We’ve had a much quieter month in December than we’ve had in recent months and we’ve used that time to reflect on 2011 and have taken some of that time to decide where we plan to take our business in 2012. Knowing that we would get less value on our sites with Flippa sales, we decided to not offer any auctions, take the hit for December, and then add more sales in 2012. We’ll be covering some of the highlights from this last year in this report and laying out a gameplan we’ve come up with for the new year to help keep us focused and on track. Overall, we were able to pull in $11,844.65 for the month of December.

2011 In Review

Traffic

We’ve had an amazing run in getting AdSense Flippers off the ground and creating a ton of value through niche websites. We were able to pull in a total of 1,151,472 visitors this year across all of the sites and networks of sites…not too bad! 67,430 of those visitors were to AdSenseFlippers.com which is great considering the blog was only started in May and we’re at around 15K visitors monthly over the last few months.

Revenue

Our total earnings for the year came in at $112,011.84 and we created (approximately) 1,250 sites with costs at right around $60,000.00. That’s not bad, but you also have to consider (with current AdSense earnings and potential earnings on sites created the last 90 days) we’re sitting on around $4,500/month in AdSense income, which is worth around $90,000.00 to us in site sales. Ultimately, our $60,000.00 in spend created around $200,000.00 in value for us overall. This of course does NOT include the time spent by Joe and I working on the sites and AdSenseFlippers which was considerable. Luckily, TryBPO has continued to “pay the bills” so to speak, allowing us to work on this project without relying on it for personal income or having to subsidize the outsourcing company.

Brand Expansion

Since starting the blog, much of our traffic has come from others linking to us or people wanting to read more about us based on our forum posts or blog comments. We’ve been implementing Pat Flynn’s approach to “being everywhere” by starting the AdSense Flippers Podcast, putting out a few videos on our YouTube page, and being fairly active on Twitter. We monitor the “brand” a bit and are always checking out blogs that are mentioning us and leaving (hopefully) appropriate and thoughtful comments where we can and that’s helped us to engage quite a bit with other bloggers.

Networking

In a complete switch from our model with TryBPO, we’ve spent a good part of 2011 in actively reaching out to our peers and making connections that have really helped us to expand our business and help others as they work on their business goals. From meeting a number of guys in the DC, talking with Dan and Ian from the LifestyleBusinessPodcast, and going back and forth with Spencer from NichePursuits, we’re very happy with the connections made in 2011 and are looking to expand that in 2012.

2012 Growth

We’re a bit hesitant to lay out all of the things we want to do in 2012 before we’ve started some of them…we think it’s much better to report things as they’re happening so that we’re more likely to actually get them done. Still, we think it’s important to have goals or a roadmap on what we’d like to accomplish for the year so that our monthly planning meetings can be better organized to hit longer-term goals.

Traffic

We’d like to more than double our traffic across the entire network to more than 2.5 million visitors. Of that, we’d like to get up to more than 250,000 visits to AdSenseFlippers and another 100,000 visits to web properties we haven’t yet created. We’d like to see more than 150,000 downloads of our podcast. (A tall order from the 8,122 we currently have from the first three episodes!)

Revenue

In terms of revenue, we’d like to break $180,000 in website sales and more than $120,000 in additional revenue from AdSense and alternative income sources for a total of $300,000.00 or more on the AdSense Flippers project. Our plan should keep our costs under 150K, earning us a decent profit for the second year in operation.  While aggressive, we’re thinking that our increased site creation, website sales, and alternative income sources should get us there before the end of the year.

Branding And Networking

We’re really looking to expand and test through different mediums for delivering content in 2012. A first step was getting the podcast up and running last year, but we’re looking to put out more regular episodes in 2012 that relate to and are around our core business. We’re also looking to further expand the brand through video content that will be on the blog and on other web properties that haven’t been created yet, as there seem to be some steps that lend themselves better to video when it comes to creating niche sites. We’d also like to reach out more to others in the industry by offering interviews, guest posts, etc. that can help bring AF to a new audience.

As you can see, we have a big 2012 in store and we’re really excited to see how everything plays out. Now…on to the income details!

AdSense

As you can see, our income remained pretty consistent throughout the month with a fairly large dip right around Christmas. Our best day was towards the end of the month at $151.87 and our worst day was Christmas Eve at $72.99. We finished the month on a strong note that’s continued into the first few days of January.

Flippa

We didn’t offer any auctions in December, thinking that not as many buyers would be looking to pick up networks of sites with the Holidays coming up. With our model of offering at $1.00 with No Reserve, a lack of buyers could end up costing us quite a bit of money and we didn’t think it was worth it, especially considering we were still having some success selling sites directly. We do plan to offer one or two Flippa auctions in January, although they’ll most likely be towards the end of the month.

Private Sales

We did surprisingly well here this month, pulling in $7,151.80 total, especially considering the fact that we’ve had some development issues with the page and the AdSense integration that have carried on through the first part of January. Our BuyOurSites page was pretty bare in December too, although we plan on adding quite a few sites here in the next week or so that will be available for sale.

Click here if you’d like to be informed when we add new sites to the page!

Affiliate Sales

We had some carry-over on the LongTailPro sales into the month and some of the BuildMyRank sales and recurring commissions are starting to stack up. We agreed to an interview with our friend Vic Dorfman for his Smart Keyword Research course and had a few sales there as well which was great. You can check out the interview with him here.

Another interview we did was with Chris Guthrie from Makemoneyontheinternet.com. He’s a great guy and he decided to do interviews with a BUNCH of people in the niche site space including Cary Bergeron, Pat Flynn from SPI, Spencer from Niche Pursuits, and others. He decided to put all of these interviews together and share the juicy details from all of us in one package which was a pretty cool idea.

You can pick up all of the interviews for less than $20 here. (aff link)

Summary

We knew that December would be a slower month for us in terms of revenue, but were pretty excited to see we still were able to squeak out more than 10K for the month. We ended up taking quite a bit more downtime in December than we were planning on, but I think that’s really refreshed us for a great start in the New Year and we’re excited with our prospects for 2012.

Sites Created: 135 (136 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $3,514.52 ($3,813.02 last month)
Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($2,770.00 last month)
Private Sales: $7,151.80 ($12,701.56 last month)
Total Affiliate Sales: $1,178.33 ($1,534.57 last month)

• LongTailPro: $452.73
• SubmitYourArticle: $48.20
• BuildMyRank: $369.30
• SENuke X: $44.10
• Smart Keyword Research: $264.00

Total Income: $11,844.65 ($20,819.15 last month)

We’ve had another killer month in November and now we’re (way) overdue for another income report! I’m really excited about what we were able to accomplish in November regarding our short-term projects, but some of our long-term projects became delayed, hit roadblocks, etc. I’ll get into what’s been going on, what we’re working on, and then right into the numbers. If you just can’t wait to hear how we did, our total for November, 2011 was $20,819.15. Not too bad, eh?

I’ve mentioned that our plan is to maintain a successful model and build around the brand, but haven’t really gone into specifics about what it is we’re planning to do. Part of that stems from the fact that I don’t want to be creating a ton of competition for ourselves, but it’s also because I wasn’t exactly sure which projects we’d be focusing on and devoting the most time to. Over the last few weeks we’ve been able to come up with an approach to our projects that, I think, will allow us to mention some of the things we’re working on as they’ve become more realistic and prioritized.

