Another month is over and a new one has started so that means that it’s time for a DotComDud.com income report! It was an interesting month with a lot of my focus being on Blogging Idol and increasing my RSS subscribers, which meant monetisation took a back seat. I did set some goals for earnings, with the minimum goal being to earn $32.50 (doubling my October income).

Last month I made $16.25, for a more detailed breakdown please read the October Income Report. Here are the earnings for November…

Earnings Breakdown

DotComDud.com
Total earnings = $0!!!
Sources
PerformancingAds

Other Sites
Total earnings = $6.35
Sources
AdSense = $1.35
PayPerPost = $5

Affiliate Earnings
PayPerPost = $15

Total Earnings = $21.35

Conclusions

I didn’t manage to double my earnings, meaning I didn’t reach my lowest income goal. That is very disappointing but at least my earnings didn’t go backwards, they were still higher than the previous month and increased by just over 131% so November wasn’t a total disaster.

In the breakdown you’ll notice the exclamation points following the zero earnings on DotComDud.com as I am pretty unhappy (and concerned) that this blog isn’t generating any income! Even now that I have more than 100 subscribers and traffic is ever-increasing my results are getting slowly worse and have now hit rock-bottom! In fact, the whole month was pretty poor. If it hadn’t been for the PayPerPost referral, I would have seen a sharp decrease from last month’s income.

I am starting to think that PerformancingAds isn’t going to start performing for me anytime soon. I am not sure if it is the system itself or the way I promote it (or fail to promote it) that is letting it down. Either way, I think that by putting all my eggs into one basket, I haven’t been making the most of this blog’s earning potential. So I have decided that throughout December I am going to diversify the monetisation methods on DotComDud.com and try several different systems to see what works best for me. I plan on doing some reviews to let you all know the good and bad points of these methods too!

Speaking of new monetisation methods, the option of making Paid Posts on DotComDud.com is another thing I have been considering. There are definite advantages and problems associated with Paid Posts but they do offer one of the easiest and quickest ways of earning money on this blog. If I used them effectively, along with other monetisation, I think I could reach the $100+ income mark in a month fairly easily. However, readers might not appreciate them and Google is clearly against paid links, which I believe Paid Posts are counted as by them. I’d limit the number of these posts I made per month (a maximum of 5) but I’m still not sure if they are worth it. I don’t get a lot of search engine traffic right now so if I want that to change in the future then I don’t want Google to penalise me. I’d really appreaciate some reader feedback on this issue, thanks!

To conclude I have to say this, my goal is to earn a full-time income online but right now I’d be lucky to earn enough to buy myself a nice lunch. I clearly need to do something to change the situation so I am going to stop messing about and focus on making as much money as possible in December and hopefully I can finish 2008 on a high note!

I can hardly believe it is November already, with only 2 months left until 2009, a new year is fast approaching! With the start of a new month always comes the latest income report for DotComDud.com, with October being the 2nd full month of operation for this blog. The month started off quiet on DotComDud.com with posts not starting until the 13th. After that, however, the pace started to pick up with a flurry of posts, including the first Reader Challenge being run. The site also became a PageRank 2 in the most recent update.

Elsewhere, I also posted a couple of new posts on my old tech blog, which definitely helped. So how did I do in October? My results are detailed below. Check out my September Income Report to compare them to my previous month’s income!

Earnings Breakdown

DotComDud.com
Total earnings = $0.60
Sources
PerformancingAds

Other Sites
Total earnings = $15.65
Sources
AdSense = $2.15
PayPerPost = $13.50

Total Earnings = $16.25

Conclusions

Earnings have increased again in October! This is great news but to make sure things keep going well, I need to look at specific areas of my monetisation to see how well they performed. If something isn’t earning the money it should be, I’ll either have to fix it or replace it!

PerformancingAds, failing to live up to it’s name, was a poor performer. As PerformancingAds is the only income source on this blog, DotComDud.com didn’t earn much at all which is a bit disappointing, especially now that DotComDud.com is PR2. With PerformancingAds taking 40% of ad sales but not sending a lot of advertisers my way, it’s clearly time that I start looking into other monetising options for DotComDud.com that will help this blog live up to it’s earning potential.

Meanwhile, on my other sites, AdSense increased noticeably, which was a pure fluke to be honest as I didn’t actively do anything to improve it. I think that the majority of clicks I received were from the trickle of search engine traffic I get. Therefore, during November I plan to educate myself more about SEO and increase my search engine traffic as much as possible.

