It’s been an amazing ride for us through 2012 and we wanted to wrap up the year with our December income report. We’re including both our monthly numbers as well as some of our overall metrics for 2012 in the hopes that it will encourage, inspire, and provide you with ideas that can foster growth in your own business. We’ll cover everything in this report, but if you’re just looking for the total, we pulled in $6,756.81 in December 2012 and our total revenue for 2012 came in at $203,825.54…not too shabby!

Even though our income reports have remained quite popular, I’m considering cutting them down to quarterly reports instead. It takes quite a bit of time to pull all of the numbers together and there might be just as much value in reporting them quarterly while saving myself time/effort/energy for more meaningful posts each month. It’s our quarterly reports that we look at internally…maybe that should be reflected on the blog as well?

A Niche Idea

You may remember that the original plan for the WSO Testers was to go through the Warrior Special Offer section on the Warrior Forum, test out those offers, and report back their findings.  To be honest, I wasn’t particularly hot on the idea when they started and much preferred their content on niche sites.  Also, I’ve found the noise levels on the Warrior Forum somewhat disturbing…and cutting through that to find the good information takes quite a bit of time/effort/energy.

It occurred to me that it would be VERY helpful if someone took the time to cut through the noise and delivered the VERY best content from the WF.  There are SO many threads there (many of them filled with nonsense) and it would be a pain to go through them all to find nuggets of truth…a pain that hasn’t been solved for me.  If someone were to go through the interesting/popular threads each week and curate the content to cut out all of the noise from posers, spammers, etc. that would be of interest to me.

You could monetize through a paid community (with even better curated content), affiliate offers from those that actually know what they’re talking about and deliver good products, etc.  There’s a TON of information on the WF (and a ton of members) and I think this could end up being pretty popular.

Looking Towards 2013

I wanted to give you a sneak peek at what we have planned for 2013 and I’m interested in hearing your thoughts or suggestions in the comments.  We’ve had a great 2012 and have plans for much more this year, including:

Brokered Sites For Sale – We’ve had a ton of requests from others to be able to sell their sites here, but we’ve had to wait until our BuyOurSites page was ready and all API’s were working correctly.  We’re currently working on the page to allow us to vet and sell brokered AdSense sites from other trustworthy sellers and should have this up and running this year.

Adjusting Our Niche Site Process – Although we’ve cut back on niche site creation in recent months, we’d like to cautiously explore getting back to it in 2013.  We’ve made slight adjustments to our process that look promising and I’m looking to do more case studies and updating our content and guide to reflect those changes as we continue forward.

Leveling Up Niche Sites – As discussed in our most recent podcast, we’re really looking forward to building out more meaningful sites.  We’ll be testing through larger informational sites, eCommerce sites (Joe’s digging into this now…for a great resource, check out eCommerceFuel here) and exploring alternative monetization options as the sites advance past AdSense.  This has the added bonus of providing a blueprint to niche site builders and buyers on how to grow their niche sites forward.

Outsourcing For Startups – We’re disappointed with the lack of quality content on outsourcing…most of it seems to come from those who aren’t actually involved and would rather sell you their ebook or make outsourcing seem like a magic bullet.  We see a gap we can fill in talking about exactly how to setup a corporation in the Philippines, building your business into processes that can be outsourced, blending work between onshore and offshore employees, etc.  We’ll be launching OutsourcingForStartups this year!

Buying Sites – John and Joe have both been interested in potentially purchasing niche sites, expanding them, and then selling them off for a profit.  I’m not as bullish on this idea, but it is something we plan to explore further this year.

All of these have been written into our goals for 2013 and we’re working towards seeing them through.  Here are a few of the ideas or projects that are on hold for now:

Squidoo Lenses – We built out a few of these lenses and, frankly, they just didn’t work for us. I didn’t expect them to earn all that much, ($0.00 to date) but I was hoping for a bit of traffic and the fact that a good number of them are below the 400K threshold and invisible to Google has made us much less interested in pursuing this strategy. If you are interested, I would suggest checking out Claire Smith (aka Skeffling) and her December income report. She’s planning to release a book/guide in the near future and I’ll probably take a look at it when it’s released.

Niches For Charity – A well-intentioned project that just never really got off the ground. I really like the idea and purpose, but the execution would simply be too much work and would likely re-hash much of what we post here anyway. I’d like to incorporate some charity and good-will into 2013, though, and will continue to look for positive ways to do that.

Traffic To AdSenseFlippers

December Traffic

We didn’t publish much content in December and it’s reflected in our traffic, dropping from 19,219 visits in November to 16,115 visits in December, 2012. Joe and I spent much of our time working on other projects, planning our our goals for 2013 and spending the end of the year with close friends, but we’re expecting to see this number rebound a bit in January.

Here are our top content pages for December 2012:

• Income Report November 2012 – 2,651 Pageviews
• Podcast Episode #33 Niche Sites Are NOT A Business – 1,236 Pageviews
• The Problem With Flippa – 1,170 Pageviews
• Podcast Episode #34 Expanding Niche Sites with Pat Flynn – 1,062 Pageviews
• Business Lesson #1: Piss Poor Partnerships – 840 Pageviews

2012 Traffic

We received nearly a quarter of a million visits in 2012, with a pretty even split between search traffic, referrals, and direct traffic. Here’s the most popular content for us in 2012:

And here’s a look at our traffic sources for 2012:

It’s interesting to see that our #1 source of traffic for the year was Twitter. I decided to approach Twitter differently than I have in the past and we didn’t do any gaming, tricks to get followers, etc. Instead, I really tried to reach out to others and connect much more honestly and it’s really paid off for us in terms of traffic to the site.

It’s no surprise that Niche Pursuits, Flippa, TropicalMBA, and Mike From Maine are on the list as we’ve continued to build relationships with all of them. www.selbstaendig-im-netz.de is a very popular IM blog in Germany that tracks bloggers with income reports in the US. I’ve followed his content a bit (as much as I can thanks to Google Translate!) and appreciate his readers here as well.

The last thing I’ll mention here is that our guide, “Building A Niche Site Empire” has been downloaded 18,796 times as of today, January 8th 2013…wow!  I know we probably would have done well selling it, but there’s no way we would have had anywhere near that level of distribution and I really think that was a more important goal for us.

Podcast Statistics

We had pretty close to the same amount of downloads this month, pulling in 7,863 total downloads in December, 2012. Many of these were due to our popular podcast with Pat Flynn where we discuss expanding niche sites, business strategy, and cool niche ideas. It was great to have him on the program and we’re looking forward to many more interesting guests in 2013.

We had a total of 133,018 downloads in 2012 and it’s really been a blast putting on the show. We’ll likely be adding a couple of different shows through this next year. If you’re at all interested in starting a podcast, we’d really recommend checking out Pat Flynn’s post on getting started as well as Dan Norris’s The Beginner’s Guide To Podcasting on Inform.ly.

AdSense Earnings

We were able to pull in a total of $2,378.53 via AdSense for the month. Our worst day was Christmas Eve at $47.40 and our best day was Dec 12th at $109.78.

We’re starting to feel the effects of our site creation slow-down that started in October. With less domains purchased and less sites created, we’re not seeing as many winners pop up as they have before and we’re expecting this to continue through the first few months of 2013. We plan to slowly (cautiously) recover our site building through Q1 of 2013 and should start to see some recovery in Q2.

Site Sales

We sold off a few sites earlier in the month bringing in $3,134.40 for December, but we gave it a rest heading into the holidays. We should be able to continue with more site sales in January, although our slow-down in production will limit the sites that are good enough to sell.

We sold a total of $147,061.78 sites through 2012, mostly through our Buy Our Sites page. We continue to have higher demand than we have sites to sell and we’re expecting that to continue to be the case through early 2013. We’ve decided to test through allowing others to sell through the page where we act as brokers for their sites. The sellers will be verified and vetted as well as the income…pulling the data directly from their AdSense accounts. We’ve had a ton of requests for this and know there’s interest…more on this in the next few months!

Affiliate Sales

Our affiliate income from the site went up slightly to $1,243.88 in December. We’ve seen continued improvement in our Kindle sales of “Building A Niche Site Empire” which is great to see. It’s interesting to point out that even though we offer this for free on our site and as an opt-in bonus to our email list, there are some who are willing to pay for it in the format they prefer.

Summary

We’re not finishing 2012 nearly as strong as we started, but we’re quite pleased with how far we’ve come overall. I think a renewed focus on other areas and revenue streams in our business will prove to be a bit painful in terms of revenue in the short-term, but will be critical when it comes to the long-term growth of our business.

Here’s a look our relevant metrics for 2012:

We were able to pull in over $200K for the year through the creation of more than 1,500 sites. We had more than 230K visits to the site and more than 130K downloads of the AdSense Flippers Podcast…sweet!

And here are the stats for December:

Sites Created: 3 (5 last month) Note: The domains purchased in October were created through Oct/Nov/Dec.

AdSense Earnings: $2,378.53 ($2,787.69 last month)

Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($0.00 last month)

Private Sales: $3,134.40 ($11,896.76 last month)

Niche Site Gold: $0.00 ($50.00 last month)

Consulting: $0.00 ($300.00 last month)

Total Affiliate Sales: $1,243.88 ($1,090.13 last month)

• LongTailPro: $444.00
• HireWriters: $60.00
• SubmitYourArticle: $24.40
• CTR Theme: $30.49
• SECockpit: $111.16
• HostGator: $150.00
• Market Samurai: $46.56
• GoDaddy: $5.11
• Amazon: $4.07
• Our Niche Site Guide on the Kindle: $295.89
• SEOMoz: $50.00
• Whoosh Traffic: $22.20

Total Income: $6,756.81 ($16,124.58 last month)

I definitely hope you got some value from this report and if you did, please give us a shout on Twitter or let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Another month has come and gone and we wanted to once again share with you our numbers for the month of November, 2012. This information stems from a proven belief that transparency in business is the best practice for us and a hope that sharing our numbers with you, warts and all, will help you learn and grow as you continue to build your business. We’ll go through all of the details below, but if you’re looking for a total we brought in a total of $16,124.58 to AdSense Flippers for the month of November…not bad, eh?