I’ll also mention that Joe and I took a trip to Singapore and Bali at the end of November and beginning of December. As you may know, I’m a huge fan of Derek Sivers and we were lucky enough to meet him and hang out for a few hours while in Singapore. We found him extremely intellegent, soft-spoken, and amazingly open about what he’s doing, where he’s going, etc. In Bali we were able to hang out and network with Ian and Dan from the LifestyleBusinessPodcast and TropicalMBA and and a host of others they network with including Cody McKibben from Thrilling Heroics for some great fun in the sun. These meetings prompted some pretty interesting thoughts and discussions which we’ll be discussing in our next podcast episode.

Projects:

Buy Our Sites Page:

We’ve spent 4K to get the BuyOurSites page where we want it to be and it’s slowly starting to take shape. Our developer’s currently working on the AdSense API and we’re really hoping to have that in place shortly, but some of the other things we’ll have for this include:

1. Widget on the homepage
2. Lightbox when you click the site giving you additional, detailed information and an option to send a deposit or buy it directly.
3. Graphed history on the earnings/pageviews

We desperately need to get some decent sales copy up for this as well, including a FAQ to help head off any of the simple questions we currently get emails about.

WP Plugin:

We had a great idea for an AdSense plugin that would help save us a tremendous amount of time. As it stands, you’re not able to share bits of information in your AdSense account with others without sharing everything you have. Our plan is to build a plugin that allows the data from AdSense to be reported back into the plugin so that you can review, site by site, the available information. This would be incredibly helpful when it comes to having someone looking at the numbers and working on improving the sites individually, as well as allowing our agents to have access to that information. We also thought it would be useful to us and others to “dumb down” the creation of Ad Units and channels in the theme and automatically push that information to your AdSense account.

We looked around and couldn’t find anything exactly like it so we thought we’d build our own. Unfortunately, all of the features/functionality can’t be implemented due to AdSense API restrictions so it’s going to be extremely limited. At this point, we’re planning to get it developed and release it for free with WordPress.org. The idea will be to use it ourselves as it helps us and our particular needs and, hopefully, it will earn us some good will from others that can take the idea and build on it.

WP Theme:

We had (what I think were) some amazing ideas regarding a WP theme we were planning to build. Unfortunately, all of the features/functionality we’re looking to build simply can’t be done and so we’ve had to scale back the project a bit. Still, we’ve been less than happy with the some of the features in the current options out there like CTRTheme and ProSense and think we have some intimate knowledge and experience with these types of sites that would greatly improve on what’s been done previously. I’m a bit vague with this one regarding the details, but I can tell you that if we can get even part of what we’d like to do done with this project we’ll be REALLY excited about what it can do for our business.

Charity Project:

We’re partnering with our new friend Spencer from Niche Pursuits on a charity project that we’re hoping can do a lot of good. While this is a project that’s near and dear to my heart, I’ve kept putting it off as I know it’s going to be quite a bit of work. We’ve finally started to move on this and we’re hoping to get launched and get it off the ground early in the New Year and I’m excited because I know it has a chance to make a real difference.

AdSense Flippers Intern:

Speaking of making a difference, I’m extremely excited about the AdSense Flippers Intern Position as it has the chance to change someone’s life dramatically. We’re taking someone out of their country, having them fly out to the Philippines and setting them up with a live/work situation that will (hopefully) allow them to step into the live/work anywhere lifestyle and work with us directly on our projects and build their own business. This is a risky move by us, but after meeting some of the previous TropicalMBA alumni, we just knew we had to jump on it. We believe this model is game changing and we’re excited to expand the idea and concept outside of the TropicalMBA.

Alright…now on to the income details!

AdSense

With such few sales last month (October) we did see an increase to $3,813.02 in AdSense revenue this month, but if you look at the chart the income held pretty steady overall.

Our best day last month was at $155.60 and our worst day was $80.34…the only day under $100. With all of the site sales we had going on this month it was nice to see the income remain relatively consistent, although I can say we saw a slight drop-off in early December.

Flippa Sales

We did open up another Flippa auction for AdSense Flippers this month that ended up selling at the BuyItNow for $2,770.00. They’ve been making some changes over at Flippa recently. We used to send out a “welcome message” to any bidder on our auctions that just went over who we are, gave more detailed information about us and what they’re getting, etc. We thought it was a great way to build trust and to encourage more bids from the bidder, but Flippa has removed the option to message bidders now…ugh. While I agree there area a ton of people sending spam via their messaging system, it’s still a useful tool and it feels a bit like they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater here.

Private Sales

We were able to do extremely well here this month with $12,701.56 in private sales revenue. The below screenshot doesn’t include all sales, but I’m including to give you an idea as to the frequency and volume we were selling at this month.

Because the AdSense API wasn’t set up, we ended up selling a few sites for LESS than they would have gone because their income had continued to increase. Rather than applying that additional expense to the buyer, we thought it best to let the buyers realize the additional value. This should be fixed in December and ready to go by January. We’ve held off on adding more sites to the page as we continue to build our stock and allowing our developer to get the API implemented.  As soon as this is done we’ll send out an email letting you know we’ve added the new sites so you can check them out.  You can subscribe here to get on the list!

Affiliate Sales

We really killed it with LongTailPro this month, bringing in $1,134.86 on its own. We’ve been using the tool without any problems and we’re pretty happy with how it’s working out, overall. We’ve had some recent questions as to how it compares to SECockpit. There’s a heavier monthly fee associated with the latter, but I’m assuming/hoping it makes up for it in richness? Do any of you have experience with both tools you’d like to share?

Summary

This was a GREAT month for us heading in to what we expect to be a pretty slow month for site sales. We’re taking December to really focus on building out some of the projects mentioned above. We’re planning to have a 1-2 day “retreat” sometime in December where we can go away for a short while, getting away from the noise so that we can review what we’ve done for the year and lay out our goals for 2012. We’ll be sure to share everything we come up with during that time and let you in on our gameplan for the new year.

Sites Created: 136 (85 last month)

AdSense Earnings: $3,813.02 ($2,862.50 last month)

Flippa Sales: $2,770.00 ($0.00 last month)

Private Sales: $12,701.56 ($6,195.68 last month)

Total Affiliate Sales: $1,534.57 ($552.58 last month)

• LongTailPro: $1,134.86 with 33 sales and 2 refunds! ($140.44 last month)
• SENuke X: $44.10 ($93.93 last month)
• CTR Theme: $136.14 ($91.48 last month)
• SubmitYourArticle: $48.17 ($48.97 last month)
• BuildMyRank: $171.30 ($106.20 last month)

Total: $20,819.15 ($9,610.76 last month)

We’ve had a ton of things going on in October that I want to go over in this month’s post…it feels like I was just writing the September Income Report yesterday. Much of our growth in October came through connections we’ve been making through the AdSenseFlippers blog and the new projects we’re starting, so I’ll cover that first before getting into the specifics of the dollars and cents we made in October.  But…for anyone that just can’t wait, our total revenue with AdSenseFlippers in October was $9,610.76.

Branding And Networking:

Logo: We’ve got a new logo! We just finished our project with 99Designs and had 37 entries submitted. We paid the $295 fee and although we were less than happy with some of the design options we had this time as compared to our previous contests, we’re happy with the final selection. We JUST finished the contest and are still waiting for the final designs so that we can start changing them out, but here’s a sneak peek:

Facebook: We’re up and running with our FaceBook page now, although we don’t have much going on there other than posting our content here. In the future we do plan on running contents, having giveaways, etc…so feel free to check it out.

