Can I make money online? The question is a good one and is really what this whole blog is about. My experiments are designed to help me get free traffic that converts well to websites that I have spent a lot of time building high quality content on. You see, the type of traffic that is free and converts well is search engine traffic. Get that and you can make money online.
I have to be brutally honest here - I do not currently make very much money online. I currently take in about $250 a month from two sites that I have built - the rest earn me nothing because I haven’t monetized them yet (or had monetized them at one point but took it off because the traffic was pathetic and I feared smart pricing like it was a blue haired devil bent on destroying my will to live). My main earners are Amazon affiliate links and Google Adsense, with Adsense earning me around 80%-90% of my online income.
$250 a month has taken me an exceedingly long time to achieve - too long if you ask me - and has solidified myself as a noob trying to break into a business that I don’t yet fully grasp or comprehend. There are a lot of factors that still are mysterious to me - like triggering the highest paying ads, or improving search results, or building a network of high quality sites, or getting those links that will push your site to the next level. I mean all of my content is high quality, I just can’t seem to get things just right just yet.
Here are some helpful graphics that might illustrate my noobishness well:
Total Earnings
Total Earnings Online
Average Earnings per Day
Average Daily Earnings Online
Mysterious Graph Due To Affiliate Program Terms of Service
Mysterious Make Money Online Graph
As you can clearly see, I have been trying to make money online for just under 450 days and have only earned around $1,100. How noob is that? Can you see why I seriously question if I can make money online? Sure, there are signs of making some steady progress - over the last 100 or so days I have been making a fairly decent per day total with just one site being active (decent for me anyway, certainly nothing I could retire early on).
Another encouraging point is how steep my total earnings graph is looking right now. Steep equals good if you ask me.
In the end though, my success at doing this whole SEO thing while writing high quality content needs to do some serious growing if it is going to meet my financial needs in the future, and I have financial needs that I want this type of work to meet.
My current plan is to continue to focus the bulk of my efforts on trying to make money online with Adsense, but I definitely won’t give up on my Amazon affiliate plan. Sure, maybe working affiliate marketing has a greater potential for making lots of cash, but since I still don’t really know what I am doing we will have to see how things pan out.
So the question remains, can I make money online?
One Comment
Hi - nice looking site !
We seem to be in very much the same boat - I’ve been doing this shtuff for 2 years now and still ain’t cracked it ! To be fair I spent the first 18 months basically doing all the wrong stuff, but even so my MMO site still doesn’t MAM -fortunately I have another site which does make small amounts so proves it may be possible. It seems the secret is TRAFFIC - not much of a secret I know - but hard to get all the same. How do these guys get sites that get 200,000 visitor a month ? If you know the secret please let me know. Good luck in your enterprise and experiments. VicW
[Reply]
Steward Reply:
March 21st, 2009 at 6:49 am
Hi VicW,
Thanks for stopping by. My guess is that becoming someone with 200,000 visitors a month is a little out of my league at the moment. Maybe someday like when I’m 80 and there are 36 billion people on the world and every day each person views 200,000 websites. Maybe then.
I honestly don’t think I’ll need that much traffic to one site to make the kind of money I would like to. For example if I can increase the traffic on my one producer to 9 times its current total that would probably cover all my financial needs for the next three years. So what I really need to do is get 9 more sites producing at the same level or work on the one site and get it producing 9 times more. Right now I am working both angles, but my time is pretty limited right now since I work full time and have a 4 month old whom I love spending time with too much!
And about that secret, if I knew what it was - I’d probably write a crappy ebook and make millions!
Steward
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