As 2012 draws to a close, Joe and I have had considerable time to reflect on our business over the last 12 months. There were quite a few goals we were looking to accomplish in 2012 and many of them we met and even exceeded in some cases. (more on that in a later post) It helped that we had a pretty clear vision of where we wanted to go this year, based on a careful planning process we went through last December, but we’re feeling much less confident about what we’d like to accomplish in 2013 as we look forward.

We have a choice on what type of business we want to have at the end of 2013. What will it look like? Who will be involved? What will our day-to-day be like both individually and as a team? What about 2014? 2015? These are questions we don’t have clear answers to…and is something we need to remedy in the very near future.

More on that in a future post. For now, let’s dig into the numbers.

Quick Note: We’ve already met our goal for donations on the Christmas Gift Giving Project! That said, the need here is overwhelming and we’re happy to take on more!  100% of the donations go to presents for the kids.  You can find out more about the project (and have a chance of winning a niche site from us) by clicking here…or you could just donate here!

Traffic To AdSenseFlippers

Our traffic dipped a bit in November to 19,219 visits from 22,203 the previous month. We didn’t have any stand-out posts that drove in a bunch of traffic like we did in October and our overall traffic was a bit more balanced. We’re expecting the traffic to again be lower in December as everyone prepares for the holidays and we’ll likely be putting out less content through the month as well.

AdSense Flippers Analytics November 2012

We have quite a bit of content that we’re working on, including a series about recovering from the EMD Update, but we’ll most likely be waiting to get through December to put some of it out. Here are the most popular posts in November:

• Income Report October 2012 – 3,249 Pageviews
• IntelliTheme Launch And Giveaway – 2,016 Pageviews
• Building Human Machines – 1,883 Pageviews
• The Problem With Flippa – 1,369 Pageviews
• Screw Passive Income – 1,176 Pageviews

Podcast Statistics

We saw a bump in podcast downloads for November, 7,986 downloads as compared to 6,949 the previous month. This was likely due to us releasing two new episodes this month, (AFP 32 – Leveling Up Site Content and AFP 33 – Niche Sites Are Not A Business)

We’re excited about some of the interviews and content we have prepared for the coming weeks and plan to continue the podcast as we head into 2013.

AdSense Earnings

November was a remarkable month for us in regards to our AdSense earnings. After taking quite a hit the previous month, we saw some bounce-back in November, bringing in a total of $2,787.69. Our worst day was November 6th at $59.23 and our best day was November 26th at $148.58.

You’ll see a notable increase from the beginning through the end of the month with a slight drop-off at the very end once we’d sold some of our sites. The growth has remained consistent into December, but we’re expecting our reduced site-building to start impacting revenue January through March.

Site Sales

After not selling any sites in October, we were keen on “getting back to business” once the dust had settled and we’d determined which sites were hit in the previous update and which were not. We went through two rounds of site sales in November on our Buy Our Sites page and pulled in a total of $11,896.76 for the month.

We have various sites that are currently “on hold” and cannot be sold due to some testing we’ve been doing. We’ll continue to hold these sites until we complete the tests, selling off some of the newer sites that have popped up in recent weeks/months as strong earners.

Affiliate Sales

Our affiliate sales held pretty steady, pulling in a total of $1,090.13 for the month. A good portion of that came in from our sales of LongTailPro, but sales at HireWriters.com have gone up quite a bit, as have our Kindle sales of “Building A Niche Site Empire”.

We have no major changes planned in this area for the next few months, other than a site-redesign that might better funnel our traffic. I’d really wanted to do some in-depth reviews on exactly how we’re using some of the tools and software, but I have limited time and figure it’s better focused on higher-value areas of our business.

Summary

Sites Created: 5 (141 last month) Note: The domains purchased in October were created through Oct/Nov.

AdSense Earnings: $2,787.69 ($1,952.19 last month)

Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($0.00 last month)

Private Sales: $11,896.76 ($0.00 last month)

Niche Site Gold: $50.00 ($0.00 last month)

Consulting: $300.00 ($1,000.00 last month)

Total Affiliate Sales: $1,090.13 ($962.23 last month)

• LongTailPro: $453.91
• HireWriters: $192.54
• SubmitYourArticle: $24.30
• CTR Theme: $30.49
• SECockpit: $27.88
• GoDaddy: $25.89
• Amazon: $12.56
• Our Niche Site Guide on the Kindle: $238.46
• oDesk: $50.00
• Whoosh Traffic: $34.10

Total Income: $16,124.58 ($3,914.42 last month)

I hope you find this November report useful! Want to hear a bit more from us? You can sign up for email updates, check us out on Facebook, or say Hi on Twitter! How did things work out for your business in November? Let us know in the comments below!

Once again, it’s time for another income and traffic report for October, 2012. As always, we’ll be sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly to give you a complete picture as to what’s going on with our business, how our sites are doing, etc. This is the first full month after Google’s EMD Update and we expected to take quite a hit for the month. Luckily, we’ve been seeing some improvements in earnings towards the end of the month and have some sites that are still doing well, so we’re much more optimistic about November. We’ll give yout he rundown throughout the post, but our total revenue for October was $3,914.42.

Many of our sites took a hit at the end of September, putting them in a pretty bad position in terms of earnings and value. We decided to avoid site sales for the month and let the dust settle…giving us time to figure out which sites were not affected to see if we could learn something about those sites. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a discernible pattern between those that were affected and those that were not. Our best guess points to two things:

1. On-Site SEO – While we’ve avoided heavy anchor text usage when it comes to backlinks, we were quite liberal in applying exact match anchor text on our own sites. With very few other sites linking to our niche sites, these links are often the only links to those pages. We’ve since toned down the on-site internal linking with exact match anchors.
2. Unnatural Positioning – When looking at the strength of competition with SEOMoz, our ranked sites would often stand out like a sore thumb with very few backlinks, lower page authority, etc. This is problematic…we don’t want our sites to stand out much when compared to those above and below on the SERP.

We applied the steps we mentioned in our September Update to both cut costs and cut down the on-site optimization for the sites. It looks to be working…our AdSense revenue has improved throughout the month and we’ve had some even better days heading into November.

Joe and I both did quite a bit of traveling in October, heading up to Manila to take care of some business and meet up with friends, spending a couple of weeks in Bangkok to give a presentation and do some networking/relaxing, etc. It was good for us to take some time off and we’ve come back with some fantastic ideas we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. I’m not so hot on traveling when you’re in a zone and really need to knock out some work, but a change in scenery has always been great for me in terms of inspiration.

Traffic To AdSenseFlippers

We had a TON of traffic come in with our EMD update in the beginning of the month, but the lack of updates and posts in the second half of October kept things pretty quiet here. Overall, we had a total of 22,203 visits for the month of October.

Here are the top content pages, in order of pageviews:

EMD Update – Rolling With The Punches - 7,262 pageviews
Income Report – September 2012 - 3,538 pageviews
The Problem With Flippa – 1,049 pageviews
AdSense Flippers Monthly Expenses – 891 pageviews

Podcast Statistics

We haven’t put out any new podcast episodes for a while now and we’ve seen a decline in our downloads. We only had 6,949 downloads for October. We’re working on some content for a few new episodes and we’ll resume the podcast shortly.

AdSense Earnings

We definitely took a hit with AdSense, but there was a bit of an increase through the month and early into November that looks positive.

Our best day was October 22nd at $99.21 and our worst day was October 20th at $43.51.  We’re expecting improvements to our AdSense earnings through November and things are looking good so far.

Site Sales

We didn’t offer any private sites for sale or any auctions on Flippa as we knew we needed some time to determine which sites were ok and which were not. Because we sell sites on a rolling 30-day earnings multiple, it wouldn’t accurately reflect their value if we sold them based on earnings before the update. We’re starting to see some normality return and should have some sites available in the next few weeks.

Affiliate Sales

We saw a bit of a drop-off in LongTailPro sales, but there was just a major update to the software that includes some pretty significant improvements to the competition analysis. We’ve been using and have had success with HireWriters.com and have had some earnings from referrals we’ve sent to them.

Summary

Sites Created: 141 (130 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $1,952.19 ($4,129.40 last month)
Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($0.00 last month)
Private Sales: $0.00 ($7,477.20 last month)
Niche Site Gold: $0.00 ($500.00 last month)
Consulting: $1,000.00 ($0.00 last month)
Total Affiliate Sales: $962.23 ($1,346.92 last month)

• LongTailPro: $494.72
• HireWriters: $187.95
• SubmitYourArticle: $24.70
• CTR Theme: $121.61
• SECockpit: $27.88
• Our Niche Site Guide on the Kindle: $94.37

Total Income: $3,914.42 ($13,453.52 last month)

Hope you found this month’s income and traffic report useful! If you’d like to connect you can sign up for email updates, check us out on Facebook, or say hi on Twitter! How was your October? Let us know in the comments below!

It’s time for another income and traffic report from us and we have quite a bit to cover with the recent Google changes and the effect on our business.  We publish these reports each month to help you better understand our business, where we’re earning our money, and to help motivate and guide you towards building a successful and profitable online empire.