Twitter: If you really want to know what we’re up to, what we’re reading, what we’re listening to, etc. I suggest following us on Twitter here. I’m extremely active on Twitter and often share links that are closely relevant to what we’re doing. I’m respectful of your time and never RT stuff unless I checked it out and found it particularly interesting.  Plus, you’ll find out quite a bit about what we’re up to and working on through our Twitter feed…along with some tips and tricks we come across as we continue to grow.

Podcast: We finally got our first podcast out last week (now available on iTunes as well) and are stoked to announce we had over 670 downloads in the first 7 days! We were able to use a service I just LOVE called Voice123 for our Intro/Outro from a professional radio guy named Jamie Buck who just completely blew us away. We featured our first interview on the podcast with Spencer from NichePursuits, who came on to talk about his keyword research tool, LongTailPro and gave our readers a $20 discount, available until November 10th. While we were excited to have an interview with Spencer, but our next few Podcasts will be a bit more about our story and our process which should give you a bit more about our back story and how we got to where we are.

Webinar: We’ve agreed to and are working on a webinar (series?) where we can go through our story and process in a bit more detail and field any specific questions any of the listeners might have. This will be free and we’d love to have as many people join as possible, but spots will be limited. We should have this ready to go sometime in December, so expect more information about this in the coming weeks.

Our Goals And What We’d Like To Accomplish:

Many have emailed or asked us in the comments what our end-goal is here in creating these sites. It’s a great question but, to be perfectly frank, not one we’d put as much thought into as we should have. We knew that we wanted to self-fund some fast growth so that we could take it quickly to a level that we thought was worth pursuing. Now that we’ve reached a level we think is close, this question becomes much more important and is worth some reflection.

As it stands, our goal is to provide a sustainable model that provides a good amount of net profit through both AdSense revenue and site sales. More specifically, we’d really like to be in the 6K-8K range for AdSense revenue and 10K-12K per month with Flippa or private sales. With 5K-6K in costs, that would put us at 10K-15K net profit each month. We’re still a little ways away from that level of consistency, but I think we should definitely be there by Q3 or Q4 of 2012…that’s a quite reasonable goal from where we’re at right now.

As some of your have pointed out our Buy Our Sites page has left plenty of room for improvement, for sure! The great news is that we’re currently in the process of updating the page from both a design and a feature/reporting aspect. We’re going to clean up the page a bit (and get it working in Firefox!) and get rid of some of the information that’s not as useful. Additionally, through the use of the AdSense API we’re going to set the page up to dynamically update our revenue and pageview information each day, so that you have the most up-to-date information about the sites. Additionally, the pricing on the sites will be dynamic as well, providing a true marketplace at which you can time the buying of the sites, look for those that seem to be a best fit to your portfolio, etc. We’re really excited to be working with Dylan on this project and hope to have it up and running by December 1st.

Even though we run an outsourcing company here in Davao, we’d heard some great things about VirtualStaffFinder and wanted to test it out to see if we could source another keyword researcher.  They provide a service where you pay them to take out the hassle of trying to find an offshore agent to work with directly.  They narrow it down to three agents and you get to interview them and pick one to hire from there.  Our first agent interviewed was horrible, actually.  He was late to the Skype interview, (he lives in Cebu) wanted twice what we normally pay for our in-house agents, and knew absolutely nothing about keyword research.  Our second agent was in Davao, was very familiar with internet marketing and keyword research, and was in line with the salaries from our other agents.  We ended up hiring her and she’s been a great addition to the team and has worked out quite well.  For anyone not living here in the Philippines, VirtualStaffFinder is a great option to get a direct hire and you’ll save quite a bit of time and money over hiring directly on your own.

The last thing I wanted to mention regarding our goals is that we’re on track to attack some of the strategies we laid out in our previous post, specifically when it comes to “Round 2” for AdSense Flippers sites. The plan will be to group up all of the sites we’ve created to date and basically set them to the side. We’ll be going through the sites and:

1. Selling off the “winners” or the sites that are doing well both in regards to rankings and earnings
2. Having a monetization/conversion rockstar go through the mid-tier sites and look for ways to improve them and get them up to earning their potential
3. Sitting on the low-end sites as just mini-passive earners…dropping those that earn less than it’s worth to cover domain costs!

As with Round 1, our Round 2 strategy will include tracking the sites, month by month, to determine their effectiveness over time and to track our progress. Barring major setbacks or very large site-sale chunks, this is a pretty effective way to make sure your sites are on track and profitable and we’ll continue with it in the next go-round.

AdSense

With the Flippa Sales last month and the private sales this month, the AdSense revenue itself as remained fairly consistent throughout the month, earning a total of $2,862.50. The best day of the month was on 10/26/11 at $133.90 and our worst day of the month was on 10/1/11 at $69.33, so you can see the swings were fairly high. Still, if you look at the graphed income, it looks pretty stable overall with just a slight increase throughout the month, trending up.

I’ve left out the site specifics/averages and projections as we’ve sold off a good portion of our top-earning sites through Sep-Oct and it’s really thrown the averages out of whack. When we move from our Round 1 to our Round 2 approach, the plan will be to lump all previous sites together into one large bunch and split them up into thirds. The top 1/3 will be sites for sale on our Buy Our Sites page, the middle 1/3 will be sites we are working on improving and the bottom 1/3 will be passive sites we just let sit. Obviously, these statuses are a bit dynamic and we’ll move/change those sites from group to group as they move up and into a different performance category.

Flippa Sales

For the first month in quite a while, we didn’t run any Flippa auctions in this month. With our Buy Our Sites page up and running, we wanted to test the effectiveness of just selling directly the same types of sites we would have included in a Flippa auction. We are planning to run at least one Flippa auction in November and we’ll be sending out an email to our subscriber list when that’s up and running. As always, we’ll be starting the auction off at $1.00 with No Reserve.  Click here for some awesome sales tricks on Flippa.

Private Sales

Even with our embarassingly bad sales page, we were able to pull off $6,195.68 in revenue through private sales this month! Thankfully, anyone who paid the deposit first on a site and took the time to review the sites ended up purchasing, so we didn’t have any leftover deposits to deal with where we’d discount the sites for any future buyers. Of course, our intention is not to take the deposit money…but the reason we hide the keywords and niches on the sales page is so that the buyer gets the opportunity to keep their keywords and niche private once purchased. If we made those sites public the buyer would have to compete with everyone who actually took a look at the sites and stats available…creating quite a bit of competition. It’s a different approach than we use for our Flippa auctions and is available for buyers who trust us and are more particular about not having the niche and stats publicly available.

Surprisingly, the domains for sale didn’t fare nearly as well as the sites for sale. With all of the people we’ve had contacting us asking about keyword research, whether their niche is any good, etc….we thought there would be quite a market for people looking for assurances that a keyword or a niche was good (Since we’d already vetted and purchased a similar domain for us to use ourselves) but that didn’t seem to be the case. We’re going to continue with these available domains for a while to see if interest picks up, but may discontinue selling them in the future.  We’re also considering a regular/recurring post where we give away some niches, showing some we would be interested in and a few we would not, explaining why.  Would that be helpful?