By far the biggest change in my earnings was from doing 2 paid reviews from PayPerPost.com which paid $5 and $8.50 respectively. These posts didn’t appear on DotComDud.com but the money they earn (along with how easy they are) make me wonder if I should start doing them on this blog. It is a difficult decision, as I don’t want to lose readers but it’s hard to ignore the money that I could be making right now. I think I will hold off a bit longer on that decision, I’d prefer to create more quality content and build consistent traffic, then monetise DotComDud.com in alternative ways if possible.

In September my earnings increased by 473% over the previous month, which I thought was a good result. I was hoping October would be able to get close to that percentage increase again but I expected it to be difficult. To my surprise, I did even better as my latest earnings rose by 745%! It is very encouraging to know that my blog is improving over time and November promises to be another great month. I have a few things planned in the next few weeks which should ensure that my earnings continue to grow and grow and grow!!

The month of September might be long gone but it’s still worth taking a look at my earnings. My previous monthly earnings were a measly 46 cents in August, down from my July earnings of 84 cents! I only made 9 posts during September, it was a bad month and there was no posts at all in the second half of the month, so it would be fair to expect little to no earnings. However, coming in to September this blog had gained some momentum and traffic was increasing steadily. The start of September also saw the launch of Dot Com Dud’s first blog contest, which had the potential to grab the attention of more readers. I also feel that the posts that were made during September showed a definite increase in quality compared to earlier posts. So September was a month of ups and downs but how did it all turn out? On to the earnings to find out!

Earnings Breakdown

DotComDud.com
Total earnings = $1.80
Sources = PerformancingAds

Other Sites
Total earnings = $0.38
Sources = AdSense only

Conclusions

It looks like it’s good news this time around! Total earnings for September were $2.18 which is still a small amount of money but at least it’s an increase. AdSense earnings were slightly lower than the previous month but with no effort from me to increase AdSense performance, I’m not surprised or worried. I will actually be concentrating more on AdSense in an upcoming project which you’ll read about very soon on DotComDud.com, so stay tuned!

The real highlight was finally earning some money on this blog, all of it made through Performancing Ads selling 125×125 ads on the right hand side of the blog. There is still some free space on the sidebar for more ads, so hopefully bookings continue to increase this month as I focus on getting this blog back into shape and becoming better than ever!

Overall, I am happy with these results as they showed that DotComDud.com is improving and even though I only blogged for the first half of the month, it shows that this blog has real potential. Earnings increased by 473% and if I can keep them growing at that rate, I’ll be doing very well, very soon!

Well it has been less than two weeks since the last income report but the month of August is over and it’s time to take a look at the results. They are, unfortunately, a bit disappointing, as I failed to crack the $1 mark as I had hoped.

Earnings Breakdown

DotComDud.com
Total earnings = $0
Sources = None

Other Sites
Total earnings = $0.46
Sources = AdSense only

Conclusions

To be honest, these results are not surprising. This site maybe too new to attract advertisers and I didn’t do anything to improve traffic on my other sites (traffic was down from July, under 1,000 visits in the entire month of August). So what needs to be changed to increase earnings? I’ll need to increase traffic and improve my monestisation methods.

Increasing traffic is always a good thing for a site, it will increase the exposure my ads get, making affiliate links more profitable and making advertising space more appealing to advertisers.

I think the monetisation opportunities can be improved on DotComDud.com as well, again to make the site more attractive to advertisers (combined with increasing traffic) and making better use of the free space on the site’s pages. I’ll also offer other advertising methods instead of Performancing Ads being the only option.

My other sites also need their monetisation methods re-evaluated, as there is more to monetisation that AdSense. So you can expect some posts detailing what works and what doesn’t during the month of September. I’ll be working much harder this month, making sure I increase my earnings so that the September Income Report has more positive results!

In the month of July I made a grand total of (drum roll)…

$0

I thought I should start this blog out with an income report (and a joke) as they seem to be all the rage these days. I also thought $0 was a good place to start, as things can only get better right? (anything else would be negative thinking and we’ll have none of that). So, to introduce this blog… well it’s yet another Make Money Online blog, just what the Internet needs! In reality though, this blog will be more of a running diary of my efforts to make a living online and if I’m lucky, I’ll make a very good living online and pass on a few tips of what works and (most likely) what doesn’t work

To be perfectly honest though, my online income wasn’t actually $0 last month, I did in fact make $0.84. That’s right, 84 cents! That was made from a neglected tech blog (only had 1 post in July) that got 6 AdSense clicks. Hopefully that 84 cents is just the start, so stay tuned to see if I am successful and can become an Internet success story or maybe I’ll just end up another Dot Com Dud!