Before writing this post, I took a few minutes to go back to our September 2011 income report as I remembered us taking a bit of a hit with some of our sites.  I thought it would be interesting to compare where we are today to where we were a year ago.  Here are a few of the things we were looking at and how they ultimately turned out:

• Niche Site Recovery Project – We stopped production for a couple of weeks and redirected the team to significantly changing and improving the 100 or so sites that were hit or “tanked”.  This was a wash…the few thousand dollars we spent on this was recovered in AdSense earnings value and site sales, but we would have been better off focusing on new sites in terms of ROI.
• Improved Content On Niche Sites – The value of the content on our niche sites to searchers was pretty low when we started.  We significantly improved the content over time (As much as we could with the limited scope of our sites) and this proved effective, avoiding all of the negative effects of updates over the last year.
• Expanded Niche Sites – We’d originally talked about expanding these sites out a year ago and this is something we never followed through with, unfortunately.  I think this was a costly failure, actually…we would have been better off “leveling up” our site building at that point rather than today.  More on this in a future blog post…

If you’re a regular reader you’ve likely already seen our post on the EMD Update and its devastating impact on our sites across the board.  It’s been a few weeks and we’ve all had time to review and weigh in on the impact.  Many of you have left some extremely interesting and insightful comments on the post.  Here’s a quick run-down from some other niche site builders, where they’re at, and our thoughts on their direction.

Niche Pursuits – Spencer

Spencer wrote a post shortly after the update that estimated around a 13% hit to his sites from the EMD update.  He attributes part of this to taking a larger hit on his sites from the Penguin update and is reporting those that some of those that survived Penguin have actually benefited from the most recent update.  He went on to discuss the opportunities these changes represent and actually talked about it a bit in his latest podcast.

We admire and agree with his entrepreneurial outlook on the opportunities that are presented with change.  Overall, I think you’ll find that the types of sites we build in the coming months will be quite similar.  I chatted with Spencer the other day and told him we disagree on a few points:

• There wasn’t a penalty – This is true in some instances, but we also had plenty of sites that were hit with a domain-wide penalty across the board for both their primary and longtail keywords.
• EMD’s lost value – EVERY site is, ultimately, an EMD for their brand name.  There may have been some semantic interpretations that effected some EMD’s and not others, but cutting out value simply on the fact it’s an EMD seems rather improbable.

Still…significantly upping the value to the end user and “leveling up” the site building process is his main point and we’re in agreement there, for sure.  We’ll be laying out some of our changes to site building in the coming weeks.

Mike From Maine

Mike been successful at scaling out niche sites in recent months.  He recently sat down with Spencer for an interview where they both discussed Google’s changes and the heavy impact on his sites.  Mike’s since backed off from selling sites that have earnings and has positioned them as Authority “starter” sites for sale.  Shortly before the latest update and after, Mike’s pivoted his blog to be more interview focused…looking and talking to those who have widely-varying methods, tactics, and strategies for success online.

I really like some of the content I’ve seen in the interviews and he’s been KNOCKING THEM OUT lately!  It’s interesting, because I know that he’s focused on finding new/different ways to make money online and so his questions come across as quite earnest and he tends to pull quite a bit of information out from those he’s interviewing.  He mixes in some affiliate sales and self-promotion, but it doesn’t take away from the value of the interviews at all, in my opinion.  I think his positioning his sites for sale as authority starter sites is interesting as a path to recovering some investment, but I think that going down-market with site sales wouldn’t be a good long-term strategy…you’ll be competing with…well…everyone who can setup a wordpress site.

WSO Testers – Josh And Trevor

Josh and Trevor were able to quickly build their empire through an initial investment, but are now reporting a 70-80% hit with this last update.  They didn’t mince any words and are reporting that both their niche sites and authority sites were hit…ouch.  Their short-term plan is to discontinue building sites and to instead possibly focus on testing through and reviewing various WSO’s from the Warrior Forum.

I really like these guys, their approach, and have been following their progress in recent months.  I’m hoping this post was written out of frustration more than anything else.  I think a focus on testing through random WSO’s is not likely to produce a viable long-term strategy for their blog, won’t be a profitable or ROI-driven strategy, and won’t provide the helpful content to their audience they’re hoping it will.  Don’t take this the wrong way…I really like these guys and I’m wishing them the best.  They’re smart/resourceful and I’m sure they’ll figure out their next move in the coming weeks/months.

Our Short-Term Strategy

Joe and I are in Thailand from October 14th to the 28th on a pre-planned trip and we wanted to implement a few changes before we leave so that we’re not hemorrhaging cash.  Without going into too much detail in this post, here are the short-term changes we put into effect:

• Drop from 40-50 sites created per week to 10-15
• Cancelled contracts with 3rd party
• Content Managers All in-house
• Content Managers are now writing and not ordering content
• No longer targeting “low-4′s” on our Chance To Rank scale…only “mid-4′s” or better
• No longer using exact match for site title, H1′s, etc.
• Cut down keyword density from 4-5 mentions to 2-3 on each article
• Only using partial match on image titles and their alt tags
• Less aggressive internal anchor text and linkbuilding

These changes will significantly cut down our costs in the coming weeks and will (hopefully) produce sites that will withstand the latest updates.  It will also buy us time and allow us to further adjust the process to create sites that Google will “love”.  There are no guarantees, but these are the quickest/easiest changes we can implement right now that we feel will have the most positive impact.

Based on the lack of success with our “Tanked Site Recovery Process” we implemented a year ago, we’re only going to be working on a recovery project that focuses on the top 30 site earners (that ended up tanked) leading up to the update.  This 1.5% of our sites represents about 30-35% of our earnings in the previous 30 day period and is worth some level of effort to recover.  Depending on how that test goes we may or may not roll this test out to more of the sites.

Traffic To AdSenseFlippers

Our traffic was pretty consistent for September, coming in at 18,635 visits for the month.  Our EMD Update post drove a crazy amount of traffic, but that will be included in October’s traffic report.

Here are the top content pages, in order of pageviews:

• Income Report – August 2012
• AdSense Flippers Monthly Expenses
• Clickbombing And Click Fraud
• 8 Misconceptions Regarding Site Rankings

Podcast Statistics

Our podcast downloads were pretty consistent in September with 11,972 total downloads.  We’ve been on a 2-3 week podcast schedule which tends to fit our schedule a bit better and gives us plenty of interesting things to discuss.  We’ll have quite a bit of content coming out with both AdSense Flippers and other brands in the coming months that will compliment the podcast greatly, we think.

AdSense Earnings

Overall, September was great for AdSense earnings and we brought in $4,129.40 total for the month.  Our best day was on Sep 18th at $191.42 and our worst day was on Sep 30th at $37.88…ouch.  As you can see, September 29-30 was when the full effects of the EMD update kicked in our sites.  To give another representation, take a look at this screenshot of pageviews over the same time frame:

Ouch…  We’ve seen a bit of bounce-back/growth in early October, but nowhere close to where we were in September, unfortunately.

Flippa Sales

We were planning on offering up a few Flippa auctions in late September, but never got around to it.  We’re not planning any Flippa auctions in October.  If we estimate a value based on revenue it wouldn’t be fair to the potential buyer…he or she would be paying a multiple on earnings that have taken a huge hit.  I haven’t looked, but my guess would be that it’s a BUYER’s market on Flippa right now with AdSense accounts.  It’s likely that plenty of those creating sites will be looking to sell them off in a fire sale.  As long as you’re sure they’ve updated after the EMD Update, you might be able to snag some excellent deals right now.

Private Sales

We’re not planning on any private sales through October for the same reasons mentioned above in the Flippa section.  We’re going to need to wait a couple of months and see how everything plays out, first.

I like Mike From Maine’s approach in positioning them as starter sites rather than expecting a multiple on earnings.  Our plan now is to move up the value chain with site creation…and we’ll probably have some of our new/expanded sites for sale in the next 6-8 months or so.

Niche Site Gold

I know they’re calling it the “EMD Update”, but we’re pretty confident that the value of EMD’s will never truly go away, even if they have tweaked it down a bit.  Still, I would expect the PERCEIVED value of buyers to be pretty negative towards EMD’s in the next few months, presenting a great opportunity for buyers to take advantage.  You might see some pretty interesting EMD’s become available in the next few months.  If a purchase/transfer will remove any associated penalties you might find some awesome bargains here.

Affiliate Sales

Our free trial and discount on Long Tail Pro continues to be the primary driver for our affiliate income, bringing in $1,008.90 of our overall $1,346.92 in affiliate income.  It’s awesome to see so many people picking up LongTailPro.  No matter what kind of sites you’re building, having a keyword research tool that works is the most important step for getting ranked and getting traffic.

Summary

Sites Created: 130 (182 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $4,129.40 ($3,983.59 last month)
Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($0.00 last month)
Private Sales: $7,477.20 ($10,797.40 last month)
Niche Site Gold: $500.00 ($450.00 last month)
Total Affiliate Sales: $1,346.92 ($1,455.31 last month)

• LongTailPro: $1,008.90
• SubmitYourArticle: $59.59
• CTR Theme: $60.62
• SECockpit: $28.02
• HostGator: $100.00
• GoDaddy: $50.44
• Our Niche Site Guide on the Kindle: $25.55
• Whoosh Traffic: $13.80

Total Income: $13,453.52 ($16,686.30 last month)

Thank you so much for your support at AdSense Flippers!  Want to check in with us?  You can sign up for email updates, check us out on Facebook, or say Hi on Twitter!  How did your September turn out?  Let us know in the comments below!

Starting AdSense Flippers was, from the beginning, a “side project” for us…our main business has always been our outsourcing company, TryBPO.  Because of this, we were able to take risks and push boundaries that we might not have been willing to try out on our main business for fear of ruining our primary revenue source.  I mention this because it compares nicely to those that have other companies or “real jobs”…you can rely on your safety net for security and really push boundaries with your online projects.  In doing this, you’ll have both failures and successes and the experiences can then be applied to help grow your primary source of revenue.