Affiliate Sales

We had a stronger month in October when it comes to affiliate sales, racking up $552.58 in total revenue. Leading the pack was LongTailPro and BuildMyRank, with almost $250 from the two in October. We’ve had quite a few questions about our thoughts on other keyword tools and linkbuilding tools and methods. While we’d LOVE to be able to offer reviews, do A/B testing on various products and tools that are on the market, etc…that kind of research takes considerable time and, we think, would lead us away from our core business and the things we’re passionate about pursuing. We’re kind of slow to change when things are working, but there are a few things we’d like to try out in the near future. (I’d really like to try out PropelBacklinks this month on a few sites and report back on our experience…I love the idea of manual drip-feed links and the fact that it’s one of our readers that set it up for niche sites, specifically!)

Summary:

We were pleasantly surprised with the revenue numbers this month as we’d anticipated being much closer to 5K while we’re rebuilding/regrouping. One of the negatives that has come with that, though, is that we’ve sold off some decent earners through private sales that, I think, were still continuing to grow pretty heavily in terms of revenue. I feel we might have sold short on a few of those sites, but I do know that others are waiting in the wings to take their place…we just need to make sure we can keep our inventory up with demand as we move forward.
Sites Created: 85 (86 last month)

AdSense Earnings: $2,862.50 ($3,695.68 last month)

Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($19,445.00 last month)

Private Sales: $6,195.68 ($2,762.60 last month)

Affiliate Sales: $552.58 ($108.51 last month)

• LongTailPro: $140.44
• SENuke X: $93.93
• BuildMyRank: $106.20
• SubmitYourArticle: $48.97
• Market Samurai: $46.56
• CTR Theme: $91.48
• ABCLeads Affiliate Sale: $25.00

Total: $9,610.76 ($26,011.79 last month)

Feel free to leave comments below and do share this post with others if you’ve found it useful!

It’s been a particularly interesting September and we have quite a bit to cover in this report. We had our best month ever by far when you consider our gross revenue at over $25,000 for AdSenseFlippers, but we also had a few things happen that have shaken it up and have us making changes to further our goals in the long-term. I’ll be going through the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly about where we’re at and what’s been going on with our sites, our revenue, and our goals for the future.

The Good:

In last month’s Income Report you might remember us debating whether we should sell more sites in the short-term to improve cash flow or whether we should hang on to more sites for the long-term passive income. It’s a tough decision, because we’re faced with a hot market when it comes to website buyers and feel we should “strike while the iron is hot” so to speak. At the same time, we’re very experienced at building up niche sites that earn, but have almost no experience at building out a $40-$100 site to a $200-600 website and know we could find massive success if we get some practice and experience at doing this. Ultimately, we decided we wanted the cash up-front and sold $19,445 in public Flippa auctions alone this month. We’re not planning to spend the revenue here for a while, but this cash injection should help us accomplish a few of the projects we have planned through the end of the year. We understand there’s usually a “learning curve” in starting or trying anything new and it’s nice to have the extra cash to help you fund and work through your early mistakes and disasters so that you can get them out of the way!

We’ve started to do a much better job in getting ourselves out there and networking with others in the industry. It’s well known that the Internet Marketing industry can sometimes feel like you’re working “on an island”. In this case…we literally are on an island!

While there are some serious benefits to living and working out here, one of the disadvantages is that it’s easy to feel disconnected from the rest of the world, particularly when it comes to work. One of our long-term goals is to expand our brand and start building relationships that can grow and branch into other projects in the future and we’ve had an excellent start with this in September. We’re networking with a group of other professionals in and outside of our industry, setting up interviews with (both as interviewer and interviewee), and are following through on our comittment to start putting more content on video, try out podcasts, etc.

The Bad:

About a week into the month, it turns out that just over 100 of our sites had been “tanked” or had seriously dropped in the rankings, virtually overnight. (Not deindexed…for a detailed description regarding the difference click here) We’re far from conspiracy theorists, but our first reaction was that Google had punished a good chunk of our websites based on something we were doing.  After thinking it through, we realized how very unlikely it is that we’re even a blip on the radar screen for the search giant and started looking at other possibilities. The worst part is that a good portion of those sites were doing quite well as far as earnings, so it was heartbreaking to find all of that value shot down the drain in a very short timeframe. After some research, we found that:

• All affected sites were on the same hosting account
• Not all sites on the hosting account were affected
• Most of the sites had their content copied, word for word on other sites

That being said, we can’t say with certainty the cause of the problem. Our best guess is that these two people found a portion of the sites on that hosting account and copied all of the content from our sites. (One of them created them on individual sites, the other created sub-domains on a site) We’ve attempted to contact both and have filed DMCA requests which took the sites down, but the damage had been done. (The not-so-funny anecdote here is that their sites were never ranked…we all lose here, ugh) A more-worrying concern was that it was not simply a duplicate content issue, but a larger referendum on our sites in general, but we couldn’t find any substantial evidence pointing to this, so we’re hopeful.

Ouch! Even more painful, we found that a couple of our network sales that were in the process of being transferred, but that were still on the server were affected as well, hurting our customers! We’ve been in contact with the buyers and have promised to make it right as we believe the responsibility lies with us.  They’ve agreed to sit tight while we go through the process of recovering those that are recoverable and replacing those that are not with sites that are as valuable or better than those that were not recovered.

So…what do we do? First, we took inventory of our sites. We looked at previously sold sites (they’re ok) and then broke our sites up into groups:

1. Older sites that were ok
2. Older sites that were tanked
3. Newer sites with CTR Theme

We were already planning to sell off a good portion of our sites this month anyway, so we selected samples of older sites that were unaffected and earning, broke them up into networks, and sold them off. We kept some of our sites that were earning well and many of those sites that were low-earners with a plan to expand/improve them in the future. We’ve made the decision to break up all our current and new sites into much smaller groups for hosting purposes and have removed some of the identifying characteristics for our sites across the entire network.

Our plan with the tanked sites was to:

• Significantly alter the content on the first page (Taking this opportunity to make significant improvements in providing unique, valuable information to the users)
• Switch themes
• Switch hosting accounts
• Remove as much identifying information about us from the sites as possible
• Add content
• Add unique look/feel to the sites to distinguish them
• Additional links built

This took QUITE a bit of work, but it looks like it’s slowly paying off. We’ve had at least 5 of the sites recover already, although not quite to their former glory as of yet. This did significantly impact our ability to create sites this month and dropped production down to only creating 86 sites this month. Still, based on the revenue those sites were generating, we thought the additional expense (both in actual cost and value lost from lowered production) was worth it.

Another issue we ran across is that our trial with CTR Theme seems to be costing us quite a bit. With the sold sites, tanked sites, and an increasing number and overall percentage of our sites being built with CTR Theme, we’ve seen declining returns and statistics across the board on the sites. We’ve been rotating ad placement across all of the sites, but not one of the options seems to come close to the numbers of ProSense. We have enough numbers to back it up at this point. It’s particularly discouraging, as I really LIKE CTR Theme and think it looks WAY better overall. If it were close we’d probably stick with it but, as it is, we’re going to have to look for a change, I think…it just isn’t working unless we’re missing something.

