Affiliates Tested

Apologies for the lack of reports, but I've been busy on holiday and being ill. Anyway, here's the figures since I last wrote:

Adsense: $3.40
Scratchback: $0.00.
Widgetbucks: $0.00.
Amazon Affiliates: $0
Squidoo: $0.00.


$15.63 for 14 weeks work.

To be fair, the first couple of weeks were a complete waste due to the fact I wasn't really updating, and the people I'd asked in my absence made a hash of it. So those weeks might have well be written off, and it's taken a bit of effort to get my monthly traffic total back on track with some decent posting over the last week.
Still, so far, it's only Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliates that have contributed to my total so far - time to experiment some more!

Well, not a record week - and a bit of a lack of posting on my behalf if I'm being honest. But at least some payment is still trickling in. Whether or not it pays for my hosting for some of my sites will be another question!

Adsense: $2.50
Scratchback: $0.00.
Widgetbucks: $0.00.
Amazon Affiliates: $0.00.
Squidoo: $0.00.



$9.14 for 9 weeks work.

If I was aiming to monetise successfully, a viable target from my research seemed to be around $1 per day, per site. Not a huge amount, but if a site could raise that with a minimum of upkeep, and that could be scaled across numerous sites, I could make the start of a reasonable second income, say $10 per day, $70 per week, $280 per month and $3360 per year. Enough to pay for all hosting, and make a really small profit - enough to then start adding more.

Instead, I'm currently managing $1 per week across five sites (Three on blogspot, and two self-hosted).

That's a looooooooooooooooooong way off.

Not a straight test of affiliate advertising etc, but it's obvious that the effects of the economic downturn and credit crunch don't just affect big business and mainstream media.

Not only do advertising budgets get cut first when businesses need to cut costs (Even though a lot of people advise spending your way through hard times to make the most of the opportunities), but a lot of the products that tend to be advertised online and on blogs are those that are the first to be cut from individual's spending.

After all, if you're worried about your job, feeding your family and paying the mortgage, are you going to invest in some new software, upgrade your iPod, or buy a new blog template for example?

So it's going to be tough for any blogger who is looking to create a primary or secondary income - at the same time, there is still a huge amount of opportunity:-

Besides creating money saving blogs and tips, there's also another benefit to the fact it's harder to monetise blogs - less competition.

The harder it gets, and the more people realise the amount of work it can take to make a decent revenue from blogging, the less people will be keen on spending the time - especially if they're already struggling. After all, most people could make far more by simply getting a second job delivering pizzas etc.

Which means those people who keep pushing, and keep going are likley to reap more of the rewards that are left. And as you can see from my previous earning reports, I'm definitely doing this more for fun than to make myself rich - but if less competiton increases my earnings, I'm not going to complain!

Project Wonderful is way for bloggers and website publishers to place adverts on each others blogs and websites. It allows anyone to display advertising slots, and allows other users to bid on placement. Alternatively you can just bid to display your advert on other sites.

Like most other schemes I've used in the past, it wasn't enormously successful at creating revenue from small traffic sites. Over time it built up a matter a 1 or 2 cents a day, which wasn't going to make me particularly rich, or fund an advertising campaign to drive a lot of traffic.

However, I suspect I'm going to retry it on one or more of my blogs to see if things have changed with the growing number of blogs and advertisers out there - Technorati are reporting about 113 million blogs in the world these days.

(Technorati also say the average earnings for bloggers with 100,000 unique users per month if around $75,000. I'm a little way off that at the moment!)

Part of the purpose of this blog is to help me keep track of where my efforts are being directed, and hopefully focus them a little better, due to ever increasing financial commitments.
So my first earning report, on 4 blogs, ranging in age from 2 years to this one, and six Squidoo lenses is:

Adsense: $0.60.
Amazon: 2 clicks. No order = $0.
Scratchback: $0.00.
Squidoo: $0.00.

Total earnings: $0.60.

If I had been solely concentrating on blogging and websites to make direct revenue, I'd be rather disappointed that two years and a lot of hours hadn't had a bigger impact. Luckily my main focus is on expanding my knowledge, contacts and opportunities in my career - and that's where blogging has really paid off so far.

Hopefully, though, I can improve on the financial return as well...maybe a whole $1 next week?

You may notice the new Scratchback widget at the top left of the menu.

I've used it in the past on a popular blog (100-200 readers per day), and despite getting my first tip within minutes, it stalled somewhat, and never really went anywhere.

Possibly that's a comment on the quality and relevance of that particular blog, so I'm giving it another chance here. Having logged in for the first time in a long while, there's also some useful information about pricing, which makes me think my first attempt didn't quite do the system justice.


So what is Scratchback?
Scratchback is intended to be a quick, easy and fun way to get 'tips' for creating good content on your blog. You set a price for tips, and tippers get a return link and recognition in return for giving you a small amount of cash.

Signing up is really quick and easy, and you simply pick whichever design you like from preset templates which should cover most blog designs and colour schemes (You don want it to stand out a bit at least!).

And that's it. Payment is by Paypal, so you'll need to have a valid account - and remember that Paypal fees will be taken out of your tips when you transfer them.

Once it's set up, you can either manually approve tip listings, or let them auto update. And once your spot is full, new tips bump off the oldest one (Assuming it fills up).

As I said, previously I had it set up on a couple of blogs, and I come across it a lot on smaller blogs when I'm randomly surfing - it's rare to see a Jar totally full but this may be down to bloggers always selecting the maximum display number, or getting the pricing wrong...we'll see.