Note: Joe and I have been having some serious discussions about how we can apply the marketing strategies we’ve learned here to our outsourcing business.  We have a ton of ideas we’d like to see through…more on this in the coming months!

One of the great things about having AdSense Flippers “on the side” is that we haven’t been forced to rely on income from AdSense Flippers to survive.  Instead, we’ve been able to reinvest much of the profit into our business: experimenting with new ideas, marketing strategies, and revenue streams that can continue to grow our company forward.  To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t until a earlier this year that we’d taken any money out of the business personally.  Any profits went towards growing the business or building runway for the project and/or our overall business, if needed.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately.  Due to the fact that we have our “machine” built for the niche site process it actually takes very little of our time and we’re getting a GREAT ROI.  Where we spend much more of our time is with the things that do not currently make us much money, but have long-term potential for the growth of our business.

It’s a bit counter-intuitive actually, but more on that later when we get into side-projects.  Here’s an overall breakdown on our costs:

Niche Site Creation Costs

We often mention the amount of sites we built that month, but don’t mention the cost of building those sites…which is considerable.  This will break down the costs for each section of the process and give you a total per-site cost on each site that we currently build.

KW Research:

• 1 agent hour or $2.00 (We currently spend around 50-60 agent hours per week on KW research and adding potential domains to the list and we’re selecting around 50-60 sites/week to target)
• 5 minutes – Joe’s time (Joe spends around 4-6 hours per week analyzing the first page of Google and their “Chance To Rank”).

Domain Purchase:

• $8.00 from GoDaddy (with Discount Domain Club)
• 2 minutes – Joe’s time

Primary Content:

• $5.00 Outsourced content
• 1 agent hour or $2.50 for ordering/editing/uploading (Our Content Managers are slightly more expensive due to averaging in higher-priced oDesk workers…more on that below)

Secondary Content:

• $12.00 Outsourced content
• 2 agent hours or $5.00 for ordering/editing/uploading

Site Setup:

• 2 agent hours or $4.00

Total Costs Per Niche Site:

• $38.50 in actual spend (including agent hours)
• 7 minutes of Joe’s time per site

Please keep in mind that we’re taking advantage of the economies of scale.  If we were only building 5 sites per week, our costs would likely be higher per site across the board.

Note:  When we started, we were doing linkbuilding on the sites which was around $10-$15 per site.  We’ve stopped building links since March, 2012 and that’s no longer included in our costs or process.

One last thing I should mention is the transfer or sale of niche sites does cost us a bit as well:

Post Sale Process:

• 1 agent hour or $1.50
• 1.5 hours of Joe’s time per SALE (This can vary pretty widely.  One of the reasons we like to group sites together is that it doesn’t take much more time to sell 10 sites together as compared to 1 site, so Joe’s per/hour time is better when we sell in bulk at higher price points)

Recurring Service Expenses

We’d noticed these costs have been sliding up in recent months.  Last week, Joe went through our recurring costs and was able to cut close to $500/month in expenses we no longer needed…ouch!  I’ll list out the monthly services relating to niche sites we are still currently paying for today, although this is bound to change over time. Feel free to ask about them in the comments and I’ll either explain or add/edit them later if I’ve missed any.

• SEOMoz – $99/month – We use their OpenSiteExplorer tool regularly and some of their other tools for research, tracking testing sites, etc.
• Whoosh Traffic - $179/month – We use this tool to track the ranking on all of our niche sites.  It allows sub-accounts and gives us the option or emailing ranking reports to specific clients for specific sites…quite handy.  Starts at $19/month
• Hostgator – $200/month approx. – We have 15 (and growing) shared servers for niche sites, a VPS for AdSense Flippers, and a US VPS that we log into to check US rankings, use tools, etc.
• ManageWP – We’ve been fans of ManageWP for some time now, but we JUST cancelled their service and are trying another option.  More on that in a future post!
• GoDaddy Domain Club – $90/year – We pay this annually to get a discount on our domain purchases without having to bother to look up the latest promo or discount codes each month.
• Social Oomph - $35/month – This tool allows you to set recurring, spinnable messages to go out on a bunch of different social media platforms.  We used to use this along with Ping.fm, but they recently cut out the integration between the two.  We’ve kept it only because of all the content that’s on there and we do have Twitter accounts still using this service.
• oDesk – We’ve hired a few overflow Content Managers via oDesk at a higher rate than we would pay in-house.  We also have some of our side-project developers and designers hired here.  I’ve already baked in the Content Manager costs into the niche site creation costs above.

Side Project Expenses And Budgets

We constantly have additional projects that we’re working on.  Some work out and some don’t, but we’ve spent plenty of time, effort, and energy here as it will allow our business to grow and adapt to an ever-changing environment.  Some projects look to be or turn out to be profitable, but aren’t as in-line with our business goals as we’d like them to be and they get scrapped.  Here are a few examples of things we’ve worked on or are currently in progress to give you an idea as to our costs, budget, and expectations:

Niche Site Gold

• Domain Costs – $80/month – We typically purchase around 10 domains for the project each month.
• Agent Time – 8 hours or $16/month – My assistant will prep the data for the newsletter we send out each week and I’ll fill in the intro, Chance To Rank details, etc.
• Joe’s Time – 1.5 hours/month – It’s about the same amount of time he spends on KW research and purchasing the domains, with a little extra thrown in for a little extra care and Chance To Rank explanation.  We just pull out 2-3 domains each week from the batch we’ve selected for ourselves.
• Justin’s Time – 3 hours/month – I just review my assistant’s work and add some of the reasoning to the newsletter each week.  It takes me about 30-40 minutes each week.

Thoughts: It might not be the best use of our time from an ROI perspective, but the value offered to readers/subscribers makes it worth it.  We’ve had a ton of feedback through NicheSiteGold and know well the pain points or struggles people have when selecting a niche.  It’s great being able to deep-dive with everyone on keyword research and it’s helpful for us to segment out those of our readers/listeners that are particularly interested in this topic.

IntelliTheme

• Development Costs – $3,500 approx. – This has mostly gone to our main developer, with a portion of the costs going to a development “consultant” that has helped us through some of the sticky parts with the theme.
• Project Management Costs – $3,000 approx. – Out Intern, John, has spent around two full work-months on Intellitheme.  His work has really been driving the project and has saved us considerably on the development costs.
• Beta/Launch Consulting – $1,000 – Since we’d never done an end-to-end launch like this before ourselves and know someone who has, we thought it useful to bring him in as a consultant to help guide us through the process.  It’s an additional cost, but as a learning exercise it’s been invaluable.  Honestly, he probably would have helped us for free, but we thought it better to really get him involved and pay him for his time. Our Time – Ugh…maybe 200 hours? – Joe and I have spent considerable time on this project over the last few months.

Thoughts: We mentioned it in a recent podcast, but we are COMMITTED to seeing this project through.  This will be our theme, our baby, and we plan to continue to expand the theme as we grow and move into different types of sites.

Authority Sites

• Site/Content Costs – $1,100 approx – We purchased the domains from a broker, ordered a bunch of higher-end content, and had an ebook created for one of the sites.
• Agents Time – 20 hours or $40 – I had some of our agents help me out with the design and getting the sites up and running.
• Justin’s Time – 80 hours – I spent quite a bit of my own time with keyword research, ordering/editing the content, putting the content on the site, etc.

Thoughts: This project was an absolute failure for us monetarily.  One of the sites was deindexed and the other had a ton of traffic but didn’t convert well at all.  (Ultimately, the high-traffic site tanked)  I thought some of the problems came from our hammering these sites with BMR links, but Joe was convinced we bought “tainted” domains from a broker.  Either way, this didn’t pay off for us at all and we’ve been a bit gun-shy about diving into another authority site project.  We’re more interested in testing through the expansion of our current niche site “winners”.

CRM Migration

• Project Management – $1,000 in niche site value ($50/month) – A student/entrepreneur named Ryan reached out to asking if we needed any help with projects and we thought it would be a great fit for migrating our data from a Google Doc to the CRM.  He didn’t ask for any compensation, but he did put in some real work on this project and were happy to compensate him for it.
• Agents Time – 80 hours or $160 – We had a couple of our Team Leads train with us, work on getting the data correct for migration, and then teaching their related teams how to work inside of vTiger, the CRM we’re working with.
• Our Time – 40 hours – Ryan probably saved us 60-80 hours worth of work by running the project…an excellent investment on our part.

Thoughts:  Hopefully, we’ll see some cost-savings and efficiency improvements with the CRM, but the real purpose in migrating was because we had seriously outgrown the Google Docs we were working with.  In addition to our two main Google Docs, our team had created several others privately to communicate and keep track of their work and it was turning into a real mess.

Squidoo Project

• Round 1 Budget – $300 – The goal is to put up some quality lenses targeting similar keywords to our niche sites.  We will monetize these lenses, but the real purpose is to see if they “stick”, are high enough quality to remain on Squidoo, etc.
• Round 1 Content – $200 – We ordered 10, 1,000-1,200 word articles from a quality content writer to get the Squidoo Lenses started.
• Round 1 Agent Time – 20 hours or $40 – Creating and organizing the modules on the Lense, researching videos and images to use, etc.
• Round 1 Our Time – 40 hours – I’ve detailed the process for our agent and I’m checking/editing the lenses after they’re saved as drafts before publishing.
• Round 2 Budget – $1,000 – We’ll create 30-40 lenses that are specifically built to earn us money and track their results in the coming months.
• Round 2 Content – $600-$800 – We’ll again order $20 articles from higher-end content writers.
• Round 2 Agent Time – 60 hours or $120 – Time spent creating/editing modules for the Squidoo lenses.
• Round 2 Our Time – 100 hours – I’ll be monitoring these lenses closely, making sure they’re optimized to earn and remain live on Squidoo.