The Ugly

At the very end of September 2011, Panda 2.5 rolled out. As with previous updates, we found some of our sites go up while others went down, but the problem with this update is that it negatively effected our top earners more than our bottom earners, costing us quite a bit. We’ve seen some bouncing around the last few days so we’re hoping that, like previous updates, we’ll see some temporary changes/adjustments and things will get back to normal, when looked at in aggregate. That, mixed with sold sites, tanked sites, and CTR Theme underperforming sets us up for a bleak month or two when it comes to revenue.

Our greatest question/concern/challenge is this: Is what we’re doing really a viable business model at scale? Are we really providing valuable information to the web or are we not really adding anything?

If we’re being honest with ourselves, our early sites did very little to answer the searcher’s intent or queries. As stated before, our goal was not with the user in mind whatsoever and it was our Content Managers who started to improve this. That being said, our newer sites provide more value, but still aren’t at a level where I think they answer Google’s litmus test regarding Panda.

We want to change that. Ultimately, we want to provide enough information to where the user feels we went above and beyond answering their question or need regarding their search query. We’re looking at this long-term and feel this is the only viable option, considering the directions the search engines are heading. How will we get from here to there? Here are some of our thoughts:

• Individualize the sites
• Add enough content to the sites to make them “complete” and fully answer the questions in the niche
• More individualized attention to each site, making adjustments that are niche specific
• Improved content on all sites

I can’t help but look at the above points and hear/see an old-school cash register popping the drawer open for each point….Ka-ching! This is going to cost us. Still, I think we have enough margin here to be able to squeak it out and, ultimatly we might find that the increased revenue offsets the costs. (hoping!)

AdSense

With everything going on above, our AdSense income was less than stellar this month, coming in at $3,695.68 in total. Our best day was on 9/7/11 at $192.19 (Our worst day on 9/30/11 at $68.83) and our daily average was $123.19, down from last month’s $137.91. With the selling of sites across a range of months, it makes tracking them by month considerably more challenging. What I’ve done is included the sites we sold this month in the averages, even though they didn’t earn for the entire month. I figure this will give a more conservative figure overall:

Predictions become even more difficult. I’ve taken out sold sites to show you what we should be at, without the changes, which gives a pretty good picture of the hole in our revenue we’ve had this month:

Things were much easier with a predictable path for growth!  Still, I think in the long term, tracking these numbers will make it infinitely easier to determine potential, better understand where your risks are, see where you’re improving/declining, etc.

Flippa

We were able to sell off good chunks of our network this month with some variance in multiples. We think that putting larger packages together was counter-productive, in that it saves us more time by grouping them together in larger amounts, but it takes them out of the price range for most of the $1,500 – $3,500 buyers. Also, we grouped one network together under the “furniture” niche, thinking that someone might be more interested in a package that was targeted towards a specific industry, but what we’re finding is that the people who buy our sites are less concerned with the industry and more concerned with the sites as revenue generating machines. We were hoping that there would be more potential value for someone that’s in the furniture niche and knows how to better monetize, but were surprised to find it didn’t happen. I’m guessing that if it were in a different industry we might have had more success and so we’ll try this again in the future.

Private Sales

We’ve had a few more private sales this month with some success. As a test, we’ve also launched our Buy Our Sites page, where you can review the stats on various sites and pick out those you’re interested in purchasing. We like the “Build Version 0.1 Strategy First” approach as it allows us to test the market without spending any money designing something that has no real interest. Early interest in this looks extremely promising and we plan to expand this in the future.

We’ve also added a section where you can buy another EMD for the exact niche we’re targeting. Our thought was that we’ve already built a successful site in that niche that’s earning and we might as well offer it up to our readers rather than letting some other marketer snatch it up. I don’t know if this plan is something we’ll stick with, but you can check it out here and see if you find something you’re interested in.

Affiliates

We’ve done nothing with our niche sites to promote any new affiliate offers, but have had a few new affiliate sales through AdSenseFlippers. I’ve broken out our affiliate sales below in the summary.

Something we’re really interested in is the PayPerCall model. We had experience with a local search company offering their services to small businesses via PayPerCall. We’re not looking to add customers that way…we’d rather arbitrage our search volume into calls and take a percentage from those that already have customers. I’m quite familiar with some of the bigger networks that have a ton of PPCall customers, but I’m pretty sure none of them offer affiliate programs on a smaller scale. I’ve looked into ShareASale which seems to offer something like that, but I haven’t looked into it enough, I guess. Anyone have any experience with this that can point us in the right direction? (We’re thinking service industries…carpet cleaning, movers, etc.)

Summary

Overall we’re happy with how this month turned out, but we’re a bit nervous about the future. While intellectually I know and appreciate change and adapting, it’s a bit harder when you’re forced to put it into practice! In the end, I’m sure that we’ll come out stronger and ultimately provide more value for ourselves, but also for our advertisers and those searching for products and services.

Sites Created: 86 (168 last month)
AdSense Earnings:  $3,695.68 ($4,275.23 last month)
Flippa Sales: $19,445.00 ($6,510 last month)
Private Sales: $2,762.60 ($3,600 last month)

• Domains: $50.00
• Sites: $2,712.60

Affiliate Sales: $108.51 ($50.00 last month)

• SENuke X: $44.10
• BuildMyRank: $17.70
• SubmitYourArticle: $0.15
• Market Samurai: $46.56

It’s amazing to us how quickly this project has grown and how much we feel drawn to this side of our business.  When we originally started here we were still focused on growing our outsourcing business through client acquisition, maintaining relationships, etc.  While we’re happy to continue the current relationships we have with our long-standing clients, we’ve found ourselves saying no to taking on new customers more and more.  It’s not that we’re not interested in growing that side of our business as well, it’s just that we feel such a connection with AdSenseFlippers and have so many projects we’d like to see accomplished that we don’t want to see anything stand in the way of our growth here and there’s quite a bit we still need to do.

Our AdSense earnings were up over 25% and we had our best day ever on 8/25/11 at $176.65.  All in, we averaged $137.91 per day in AdSense earnings in August…a significant jump up from last month!  We’ve continued our conversations with Spencer from Niche Pursuits and I’m really hoping we’ll get the chance to work together on a project or two in the future…the guy has some great ideas and is amazingly capable.  As you know, it can be a little boring going it alone and we’ve made a point to reach out more to others in the industry that we look up to, think we could help, or would love to learn from.  While it’s definitely possible to make money in IM “on an island”, the real value is in connecting and building relationships that can multiply your business…that and it’s just more interesting!

We’ve been debating whether we should release/sell more of our sites in the short term to build up cash flow or whether we should hang onto them and continue to stack the passive income.  We have some pretty major projects we’re planning to get involved in over the next 3-6 months (both with AdSense Flippers and our outsourcing company, TryBPO) and we’d like to not come too deep out of pocket to get those up and running.  It seems the market is hot right now…if we wait and are forced to sell when we need the cash we might not get the value we’d like.  On the other hand, taking up short-term cash at the (potentially) expense of our long-term goals is a pill that’s hard to swallow.

AdSense

Through August, our Mar-July income seems to be on track…all except for May’s sites.  We’re not sure what exactly is going on there, but we’re just not getting the rankings or the traffic that we’ve gotten on earlier and previous months.  On the other hand, our February sites are still KILLING it comparatively, averaging over $21 per site through August.  We’ve sold off all of our December and January sites now, so February is next on the chopping block and you’ll see some of those sites up for auction soon.

