesome info guys! Quick question: Would you say Flippa is the overall best platform for selling micro-niche sites? I notice that they charge $29 minimum, which seems kinda high.
We definitely think Flippa has the best platform as they have the largest number of buyers. On Flippa, I wouldn’t sell sites individually….you’re better off packaging them together and selling in multiples with their fee structure.
Check out our just-released podcast where we go over exactly the tips/tricks we use to sell on Flippa if you haven’t heard it yet…it may give you some ideas:
http://adsenseflippers.com/flipping-websites/afp-26-how-to-sell-your-websites-on-flippa/
Yep, i sold one little site for $49, and had to pay $29 in fees.. wasn’t worth it in the end.
Just amazing, thanks a lot for sharing your income! First of all i have to congratulate you for being online over a year and sharing all this great content with your fans!
I think you both should focus on automate your core business(creating niche sites). Next step could be finishing the evaluation tool. After that you maybe save a lot of time and could spent it on diversifying your business.
But to be honest, i don’t know, maybe you could make this blog even more sucessfull. Just keep it real guys π Greatings from Germany
Thanks for the comment, Stefan…and thanks for hanging with us!
We’re “pretty” close to having the niche site creation completely off our plates and in the hands of our team. If we can get the evaluation tool working, that would be the last step and take us out of the creation process entirely.
I definitely want to continue working on the blog. We’ve met and connected with some pretty amazing people over the last year and I’m excited about the opportunities that presents. We’ll see, eh?
wow cool month guys, this should result in some SMB/SML π
Definitely! Will have to do some San Miguel Lights this weekend, for sure…