Thoughts: I’m having fun getting this project up and running and it’s a nice break from focusing on niche sites.  I’m not excited about building out this process on someone else’s platform (Squidoo) but I don’t expect this to ever be much more than a side-project for us.  It’s disappointing reading about all those who have lenses and earn sub-$100/month (ugh) but I read some of those same horror stories about AdSense before we started.  I was interested to learn that you CAN sell Squidoo lenses, so that’s likely something we’ll add to the project if it works out.  We could be expanding this project as early as 2-3 months from now, but if we’re not seeing success I’d like to wait 6-8 months before calling it quits.

AdSense Flippers Redesign

• Total Budget – $5,000 – We originally thought of this as a vanity project and weren’t excited about the financial costs and time obligations that would go into this project.  Over time, we realized that if our (admittedly horrible) design was turning new readers away and making it difficult for our current readers to access our content, that’s ultimately hurting our brand.  Seeing as our goal is to help others getting started, we thought this project was important enough to move on and worth a real investment.
• Conversion Review – Budget: $1,000 – We reached out to Andy Hayes about reviewing our site to build more meaningful connections with our readers.  We’ll be implementing many of his tips into the new site in the coming months.
• Design Budget – $2,500 – We’re running a “blind” contest at 99designs based on the design brief we’ve created.  The initial prize will be less than the budget here, but we’re expecting to work more with the winner post-contest on additional pages.
• Implementation – $1,500 – We’ll be working with John “The Intern” on implementing the new design on our site, making sure all the redirects are in place, matching up our Buy Our Sites page with the new site, etc.

Thoughts:  We’re really looking to make the new site more user-friendly for new readers and to make our older content more accessible for those who have been following along for some time.  If you get a chance you might want to check out our design brief on 99 designs.  It might give you some insights into our strategy and conversions that are important to us.  We’re happy to have this project up and running, but frustrated knowing it will be a good 3-4 months until it’s complete…ugh.

Additional Expenses

• John “The Intern” DeVries – We’ve paid John $800/month over the 8 months he’ll have been with us, but we’ve also included his room/board, travel to Cebu/Manila/Puerto Galera, etc.  In that time he’s learned our process, documented it in our guide, “Building A Niche Site Empire”, ran our IntelliTheme project from idea phase through Beta, and he’s currently working on a test to expand our niche sites.  In addition to his projects, he’s been a tremendous sounding board and has helped us with countless other tasks and projects we’ve needed help with.  All in all he’s been tremendously valuable.  He’s heading back to the US in October, but the plan is to keep him onboard and have him take over our project management needs for AdSense Flippers as we continue to move forward.  We’ll be announcing another Intern position shortly and we’re expecting to see John back here in the Philippines in January or February of next year!
• LibSyn – $20/month for podcast hosting.  It’s totally worth it for the statistics and analytics.  We push the episodes through FeedBurner to iTunes just in case we ever need to change hosts and don’t want to deal with trying to update iTunes.
• Podcast Transcriptions – $20/episode – We’d had several requests for podcast transcriptions so I had my assistant work with someone on Fiverr to get these completed.
• Dynamite Circle – $97/quarter – We’ve made a ton of connections with the people in this group and have met quite a few of them in person here in Davao, in Singapore, in Bali, etc.  We’ll be heading to Bangkok in October for a meetup with many of the DC members…should be fun!
• Aweber - $69/month – We use Aweber for all of our email lists.  As of today, we currently have 7,184 email sign-ups across all of our lists and the price will increase when we break 10K.  We went with Aweber as they were a “best in class” service and we’ve been very pleased with the value here.

Well…that just about wraps it up!  There are definitely some older projects I didn’t include, some monthly software or expenses we’ve canceled and didn’t mention here, etc…but that should give you a pretty good idea as to how much it costs to create our niche sites, what monthly services we pay for, and the costs and budgets we have for previous and ongoing projects.  Please keep in mind that all of this is subject to change over time, so even though it gives an accurate picture as to where we are today that may vary significantly as the months go by.

Now…over to you!  Did we miss anything you were hoping we’d cover?  Any surprises?  Ideas on where you think we should be spending more…spending less?  Let us know in the comments below!

Hey there…time for another of our Income and Traffic Reports for August, 2012.

We publish these income reports each month for three reasons:

• To Inspire Others – It’s not easy, but making a decent amount of income online is achievable.  We’ll break down our income and our projects each month for your review.
• To Hold Ourselves Accountable – I’ve gone back through (and been called out on) previous income reports looking at what we were working on, how projects were progressing, etc.  It’s sometimes embarrassing, but awfully helpful to be able to look back at where we were at and how we’ve progressed.
•  To Elicit Feedback – Some of our best ideas and implemented changes have come from conversations with readers, podcast listeners, etc.  It really is true that the AdSense Flippers community has been a large part of our success.

We’ll share both the good and the bad along the way and give you a sneak peek and some of our up-and-coming projects as we plan them out.  We’ll go over some of them now but, for those that can’t wait, we brought in a total of $16,686.30 for the month.

Ongoing Projects

August turned out to be a middle-of-the-road month for us in terms of earnings, but we were able to accomplish quite a bit when it comes to some of our longer-term projects we’ve been working on.  Here’s some details regarding what we’ve been up to.

Niche Site CRM Project

We’ve mentioned it before, but we’ve been working on getting all of our niche site data into a CRM with the help of our remote Intern, Ryan.  He’s been tremendously helpful in helping us prepare the migration of a TON of data from multiple Google docs into a more-reasonable CRM solution.  We decided to go the cheaper route with vTiger instead of a more robust solution like SalesForce.  Originally, we seriously considered building out our own CRM, but in the end we decided our efforts were better suited elsewhere.  We should have all of our data fully migrated sometime in September.

Looking back, I still think it was the best move to get started with a Google Doc.  It’s quick, cheap, easy, and avoids the complexity that can suck up your time on “setting things up” rather than getting things done.  Still…we’ve hit the max on what we can do with multiple Google Docs, spreadsheets, etc.  Our main goal here is to protect and organize the data, but there are some pretty cool advantages we can chase down in the future having all of our data in one place.  We can setup efficiency reports, look for trends in keyword research and niche selection, track profitable sites better, use API’s to collect even more data, etc.

IntelliTheme Project

We spent most of August preparing for our private beta release on IntelliTheme.  We reached out to those we thought could best provide us feedback and help improve the theme for a future, public release.  Ultimately, the better we make the theme the more money we can ALL make using it!  Here are a few of the points we’ve realized in getting the beta up and running:

• Need A Better Defined Sales Message – I think we’ve been a bit unclear about what we’d like the theme to do.  This is NOT an ultra-customizable, all-in-one theme.  The idea is to offer less options and to have the theme act as an optimization tool for niche sites.
• Balancing Quality Feature Requests With Our Vision – It can be difficult when you get feature requests that are legitimate and useful, but don’t match the overall goals or vision for the project.  This becomes even more difficult when these requests come from multiple testers.  Deciding whether to implement certain features that might cause friction with the end-goal or whether to pivot the product to something else entirely brings up some hard choices to make!
• Not All Assumptions Are Wrong (But The Ones That Are Might Surprise You) – Our initial thought was that, upon first installing and testing the theme, most sites would earn less until they were fully optimized 30-60 days later…but that’s not the case in all instances.  We were basing this off our experiences not realizing some niche sites would have previously been on poor performing themes.  Interesting…

We’ve made a commitment to IntelliTheme now and are fully-in on this project.  We’re expecting to continue to expand the theme as we grow and expand.  (Into expanded niche sites, authority sites, and possibly even product/travel sites!)

AdSense Flippers Redesign

We’ve completely outgrown our WooThemes layout and have started down the path towards a complete overhaul on the site.  Our first step was to contact one of our readers, Andy Hayes, to talk to him about some of the conversion aspects on the site.  Once we’ve finished up with feedback from him, the plan is to put a public project on 99Designs and to elicit some submissions from everyone we can to help us get this up and running!

Since we’re basically starting from scratch, I’m quickly realizing that there’s going to be a ton of additional content needed to get the site where I want it to be.  Fun stuff!  We’ll have more on this in the coming weeks…

Traffic To AdSenseFlippers

Our traffic was down a bit in August, coming in at 19,834 visits for the month.  We were a bit light on content in August, only putting out three blog posts and two podcast episodes.  This should change a bit in the coming months and many of our projects we’ve been working on come to fruition.  Here are the top content pages, in order of pageviews:

• Income Report July 2012 - 3,048 pageviews
• Authenticity As A Multiplier – 1,605
• Niche Sites VS Authority Sites Debate Post – 1,135 pageviews
• Niche Site Profit Calculator - 946 pageviews (You can use this calculator to help you estimate potential profit on a niche site around a particular keyword.  We put this out a year ago and it’s gotten quite a bit of traffic.  You can find out more about how it works by clicking here.

Podcast Statistics

We only put out two new podcasts in August, but our downloads improved to 11,856 for the month of August.  We changed the format for the podcast for the last few episodes, focusing more on business strategy than actually building niche AdSense sites.  Even though our tightly topical podcasts tend to get more downloads, we’re hoping our podcast can appeal to a broader audience if we reach beyond niche site creation.  Plus…discussing business plans and strategies is much more fun and engaging for us than talking about the creation of ad units!

AdSense Earnings

Even after selling quite a few sites, we saw a bump in AdSense earnings up to $3,983.59. (from $3,493.16 last month)  Our top earning day for the month was August 27th at $160.07 and our worst day was August 31st at $88.67.  Our guess is this will continue to improve in the coming weeks and months as many of the sites we would usually sell are locked up for IntelliTheme testing and for other projects we’re working on.