In an effort to get caught up on our linkbuilding that had fallen behind, we added one of our company Project Leads to the project as a linkbuilding manager.  While she doesn’t have the SEO knowledge you might expect for someone in the position, we needed a quick fix and she’s highly capable…plus she’s going to be outsourcing almost all of the work from vendors anyway…we just need someone who’s responsible and can work well with others, managing vendor relationships.

I’ve adjusted our projections to assume we’re going to sell all of our February sites in September.  Since we’ve been averaging $160 or more per day in the last week, I think it’s quite reasonable we’ll hit our $178 daily average in September…I really hope so, anyway!

Flippa

We only held two auctions on Flippa this month, but we were very happy with the value received.  As mentioned last month, we decided to include a BuyItNow option as we’d had some requests from people that simply weren’t able to wait out the end of the auction.  Our first auction sold within 24 hours of our listing, but the second auction went all the way towards the end where someone picked it up with the BuyItNow option.

We’ve noticed a few sellers have been copying our auctions recently, hoping to get the same results.  While we encourage people to consider Flippa as their marketplace of choice, we have asked them not to copy our auctions word for word.  (Aside from the fact it’s against Flippa ToS, it’s just kind of a shitty thing to do)  We give away freely what we think are the keys to success anyway and it’s NOT the exact wording of the auctions!  Check that post out here.

Private Sales

While we’ve continued to say no to people asking us to broker their sites for them on Flippa, (We do this because we don’t want someone piggybacking off our good reputation to rip off unsuspecting buyers…we simply don’t know whether the sites are any good, how they’re built out, etc. unless we worked on them ourselves) we did agree to some private sales this month as a test.

Private Sale 1:

We had a conversation with a guy that would like us to build out sites for him on a regular basis.  We’ve said no to this arrangement in the past, but we were impressed with him and figured if we were going to test it out, this would be the perfect person to work with.  We agreed to test out building him sites alongside ours to see how the process would work and see if it’s something we’d like to open up long-term.

Private Sale 2:

Someone contacted us via Flippa and said he was really interested in purchasing some of our sites, but simply couldn’t afford the price point that most of our sites were going at.  He asked if we could offer a private sale to him of a much smaller network and we agreed.

Affiliates

Very little change here and we’re not planning to explore affiliate sites much in the future.  We do offer some affiliate links here at AdSenseFlippers, but we’ve found it not very conducive to our process for our niche sites.  We are working on a few Authority sites as a test and those will have affiliate offers on them simply to round out their earnings potential and to provide more value to the user, but I don’t think we’ll be aggressively pursuing this any time soon with our niche sites, except for expanding on the few we have up that are currently running affiliate programs.

Summary

Overall, we’re extremely happy with how this month turned out and we’re really looking forward to September.  We’re really hoping to cross the 20K barrier this month if everything works out!

Sites created: 168 (135 last month)

AdSense Earnings: $4,275.23 ($3,391.25 last month)

Flippa Sales: $6,510 ($6,600 last month)

Private Sales: $3,600 ($0 last month)

Affiliate Sales: $50.00 ($189.68 last month)

Total: $14,435.23 ($10,180.93 last month)

Anything else you’d like to see in our Income Reports?  Let us know in the comments below!  If you think these posts are helpful, help us out by sending this out via Twitter, Facebook, and give us a mention on your blog!

We finally broke $10,000!!  Much of it came from auction sales, but it was still an incredible month.  Probably even more importantly, we’ve had some great learning experiences and communication with investors, buyers, and readers like you.  We’ve begun a few tests including themes, different monetization methods, etc. but, unfortunately, we won’t know more about how those tests play out for a few months.  We did get a chance to have an interesting phone conversation and a few skype chats with Chris Guthrie and would definitely recommend taking a look at his blog when you get a chance…really bright guy with some great ideas, for sure.

Our AdSense earnings are up over the previous month by more than 20% and we had our best day so far on July 13, 2011 at $150.91.  We ended up with a daily average of $109.40 which is great…our first month with over $100 per day passive on average!  As we continue to move forward, evolve, and grow…I find that I’ve backed out of the process quite a bit.  It’s always a strange (and slightly uncomfortable?) feeling, handing over the reigns of something you know intimately.  It’s necessary when you plan to grow, outsource, etc. but it can be a bit stressful letting other people take over and run with a project.  We’ve now taken ourselves completely out of Part 1 of our keyword research strategy and are still personally involved in about 50% of Part 2.  This is great as it’s allowed us to free up our time to try out new tools, run new tests, etc.

I mentioned last month a project we were looking to get involved with and we’d had several conversations about but, unfortunately, talks kind of fizzled out with them.  The group was Cute Girls Of Davao if anyone was interested.  As of today, they have over 51,000 Facebook likes and a huge following.  Their basic idea is to promote a local competition with some of the “cutest” girls in Davao through photos with prizes, acknowledgement, etc.  This obviously drives a huge male following, but what I found interesting was that the girls were quite interested/engaged as well in recruiting friends to vote for them.  Their organic connection and following is quite amazing…I’ll be interested to see if they can continue that trend in Manila, Cebu, etc.  While you may put it off as non-monetizable Philippines traffic, I’d say that quite a few of their likes came from foreigners both inside and outside the country, so I do think there’s some money to be made there if they can convert the FB traffic to their own site.

Adsense

While the month went well overall, we did have some setbacks with our passive income this month.  We increased from $93.43 per day to $109.40 per day, but this was quite a bit lower than the $125 or so I’d projected.  A part of this came from the fact that we sold off 3 auctions earning well over $11 per day, but we did realize some of that income during the month AND it’s still lower than it would be if we hadn’t earned anything during the month with those sold sites.  If you take a look at our averages per site, you’ll see that our February sites are doing great, our March and April sites are slightly under-performing, while our May sites are considerably down. (Expected $6.16 per site but only earned $3.87 per site).

While not terribly alarming, I definitely wanted to get to the bottom of the issue and see where the leak is.  Did we change our KW research?  Did we pick poorly-converting niches?  I looked at CTR and CPC for the months in question and found them to be performing as expected or better.  Ultimately, it was a traffic problem that was causing the lower-than-expected earnings.  The good news is that the sites are all indexed and moving up in the rankings…just not as quickly as we’d anticipated.  (And had seen with Dec/Jan/Feb sites)  I knew we’d fallen a bit behind with backlinks, but was surprised to find just how behind we were!  (Next to nothing from mid-March on!)

This wasn’t completely unexpected…one of the problems with backlinks is that you tend to add more, do more, etc. and it’s awfully hard to judge what’s working and what’s not.  I wanted to see how well our sites would rank with minimal backlinking and so I really didn’t press the issue on getting caught up.  Because of that, we were falling further and further behind.  I’m 90% sure i’ve isolated the problem in looking at our sites across the board and a few groups of sites in particular, but the question now is…how do we fix?

Joe had mentioned we could halt production for a couple of weeks and switch a majority of agents over to backlinking the sites to give them a chance to catch up.  I’m not sure that’s the best idea, though, as the sites are still moving along quite well and I’d like to continue pressing forward on that end.  Ultimately, I think we’re better off stopping the bleeding by making sure we have the staff to keep caught up moving forward and outsource the catching up.  Switching our production team over to backlinking efforts would be counter-productive, as our backlinks are heavily content-based and I don’t think some of our production team could really be effective in that area anyway.  I’ve adjusted our predictions a bit, based on our lower July earnings and a less-aggressive growth strategy to make sure we’re growing all of the pieces together.

