Sep 26, 2011

Passive Income Online: Lis Sowerbutts

Making passive income online - one website at a time

Passive Income Online: Lis Sowerbutts

Sep 19, 2011

Delightful Whimsy, Creating a Tangible Happiness

Not quite on the subject of making money online, but here is a video I produced for my friend's blog.

Sep 3, 2011

SEO Chemist

SEO Chemist is a new site dedicated to bringing together some of the best SEO advice for new and experienced SEO'ers alike. If you are slightly interested in earning money online, I suggest you join up for the newsletter, or follow the Facebook page.

Sep 2, 2011

Looking back at August - part 2

Yesterday's post started to get a little too long for a blog (I figure my readers don't have the concentration for longer than about 200 words). So this is part 2 dealing with the money side of things.

Since I lost my Amazon account, I've been using Shareasale and LinkShare to try and earn affiliate money. I put a few adverts out from July 1st onwards then waited and didn't see any sales. Finally this week I had my first sale from both Shareasale and LinkShare. On ShareaSale I sold a $60 backpack and earned $7.20. On LinkShare I sold a 99c book and earned 6c in commission.

I had actually put my Amazon code in many, many places across the Internet and put Shareasale and LinkShare in just a few. Getting my first sales on each has inspired me to put the codes in a few other places. I was just about to give up with them, and now I am inspired to keep advertising their products.

Here are my Google earnings for August from highest to lowest

WebAnswers
HubPages
Best-Reviewer
Pleasanton Blog
My Own WebPage

My book Homeschooling Boys sold 75 books in August, having sold 15 in July (although it was published during July, so that was not a full month).

I'm unsure what to do next. Maybe I'll amend all my hubs, or maybe I'll work on my next book. i'll let you know at the end of September what I decided.

Sep 1, 2011

Looking Back at August - Part 1

August must have been my worst month ever for earning money online. Traditionally August is a low month for people to be online. When I used to sell on eBay, the only things that sold during August were school supplies. As soon as September hit, sales just went up.

HubPages traffic went way down and then started to rise. Is this because it's August, or because of the next edition of Panda? We mortals will never know. There's been some speculation about the fact that traffic on HubPages is rising, but earnings are still at an all time low.

I have 3 accounts on HubPages. Let's call them A, B and C. A is my main account, with 128 hubs and a variety of topics. B and C have one topic each and 36 and 21 hubs respectively.

When Panda happened in February 2011, the traffic on A dropped slightly and then stayed steady. When the accounts were split into sub-domains my traffic increased by about 20%. Not back up to Panda levels, but it looked promising. The traffic on B stayed at pre-Panda levels and then dropped slightly when sub-domains were rolled out. The traffic on C, which is pretty low anyway, stayed pretty low.

Now, something happened mid August because people on the forums were all noticing something drastic. While the traffic graph on A went vertically down, the traffic graph on B went vertically up. And there they stayed.

I reasoned that the quality of my writing in both accounts (I'm only really comparing A and B here) must be about the same. I'm not sure why one account is doing so well and the other so badly. I do have a few more RSS feeds in A, and am thinking of removing them to see if traffic improves. There have been many talks of quality, of RSS feeds, of writing an introduction to our hubs, but no one is definitely saying, "Do this and things will improve."

People say hub scores don't have much to do with earnings, but my hubs with higher hub scores are in my opinion the better hubs. At the bottom of the "my account" page is the average hub score. The average hubscore of account A is 65, the average of B is 71 and the average of C is 66.

I just used A, B and C for ease of reference, if you want to read them, A is TinaAtHome, B is TinasTreasures, and C is Cyber Scribe

I'm now about to make the decision of what to do with my hubs. Here are my options:
1. Do nothing
2. Remove RSS feeds
3. Write introductions
4. Remove some bad hubs
5. Try and improve some of my worse hubs, as in make them longer

I just don't want to amend about 170 hubs unless I'm certain it's going to work. I have lots of other things I can be doing, so for the immediate future I'm going with number 1.