Flippa Sales

We didn’t put out any new Flippa auctions in August, but we are planning to add another auction or two in late September.  The problem is that collecting and presenting the data for the Flippa auctions is a TON of work…work that has required direct involvement from Joe and I.  John brought up the point that since you can now add users to an AdSense account we should probably train a few agents to collect all of this data for us.  The plan is to get a couple of agents trained up on this so that it becomes less hassle and we can start pushing out auctions like clockwork each month.

Private Sales

August has been pretty middle-of-the-road when it comes to private site sales.  We sold a total of $10,797.40 of sites privately.  Unlike previous months, most of these sales were for much lower dollar amounts ($250 – $500 each) which requires the same amount of work as some of higher value sites.  The good news is that we’re able to serve and provide for a larger market, but the bad news is that this equals a lower ROI and a lower per-hour rate for the work we put in.

Our plan over the next 6-12 months will be to “level-up” on our site creation process.  We’ll continue to sell niche sites, but as we move in on the authority site market we’ll be able to serve a different level of buyers and gain some market share there too.  We’ll take it slow, though…just because we’re successful at creating niche sites that earn doesn’t necessarily translate to success at creating or expanding larger content sites.

We’re expecting a much slower month in September for private site sales.  We’ve had a few people contact us privately looking to purchase some sites, but we won’t be actively promoting site sales this month as we’d rather focus on some internal projects, the private IntelliTheme beta, etc.

Niche Site Gold

We’ve broken 900 NSG subscribers in August and were able to bring in $450 from domain sales in August.  (Down $100 from the previous month)  Even though this is (admittedly) a low-value project for us in terms of earnings, I’m happy to continue moving this forward as I think it provides real value to those looking for help with keyword research and struggling to evaluate the first page competition.

Affiliate Sales

We had another decent month with affiliate income, pulling in $1,455.31.  Our Resources Page is pretty popular and gets quite a bit of traffic, so I was thinking about expanding it to include reviews of all the tools that we use and linking to them from the page.  While I’m not interested in chasing down all of the latest products that are being marketed, I do think we could do a better job at promoting the tools that we actually use to run our business.

I’m not sure how long this will last, but Spencer’s currently trialing a 10 day free trial of Long Tail Pro.  We’ve worked out a deal with him where AdSense Flippers readers can try it for free for ten days and, at the end of the trial, still have the option of purchasing the software with a $20 discount!  Click here for the free trial today or you can also check out our Long Tail Pro Review if you’d like more information.

Summary

Sites Created: 182 (179 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $3,983.59 ($3,493.14 last month)
Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($2,000.00 last month)
Private Sales: $10,797.40 ($15,978.20 last month)
Niche Site Gold: $450.00 ($550.00 last month)
Total Affiliate Sales: $1,455.31 ($1,250.78 last month)

• LongTailPro: $1,037.75
• Virtual Staff Finder: $75.01
• SubmitYourArticle: $58.52
• CTR Theme: $30.49
• GoDaddy: $54.69
• Our Niche Site Guide on the Kindle: $23.91
• SECockpit: $27.88
• SEOMoz: $100.00
• SENuke X: $42.56
• Whoosh Traffic: $4.50

Total Income: $16,686.30 ($23,272.12 last month)

Thanks for continuing to support us here at AdSense Flippers!  Want to check in with us?  You can sign up for email updates, check us out on Facebook, or say Hi on Twitter!  How was your August?  Feel free to drop a comment below!

Hey there…time for another of our income and traffic reports for July, 2012.

After having our second best month ever in June we were expecting things to slow down a bit in July, but that simply wasn’t the case.  Joe “Hot Money” Magnotti decided to go on a tear and listed a ton of niche sites for sale on our Buy Our Sites page, which led to us ending the month out pretty strong.  We are expecting a slower August though, as it will take some time to rebuild and we have some side projects that will be taking up quite a bit of our time.

No time to waste, so I’ll get right into the details.  Overall, we were able to pull in a total of $23,272.14 for the month!

Traffic To AdSenseFlippers

We had a total of 21,541 visits in July, an increase of over 25% from June. Much of this increase was due to an excellent debate post on Niche Vs. Authority Sites delivered from Steve and Mike, bringing in over 4,000 pageviews on its own. Here are the next top content pages, in order of pageviews:

Income Report June 2012 – 3,553 pageviews
Diverisifcation Of Income Through Software Development – 1,493 pageviews
5 Business Failures That Nearly Killed Our Business – 1,318 pageviews
AFP 27: How To Use A Broker To Buy And Sell Websites – 972 pageviews

Podcast Statistics

We didn’t produce as much content for the podcast, but were still able to improve our downloads to 11,283 for the month. We decided to try something a little different and our most recent episode is a discussion between Joe and I, moderated by John The Intern, about exactly how we would go about starting a new business under set parameters. We’ll have that podcast episode out in a few hours! Do you prefer listening to podcasts or reading blog posts? Here are a few of the podcasts we’re listening to now:

Lifestyle Business Podcast
Foolish Adventure Podcast
Web Domination Podcast
Mixergy

AdSense Earnings

Even with quite a few site sales our AdSense earnings stayed pretty consistent and even went up a bit to $3,493.16. We had our best day at $149.71 on July 13th and our worst day at $78.79 on July 4th, due to the holiday. Our site sales were more staggered throughout the month which kept away the instant drop in income that comes with a large batch of sold sites.

Flippa Sales

As promised, we did hold another Flippa auction in July that brought in $2K. In addition to Flippa’s “verified AdSense earnings” addition, we were surprised to find that Flippa now allows you to set the maximum you’d like to bid on the auction and they will auto-bid up to your maximum as you compete with other potential buyers. This addition brought in quite a few more bids (80 bids total) and put us firmly in the #1 position of the Most Active section…a great place to be!

Private Sales

We followed up a strong June with another great month and pulled in $15,978.20 in private site sales. There seems to be much more interest in our single sites rather than our site packages and we’re really not sure why that is. We had a couple of questions in July that led us to believe some didn’t understand that you could click on the packages to get a lightbox that shows you all the same information available for the single site sales. In looking at the packages section, it just seems much less appealing than the single sites…I’m guessing that’s because there’s much less information given without clicking on each package. We’re going to make an adjustment to the page soon to show more information for the packages We’ve just added a bunch of individual sites for sale. Click here to check out our sites for sale now.

Niche Site Gold

We’re up to over 860 subscribers to our NicheSiteGold newsletter and were able to sell $550.00 worth of domains in July. (Down $50 from June) We’ve been getting quite a few questions via email about how to find profitable niches and we’ve forwarded them to NSG. A large percentage of our NSG email subscribers are also AdSense Flippers subscribers, but I think this service would actually stand on its own. I’m looking at ways to promote NSG outside of AdSense Flippers, but if you have any ideas I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Affiliate Sales

We had another strong month in July, bringing in $1,250.78. Much of that came through Long Tail Pro sales and I recently noticed we’re ranked #1 for “Long Tail Pro discount” and #5 for “Long Tail Pro”…sweet! We brought in $50 for SEOMoz which is pretty low considering the value I’m currently getting out of Open Site Explorer, Rank Tracking, etc. I’m thinking a post explaining exactly how I’m using it would probably be useful and will add that to our future content! In the meantime, click here to trial SEOMoz Pro free for 30 days.

Summary

Sites Created: 179 (202 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $3,493.16 ($3,262.14 last month)
Flippa Sales: $2,000.00 ($0.00 last month)
Private Sales: $15,978.20 ($22,312.60 last month)
Niche Site Gold: $550.00 ($600.00 last month)
Total Affiliate Sales: $1,250.78 ($1,254.13 last month)

• LongTailPro: $982.64
• HostGato: $50.00
• Virtual Staff Finder: $0.00
• Market Samurai: $93.12
• SubmitYourArticle: $40.84
• CTR Theme: $0.00
• 100K AdSense Blueprint: $0.00
• GoDaddy: $1.80
• Amazon: $0.00
• oDesk: $0.00
• SECockpit: $27.88
• SEOMoz: $50.00
• SENuke X: $0.00
• Agoda: $0.00
• Whoosh Traffic: $4.50

Total Income: $23,272.14 ($27,428.87 last month)

Thanks for following along on our journey! Want to hear a bit more from us? You can sign up for email updates, check us out on Facebook, or say Hi on Twitter! How did your July turn out? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

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.  You don’t 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 Intern  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?

Thomas from FlippingEnterprises.com – We’d both run across each other on the WarriorForum and on 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 covering 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?  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!

Another month and another income report!  May was a pretty crazy month for us at AdSense Flippers between attending the Startup Weekend event in Cebu, putting on our charity boxing event, the “Ka-Pow In Davao”, and working on quite a few business projects…we were swamped!  Luckily we have an amazing team with TryBPO and AdSense Flippers and they were able to keep the engine running smoothly.

We’ll get into the various projects we’re working on and talk a bit about our strategy moving forward, but I have to tell you our income overall was pretty dismal this month, compared to previous months.  We purposefully held off on selling any sites publicly or privately so that we could refocus internally and while we did a great job on moving things forward, we definitely didn’t make much money!  I’ll cut to the chase and give you our total revenue for the month: $4,744.41.  Ouch!  Read on to find out why…

Note: Some of the links below are affiliate links where we will get paid if you like and purchase the services.  You don’t get charged anything extra and we appreciate that so many of you choose to purchase through us!