Flippa

We had another great month selling some of our sites at auction, as you can see with the screenshots above.  Not including the BuyItNow options seems to be the most fair (and profitable) way for us sell our sites, but we’ve had multiple requests to include a BuyItNow option in the next auction and we’re going to try it out again.  One of the reasons it’s good to NOT include the BIN is the additional exposure we get for this blog.  By allowing the auctions to continue on until there’s no more bidding, we’re able to significantly increase our exposure here.  We’ve had quite a few questions as to why we do so well with our auctions and decided to write a post about our site flipping secrets that’s been pretty popular.

We finally had our first reader buy one of our auctions with the last auction sold!  He took advantage of the $100 off and the additional 5 pages of content that we’re working on right now for him.  It’s great to see readers bidding and sort-of justifies our efforts in branding ourselves.

Affiliates:

As some of you have noticed and pointed out, we’ve done a half-hearted attempt to monetize via Clickbank (Anyone else convert really well there?) and some affiliate sites.  I’m not a huge fan of info products in general, but I think we’ll revisit Clickbank sometime in the future and continue to focus on what works.  What has been working for us is ABC leads.  We turned over two sites to the ABC affiliate program that had made a total of $74.75 the previous 60 days and ultimately made us $100 the next 40 days.  It’s an improvement, but the effort on our part to look at individual sites to switch monetization to seems quite burdensome and I’m not convinced it’s worth it, even if you’re able to make slight improvements here or there.  It would be much better to create the site with a particular affiliate in mind, test conversions and revenue, and then swap in AdSense to compare.  Starting from a site with AdSense and converting simply takes up too much time, I think.  The other test we did on six sites went from earning $170.15 the previous 60 days to earning $0 during the next 40 day period…ouch!  We’ve since cancelled that test and put AdSense back on the sites a couple of days ago.

We had 3 additional Market Samurai sales this month.  While we think it’s by FAR the most comprehensive keyword tool out there, we’ve had some problems with it in the last couple of weeks.  We’re not able to use the Keyword Research module when coming from IP’s here in the Philippines.  Unfortunately, the reps from MS were not able to recreate the problem and, apparently, it’s working for most people in the US.  We’re able to use it from our US server, but that situation is less than ideal.  We’ve been taking a look at Spencer’s LongTailPro from NichePursuits.com.  While it’s still in beta, it is much faster than MS (when Market Samurai was working!) even if it’s less robust.  We’ve been talking to him about a REALLY cool feature we’d like to see him add, where you’re able to estimate a keyword’s value to you monthly based on your own set of criteria. (with a default based on his estimates here)  That would be a neat trick even MS doesn’t have.  (They have their own SEOV, but it’s not based on critieria you set…or anything realistic!)

Summary:

Sites created: 135 (116 last month)

AdSense Earnings: $3,391.25 ($2,802.82 last month)

Flippa Sales: $6,600 ($4,795 last month)

Affiliate Sales: $189.68 ($96.56 last month)

Total: $10,180.93 ($7,694.38 last month)

Before you skip down to the bottom to see how our June turned out, I just wanted to thank you for all of the contact and encouragement we’ve had from you over the last month.  You’ve shown a tremendous amount of support and the ideas shared have been interesting and actionable.  We hope that as we continue to learn and grow that we can help you as much as you’ve helped us through this process.

That being said, we’ve had a really exciting month!  We were able to increase our AdSense earnings by close to 40% and increase our Flippa website sale earnings by more than $1,400!  We had our first $100+ day with AdSense and then did it again…and again…9 times in total with our best day at $134.22 on 6/30/11.  More than our earnings, one of our greatest successes this month had to do with the addition of agents and the replacement of ourselves as bottlenecks in the process.  If you’ve followed along with our Keyword Research Strategy Part 1 and Part 2, we’ve now taken ourselves out of 50% of Part 1 and around 70% of the work in Part 2.  At this point, we still want to get rid of Part 1 completely and, if we can do that successfully, we’ll only be left with gauging first page competition and then picking out the keywords we want to target each week, including purchasing the domains.  That would get us down to around 5 hours of work per week with 30 sites per week…easily scalable to 50, 70, even 100 sites per week eventually.

This month, we’ve come across a project/group that we found particularly interesting on Facebook.  They’ve grown organically to over 40,000 likes, have a very engaged audience, appeal to young people and foreigners (Westerners), and have very little presence outside of Facebook with no real monetization to speak of.  We’re in the early stages of talking to them about ways we might be able to help them grow and start earning with their labor of love.  I’m unsure of what our goals might be at this point (Acquisition?  Investors? Advisory role?) but will definitely keep you updated as the discussions continue.

Adsense

Our average daily earnings climbed to $93.43 per day for the Month of June, and can be largely attributed to our 89 sites from April starting to hit their stride, averaging $5.85 per site for the month of June.  You’ll notice in the following chart that our average earnings per site for April/May sites is a bit down, but this is largely attributed to the fact that when I began the process, I started with the PURCHASE DATE of the URL’s to determine which month the accounts start in.

This is probably not the best date to use, as we started falling behind a bit on site/content creation and they were actually put up a couple of weeks behind, but no matter.  The change wasn’t too much, as you can see.  Also, we ended up selling off all of our December sites in the month of June and will no longer have long-term tracking on their numbers, of course.  We plan to sell our January sites through July/August.  This means that it will take longer for us to realize the long-term tracking on our sites but, of course, gives us a great cash injection to continue growing our network of sites.

Our expectations for July are quite high, as we expect to average over $125 per day, based on our historical averages.  Here are our updated projections:

Flippa

We again listed our first network of sites with a BuyItNow option and it got towards the end and someone snatched them up.  For the next sale, we decided to not include the BIN price and see instead what the market would determine was fair value.  We were amazed to see that sites with less earnings went for considerably more and to watch the bidding extend more than 24 hours from when it was supposed to end!  We’re considering this a quite successful test and will continue to explore not using a BIN option in the future.

We’ve still failed to pick up buyers before listing the sites for sale on auction at Flippa, but we’re not quite sure the reason for this.  We lay out the same information, but think it’s because we lack a large enough network of buyers to get someone to purchase.  So, instead of going through the extra work of listing the sites for sale on our website here first, what we’re going to do is email everyone on our email list once the auction has been listed on Flippa.  This email will contain a code that, when used on purchase, will include freebies like additional content, $50 – $150 off the Flippa purchase price, etc.  That way, we’re still able to reward you for being a part of our regular readers without the additional hassle of listing everything for the sale twice.  Nice, right?

Click here if you’d like to be notified of any website sales at a discount before we list them for sale on Flippa. You’ll also get a report showing you exactly how we make these sites, for free!

Affiliates:

So we FINALLY get around to swapping some of our sites from AdSense to Amazon products and we get the dreaded California email from Amazon.  Ouch!  It’s not that terrible for us of course, but we really do feel for those of you who get a good portion of your revenue from the Amazon affiliate program.  You can check out Chris Guthrie’s answer to the problem if that helps.  Note: We are not tax professionals and cannot give legal advice.