Current Projects

As we mentioned in our April monthly income report, our plan for May was to buckle down and focus on internal projects as we continue to grow our company forward.  We did a great job of advancing some of our projects, but this kept us from selling any of our sites this month which, of course, adds up to a major portion of our revenue.  It’s not so bad, though…this focus will help to make sure our revenue is better diversified in the near future.  Here’s a look at some of the projects and where they currently stand:

Niche Site Gold

We were able to launch our weekly keyword research newsletter, NicheSiteGold.com and already have 706 subscribers as of 6/4/12…not too bad!  The idea is to break down the exact reasons we do or do not select a particular domain or keyword to target based on our measuring the first page of competition on Google.  In addition to the content, we also have special offers on some of the tools we use (LongTailPro, Whoosh Traffic, etc.) and use specific examples of actual domains we’ve researched.  We can then offer those domains for sale so that readers can build their own sites, based on our keyword research.  While we’re missing out on keywords that we would have been able to build sites around, it’s only a few each week and we currently have more keyword research being done than we actually need.

The other purpose for NicheSiteGold was to build a highly-targeted list of readers that were interested in improving their ability to read the first page of Google.  As we’re currently working on a tool that will help with this, getting our thoughts down on keyword selection has been helpful in solidifying some of the rules involved with creating this tool.

Keyword Evaluation Tool

While this project/tool doesn’t yet have a proper name, we’ve advanced this project considerably in May.  The basic idea is this:

We have the majority of our niche site process completely automated and run by other people…except for the second part of our keyword research.  That’s something that, up until now, has been a manual process we haven’t felt comfortable handing off or automating.  (Remember…we only select around 20% of the keywords/URL’s that meet our criteria in every other way!)

Our thought was that maybe this CAN be automated and, if so…we’re probably the best guys to do it.  We’ve researched over 12,000 keywords and have built more than 2,000 niche websites.  We’ve got this DOWN.  The plan is to take a BUNCH of the data points (including those mentioned in our KW research webinar) and assign values to them.  Once we have a usable model, we can then go back to our 12,000 researched keywords and see how well the engine pulls out the “winners”…our sites that were easy to rank.  From there, we can tweak or modify the model until it can accurately pick out those “winners” with a high degree of certainty.  Once we’re confident in its accuracy, we can start to replace our own keyword research by allowing our agents to use it directly.  Sweet, eh?

Niche WordPress Theme – IntelliTheme

We have a name AND a logo…sweet!  More importantly, we had a major breakthrough in programming in May, allowing us to get much closer to our vision on where the theme should go.  We added the theme to six of our sites to start and are currently in the process of adding them to an additional 94 sites.  It’s still really early and we only have a few days worth of data, but everything we’re seeing so far is encouraging.  The plan will be to continue to test/tweak over the next few months and then have a limited beta release to get additional user feedback.  Exciting!

Traffic To AdSenseFlippers

We only had 17,204 visits in May, compared to 24,956 visits in April…a loss of around 31%…ouch!  I think this mostly comes down to inflated traffic in April (due to the release of our niche site guide) and the lack of content posted in May.  Not counting podcast episodes, we only published 3 posts in May and one of those was our April income report.

We should see a marked traffic improvement in June with our plan for sales on our BuyOurSites page, Flippa auctions, and a push to post more content in the coming weeks.

Podcast Statistics

Podcast downloads were down in May, probably because we skipped an episode while we were away in Cebu.  (Sorry about that!) We were planning to record while out of town but the island hopping and umbrella drinks were pulling us off-track!  We’ve launched another niche site giveaway for the podcast…any iTunes review we get through June 30th will put you in the drawing for a free niche site!  Click here to give us a review!  (Limited to the US, UK, Canada, and Australia only)  We’re up to 84 reviews on iTunes as of today and the feedback has been fantastic…thanks, all!

AdSense Earnings

Our AdSense income was lagging a bit in the first half of the month, but really started to pick up in the second half.  We ended up pulling in $3,007.10 in AdSense for the month, with our best day at $142.94 and our worst day at $56.09.  The swings in AdSense were more drastic than usual which, we think, has to do with all of the changes going on with Google.  It looks like things are finally starting to settle down and we’re back to a growth cycle, based on the second half of May and the first few days in June.

Flippa Sales

We didn’t offer any Flippa auctions in May, but we’re planning on at least one auction in June.  While we like to offer private sales through our BuyOurSites page (and the privacy this offers our buyers) there’s a branding advantage we get by listing auctions on Flippa.  We’re able to reach a wider audience that may have never heard of us before.  For an interesting read on our thoughts about Flippa, check out this article where we get into some of Flippa’s problems as we see them.

Private Sales

We didn’t offer any sites up for sale in May, but we just listed a bunch of sites available today.  Joe was able to work with our programmer and finally finish up some of the changes to our BuyOurSites page, allowing us to offer website packages for sale.  Similar to the other sites for sale, these packages will update and prices will change on a daily basis based on the last 30 days worth of earnings.  Each package will give detailed information about the individual sites.  As of today, we don’t have a rolled-up total for the packages…you’ll have to add that up yourself…but that should be fixed by the end of the month.

Affiliate Sales

We had another strong month for affiliate sales, bringing in a total of $1,637.34 for the month.  A huge majority of that came through our Long Tail Pro discount, where LTP brought in $1,315.04 for the month.  We’re happy with our affiliate sales, but we mostly view them as just a bonus.  It’s not like you can’t make a killing through affiliate sales…it’s just that it takes a TON of work to verify and test through all of the offers that are out there.  Doing that would take up more of our time/focus than we’d like to give it and is outside the scope of this site/blog, I think.

Summary

It was a strong month for us overall…even with the significant drop in overall revenue.  We’re happy with the progress we made on our projects this month and are looking for a much-improved June to finish out Q2 strong and to keep our revenue goals on track.

Sites Created: 182 (56 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $3,007.07 ($2,856.31 last month)
Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($0.00 last month)
Private Sales: $0.00 ($13,761.80 last month)
Niche Site Gold: $100.00 ($0.00 last month)
Total Affiliate Sales: $1,637.34 ($1,934.32 last month)

• LongTailPro: $1,315.04
• HostGator: $50.00
• SubmitYourArticle: $58.49
• CTR Theme: $30.49
• GoDaddy: $39.78
• Amazon: $20.67
• SECockpit: $55.47
• SENuke X: $44.10
• Agoda: $18.40 (Which of you is taking a trip…sweet!)
• Whoosh Traffic: $4.90

Total Income: $4,744.41 ($18,552.43 last month)

Another month has gone by and it’s been a rough one for many of us in the Internet Marketing space.  Between having AdSense accounts banned and being forced to look at AdSense alternatives and Google’s Penguin update that has upended many of the search results, there have been a ton of things to look out for and be worried about.  It has many asking, “Are niche sites dead?” and we’ve had plenty of questions come in via email, Twitter, etc. wondering how our business is doing.  We’ll be covering these topics and more in this month’s income report.  To cut to the chase, we brought in $18,552.43 for the month of April, 2012.  For those looking for more detail…read on below!

Disabled AdSense Accounts

Some well-known bloggers ended up having their AdSense accounts disabled this last month and it has been a hot topic in many public and private forums.  Was it because they blogged about their income?  Was it because Google hates niches sites now?  Was it because they were using Webmaster tools?  Google Analytics?  Multiple AdSense accounts?

Plenty of people have speculated as to the reason for accounts being disabled in blog comments and forum posts, but we’ll really never know for sure and anyone who tells you they’re certain is most likely lying to you or just parroting what they’ve heard elsewhere.  Google is awfully vague when it comes to the reasons they’ve disabled your account so the best you can do is guess and most don’t have enough information to even do that properly.  We’ve speculated about it as well, but we want to be excrutiatingly clear…we really don’t (and can’t) know for sure.

One of the best write-ups on the subject we’d seen pointed to Google’s own annual income report for 2011. If you haven’t seen this before you should really take a look…we found the information in it fascinating.  They’ve mentioned potentially earning less from AdSense publishers as they cut more out due to quality issues and as more competition to AdSense continues to grow.

Penguin Update

On April 24th, Google rolled out what’s being called the “Penguin Update”.  (If you noticed or were affected by changes on April 19th, that was most likely related to an update regarding parked pages.  Google admitted to mistakenly targeting some non-parked pages and worked to correct the issue.)  While this update only impacted 3% of overall searches, our guess would be that it had a much heavier effect on sites owned by Internet Marketers and there’s been a ton of discussion about it.  I won’t rehash some of the great write-ups on Penguin (Please check here, here and here for more information about what it is, who was effected, etc.) but I will say the intent was to target spun or crappy content.  Both quality niche and authority sites were caught in the middle and (in many cases) severely impacted.

What did Penguin do to our business?  It’s a little early to say, but we definitely saw some erratic changes in both our rankings and our earnings.  Our income seemed have some odd metrics and less of a growth curve in the week following Panda and, in checking our daily ranking updates with Woosh Traffic, we’ve noticed some major drops AND gains on our niche sites.  I spent several hours pouring through our data but, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find anything I could point to that was statistically significant.

I know that’s not as helpful as I’d like to be here…all I can say is that sometimes the reasons readily present themselves and sometimes they don’t.  I figured it would be better to let you know that we’re not sure what we’re doing right or wrong right now, rather than pointing to what we “think” are positive or negative signs.

Diversification

When Spencer’s AdSense account was disabled, most of the comments were extremely supportive and many of them pointed to the fact that he should have better diversified his business.  I remember thinking that was odd and that they’ve missed the point…he IS somewhat diversified.  He went on to write a post about that a few days later, but it got me thinking…we still have quite a bit further to go if we want to consider ourselves diversified on the AdSense Flippers side of things!  Spencer has established himself with LongTailPro and his other products, but we’re definitely working to catch up.