We did switch a couple of our other sites over to both a lead provider, ABC Leads, and a very small, direct household goods company.  The household goods company gives a much larger percentage than Amazon, but they’re quite small and their page layout doesn’t seem to be great for conversions, unfortunately.  So far we’ve received $50 from ABC Leads (an improvement) and $0 from the smaller company (disappointment).  We’ll continue these tests for a couple of months and will report back when we have more data to review.

Also, we ended up with a Market Samurai sale this month!  We don’t do much in the way of promotion, aside from affiliate links sprinkled here and there, but we believe VERY strongly in MS as a keyword tool of choice.  Editor’s Note: We’ve switched over to using LongTailPro for keyword research as it’s faster and more reliable.

Summary:

Sites created: 116

AdSense Earnings: $2,802.82 ($2,026.37 last month)

Flippa Sales: $4,795 ($3,390 last month)

Affiliate Sales: $96.56 ($0 last month)

Total: $7,694.38 ($5,416.37 last month)

Ok, so maybe we’re not really printing money as the picture suggests!  We have seen continued success on all of our sites through May, although from late April to early May earnings growth via AdSense seemed to be stuck.  (We’ve chalked this up to selling off quite a few of our sites and only recently increased production that hasn’t yet been realized.)  Through the end of May, we’ve seen quite a bounce back and had our highest earnings day so far on 5/30/11 at $92.40.  We’ve had a little bit of trouble keeping up and so we’ve hired two additional personnel to assist with website setup and promotion.  We’ll probably be taking our lead agent for site setup and, once the new people are trained, have him help with more sensitive tasks in our GoDaddy account, Analytics account, etc.  This addition has left content falling behind and so we’ll be moving another person into position to assist with content ordering, QA, editing, etc.

One of our real indicators of success so far has been the fact that there’s a huge market for the sites we’ve been selling.  All the networks of sites we’ve listed so far on Flippa weren’t able to make it to the end of the auction and were picked up through the Buy It Now option.  We’ve wondered if we’re selling ourselves short by listing a BIN option at all, but we’re getting multiples that we’re happy with and want to leave room for an ROI on their purchase as well, if they don’t plan to expand the sites.

Additionally, we’ve had a ton of interest, views, and contact over the past few weeks.  We’ve had some excellent ideas posted by a few of you that are worth following up on, including adding additional content to our current sites to see if we can increase their value.  Through our research, we’re going to start by targeting those sites we’d put in a Tier 1 status and are currently our biggest earners.  We’ve dug a little deeper and added our January sites to the spreadsheet to take a look at the numbers, which you can see here:

Adsense

Our average earnings per site, per month have remained consistent.  We’re actually expecting increased growth per site over time, and have bumped our estimates to $12 per site, per month, which you can see below:

We’re expecting much heavier growth in June/July as our Mar/Apr/May sites continue to mature, which is reflected in our projections here:

Flippa

We had another good month on Flippa, selling two networks of sites for a decent profit.  Our last sites included one that had me wishing I wouldn’t have let it go.  (I’d listed the site BEFORE I’d finished my Content ROI research and found it had AMAZING ROI on the secondary pages!)

Although we’ve had great success at selling our sites at auction, we haven’t had any success selling to our site/email readers before listing, although many of them (you) end up bidding on them once they’re on Flippa.  We think this might be due to the fact that we’ve only given 48 hours to respond before listing the sites at auction.  In the future, we’re going to try extending this pre-sale to 3-4 days to see if that helps sell the sites before having to list on Flippa.

Click here if you’d like to be notified of any website sales at a discount before we list them for sale on Flippa. You’ll also get a report showing you exactly how we make these sites, for free!

Summary:

Sites created: 100
AdSense Earnings: $2,026.37
Flippa Sales: $3,390
Total: $5,416.37

April has been quite a busy month for us with 89 new sites created. We were contacted through our AdSense account for a possible meeting with a rep from the AdSense team regarding our account, which was quite a surprise. We actually met with her at a coffee shop and had a great conversation. Some of the things we’d been doing were just reinforced, while she did give us some helpful tips for better monetization, which we’ll be writing about in another post.

One of the things we’re noticing is that we really need some sort of branding. We’ve been doing all of this under the TryBPO banner, but we’d like to separate this section of our business out. Additionally, we’d like to better engage with others about what we’re doing. Without a voice, it feels like we’re doing all of this work in a vacuum and we think that others could benefit from our findings. This is the reason we’ve decided to launch AdSenseFlippers.com.  We also have an email list through AWeber, and we encourage you to join us!

Adsense

With such strong results, we’ve continued to increase production. Here’s our spreadsheet showing average earnings per site, per month:

Flippa

We’ve launched our first sites under AdSenseFlippers.com on Flippa! We’ve sold two networks of sites, one for $1,499 and the other for $1,099. We’ve generated a ton of interest from perspective buyers on Flippa and have been building a list of preferred buyers. The plan is to offer any auctions to our list first and then raise the price and sell on Flippa if they don’t sell. Click here if you’d like to join our list and see our sites for sale before we offer them on Flippa.

Summary:

Sites created: 89
AdSense Earnings: $1,635.66
Flippa Sales: $2,598.00
Total: $4,233.66

With 62 sites created in March, things are really starting to roll with our websites. We’ve seen all of our sites continue to increase in the SERPs and revenue has increased for all of the sites, month after month. This project is really starting to show some legs and we’re looking for ways to capitalize on the success we’ve had so far. Our December sites made an average of $11.40 per site in March which was well above expectations.

Adsense

We’ve seen tremendous growth from our earlier sites, with more than 80% of the sites achieving first page rankings for their primary keywords…with quite a few in the top 5 positions. Something that’s really important to us, though, is tracking exactly how well the sites are doing over time. We’ve created a spreadsheet that I’ll share with you to show you exactly how we track the average site’s earnings Month 1, Month 2, Month 3, etc. and how we can use that data to make projections on future sites, based on our actuals so far. We still have a limited amount of data available, but we’re starting to see some patterns that should help us estimate how much the sites are worth and can better predict future income based on how many sites we create.

We ran a test where we removed all of the ad blocks save the one right below the title. This block does not have text wrapping and is above the fold and we figured this would give us our best chance for success, but we’ve found, surprisingly, that this made very little change to anything. Our CTR went down slightly and our cpc went up slightly on the sites that were tested. The worst thing about this test, though, is that we noticed a HUGE drop in Pageviews on the test sites. (But not a drop in traffic seen in Google Analytics…odd) Our best guess is that changing the WP theme hurt our image rankings.

Here are a few of the things we worked on this month:

• Theme/Ad Block test – We planned to test this change for 30 days, but there was no noticeable improvements and so we ended the test after only two weeks.
• Content Management – We’ve decided to take our best content writer and turn her into a content manager. It makes more sense for us to use her skills and have her ordering and editing content received from our writing staff and from our outsourced content. This has been quite a burden on us, actually, and we feel quite relieved to be finally handing this over.
• Bottlenecks – Joe and I have become acutely aware that one of the biggest problems with us scaling this process is…us! Right now, we’ve handled all of the keyword research as we feel it’s one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Now that we’ve handed over the content management, our next step will be trying to standardize our subjective view of competition so that we can start to place portions of this in the hands of our agents.

March has been a great month for us in terms of revenue and we’re really looking forward to April.

Summary:

Sites created: 62
AdSense Earnings: $1,092.73

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