Even with the other tools, products, and services we’re working on…it still wouldn’t be terribly diversified.  They are all still closely related to or tied into monetizing websites and taking advantage of organic traffic!  And there’s the rub…

It’s easiest (and most logical) to monetize around that which you know the best and have the greatest reach, but the problem is that there is a relationship between the two and if your core business takes a hit, so might your additional revenue streams.  For example, if Corbett Barr from ThinkTraffic.net stopped blogging, it’s likely some of his products targeted towards bloggers might be less effective or not sell as well.  If Spencer stopped creating niche websites, it’s possible that his LongTailPro business would suffer.  (Either through quality of the product because he’s not using it as much or through association.)

The alternative is to diversify in areas that have no relationship to your core business.  We have a bit of that with our outsourcing company TryBPO, but should we expand that even further to include additional revenue streams?  It becomes difficult if you try to get started or involved in areas you’re completely unfamiliar with (i.e. Joe and I getting involved in a franchised restaurant opportunity!) but maybe you can still get started on things that require your current skillsets but are not as tied or related to your core business?  I really don’t have an answer to this and my concern would be that if you diversify too far you miss opportunities in your core business, can’t provide enough time to each of your revenue streams to fully flesh them out, etc.  If you have any thing to add to diversification, we’d be interested to hear your comments below!

“Building A Niche Site Empire”

We finally finished and released our niche site guide and have had some fantastic feedback from you!  We definitely spread the word…we first released in a free webinar, wrote a post releasing the guide, sent a download link to our email list, and created a WSO!  We’ve had a total of 4,790+ downloads so far.  Here’s the breakdown:

• Webinar – 801
• Dynamite Circle – 134
• AdSenseFlippers blog post – 2,231
• Our WSO – 625
• Email to our list – 956
• NicheSiteGold  28
• Others – 15
• Mirror Sites – Unknown (There are a TON of sites that wait for WSO’s to come out, download them, and then put them up for free through their own sites.  This didn’t bother us as ours was free, obviously, but how irritating for those that offer paid products…)

Our goal with the guide was to help expand our brand and I think we did do that, but many of the downloads were from our own readers/listeners and I worry that it was a bit of “preaching to the choir”, so to speak.  I’d say that it’s only our WSO and a small percentage of those on the webinar and our blog post that were newcomers to our brand.

If we did it over again would we do it differently?  Would we have had BETTER distribution if we charged for it?  In retrospect, I’m thinking that might have been a better idea.  If we were charging (for example) $47 for the guide and gave away 80% to affiliates they would have had the opportunity to promote to their audience to earn a full $37.60 per purchase!  That would have given a pretty decent incentive to promote and would have helped us expand our brand to (potentially) new audiences that have never come across us before.  Additionally, it would have allowed us to build up a network of affiliates for any future products or releases that would have been quite helpful.

We’re big fans of free, but definitely not against charging for it either, especially if it’s condensed, well-packaged, and truly useful.  Since the goal, ultimately, was to get the most distribution as possible and price/cost was a secondary concern, I really do wonder if selling it would have helped us to reach a larger audience.  We’ll never know in this particular case, but I’m interested in your thoughts:  Do you think we would have got more or less distribution if we charged for it and why?

Niche Site Gold

We get quite a few questions about the exact process we use to determine whether a keyword is worth it or not.  We’ve devoted a webinar to the subject which you can check out here, but we thought it might be helpful to offer a weekly newsletter that breaks down keywords that meet our criteria and would be considered worthwhile.

NicheSiteGold.com allows readers to sign-up for free to get on a weekly newsletter that breaks down several keywords and shows you why we would or would not have targeted that keyword.  We won’t be building out those particular sites and will instead be offering the exact match domains up for sale to anyone who’d like to purchase.

Additionally, we tend to come across some pretty amazing domains that are available but just don’t quite fit the criteria for our mini-niche sites, but might be great for authority sites.   Our idea is that we can now purchase those domains and either build them out ourselves or offer them for sale through the NicheSiteGold newsletter to anyone interested.

If you haven’t yet, we would encourage you to click here to check it out and get on the list!

Traffic To AdSenseFlippers

We’ve had another month of growth, largely due to the increased amount of content we’ve put out in April, receiving 24,956 visits during the month.  (That’s 21% more traffic than we received in March…sweet!)  We’ve again had our best day of traffic on April 16th, pulling in 2,636 visits in a single day!

Our top 3 referrals for the month were Twitter, Facebook, and the Warrior Forum…but coming in 5th was Reddit.com.  there were a couple AMA’s (Ask Me Anything threads here and here) regarding niche sites and AdSense that mentioned us and brought us over 500 visits total.

Podcast Statistics

We’ve had another great month with the podcast, although our downloads are down just a bit from March.  We’re up to 71 iTunes reviews the US and have had around 13,000 downloads in April.  (It says 16,100, but around 3,000 of those are from the niche site guide)

The podcast has grown a bit more popular in both Australia and the UK as well and we’ve been getting great reviews there in the last couple of months, which is fantastic.  We put out (what I think is our BEST to date) a podcast episode about Skill Transfer Mastery this month.  If you’re at all involved in training virtual assistants or in-house staff, I’d highly recommend this episode.

AdSense Earnings

There wasn’t much change in our AdSense earnings overall, bringing in $2,856.32 for the month of April 2012.  Our best day was on April 14th at $124.91 and our worst day was April 27th at $70.65.  We did have quite a few site sales in April, but I still would have expected more growth across the sales that we had and the linkbuilding we’ve done to get caught up.

The two biggest indicators that let us know how we’re doing are:

• Site Sale Multiples – The monthly multiple at which we’re able to sell niche sites to buyers.
• Average Income Per Site – The monthly average of earnings for the sites we create.

As our site sale multiple has remained consistent both here and on Flippa, the biggest difference we’ve noticed is a decline in the amount our average site will make per month.

When we began this process, we could expect $9-$10 per month on each site we create and this was fairly consistent.  Over time, we’ve changed our process to where tracking those earnings has become much more difficult.  Ultimately, though, we are confident our average site is earning less revenue per month.  This is speculation and an educated guess on our part, but here are our thoughts: 

• Selling Sites Too Early – In the past, we would wait 5-8 months before selling a site but more recently we’ve put together packages of sites for sale that are earlier in the process.  Our thought here is that we’re selling off sites that haven’t fully developed, selling ourselves short. Less
• Effective Linkbuilding – Linkbuilding has changed dramatically in the 17 short months that we’ve been doing this.  What was working when we started wouldn’t work now, and we’re currently fumbling through our methodology for linkbuilding.  We don’t want to spend time, effort, and energy on something that would potentially even HURT our sites, thinking that less is more until things settle down.
• Higher Quality Sites – There’s a vast improvement in the quality of content put on our sites now as compared to when we started.  I’d gather that even though this is what Google ultimately wants, there’s a downside: People that are more interested in reading/using your content are less likely to click the ads, possibly?
• SmartPriced – I’m less confident with this one than the others, but we have a contact that used to work for the AdSense team.  He’s told us that your account will have a “Publisher Score” and if that score has been lowered your clicks will be discounted across the board for your advertisers.  It’s possible this has had an effect, but really difficult to verify…

I was dorking out looking at these numbers in late April and early May.  There was a bit of a role reversal when Joe pointed out that we’re bringing in more than we’re spending and maybe we should just be happy with that.  Funny enough, it was a post from Derek Sivers he pointed me towards, reminding me that I should probably be happy with what we’ve got!

Flippa Sales

We didn’t offer any sites up for sale on Flippa in April and we’re not currently planning on any auctions in May.  With the recent search engine changes, we thought it would be best to review the fallout in May and plan on putting more sites up for sale in June once Google has finished tweaking the latest Penguin update and rankings have stabilized.

That’s fine for us overall as we have a ton of work to do in May and setting up Flippa auctions can be a bit time intensive, but we will be missing out in May on the additional traffic and readers the Flippa auctions send us.  If you’re looking to purchase sites in May, make sure to follow us on Twitter as we’ll be highlighting some of the auctions available on sites that are quite similar to ours!

Private Sales

April was a good month for us as we were able to sell a total of $13,761.80 worth of sites through our BuyOurSites page.  For the most part, we’ll be holding off on private site sales in May.  We’re continuing to expand our BuyOurSites page to include packages, much like the packages of sites we currently offer for sale on Flippa.  This should be up and running in June and we’re planning to launch a bunch of new site sales then.

Affiliate Sales

We had a really strong month with affiliate sales pulling in $1,934.32 for the month.  Much of the strength of our affiliate sales this month came through a deal with Spencer where we were able to work out a discount on Long Tail Pro of $20.00 for AdSense Flippers readers and listeners only!  This includes a 60 day, money-back guarantee and helped to bring in a total of $1,311.23 from LongTailPro in April.

Summary

It’s been another strong month for us in April, but we’re expecting our income report for May to be less as we regroup and prepare for heavier site sales in June to give us a strong Q2 finish.  We’re continuing to build out more sites, expand our brand, and build tools that will help us and others continue to grow.

Sites Created: 56 (149 last month)
AdSense Earnings: $2,856.31 ($2,750.33 last month)
Flippa Sales: $0.00 ($2,320.00 last month)
Private Sales: $13,761.80 ($9,419.60 last month)
Total Affiliate Sales: $1,934.32 ($1,221.72 last month)

• LongTailPro: $1,311.23
• HostGator: $150.00
• Market Samurai: $46.56
• SubmitYourArticle: $58.21
• CTR Theme: $30.49
• 100K AdSense Blueprint: $46.44
• GoDaddy: $110.92
• oDesk: $50.00
•  SECockpit: $55.47
• SEOMoz: $75.00

Total Income: $18,552.43 ($15,711.65 last month)

Thank you for checking out our latest income report.  How did your April shape up?  Let us know along with your thoughts and comments below!