Before I go further, I’d just like to show off to you a pathetic snapshot of my first ever AdSense cheque which I’ve received earlier this month (and a wonderful New Year’s surprise it was!).

I was in a rush preparing for my son’s first day of school for the year, and only managed to take this picture while I was driving to the bank to cash it out. It takes a month for that US$124.15  cheque to clear. Why not use Western Union? That is a story for another day. Anyway, I’ll be getting another cheque at the end of February just from that one arts and crafts site I mentioned and yet to reveal.

Apart from paid posts and playing forex, making money online takes hard work, action, and patience. I’ve bought e-books and implemented the advice of  many Internet guru programs, both locally (in Malaysia) and internationally, that promise you to make money online, and I ended up getting frustrated each time. As many have claimed, they are mostly crap. More annoying is the fact that, at one point, I bought some e-book on profit blogger from one of those Malaysian Internet marketing “experts”, only to find out that I actually knew all the techniques he pointed out during my first month of blogging. What a bunch of bull.

Luckily, my early days of blogging introduced me to RT at Untwisted Vortex (who also happens to be one of the first people to comment on my blog), who, through his many posts, introduced me to two most invaluable web sites on making money online. Best of all, they’re totally free!

I based my niche site development through the advice I get from Court Tuttle’s Internet Marketing School and his new site called The Keyword Academy (co-run by Mark Butler). Due to their advice, I was able to increase search engine visitors to my web sites triple-fold. I started using Court’s techniques since late August 2008, and my traffic at that time was 900 unique visits a month. By end of November that year, traffic surged to around 3,000 uniques a month, and as of January 2009 is now close to 6,000. More importantly, my visit-to-clicks conversion for my ads are steadily improving. I realize I was in a low-paying niche, but it doesn’t stop me from getting that $1.50/day AdSense earning (and it continues to increase — imagine if I had 20 of those sites…). You need to subscribe to Court’s two sites right now, as he and Mark are currently releasing a series of very critical posts on how to improve keyword content on your sites. One of his recent posts featured a demo web site which you can follow exactly to the dot for your next niche site.

The other site I refer to for specific AdSense advice is Grizzly’s How To Make Money Online For Beginners. Don’t let the blog title and fugly design fool you — no matter how seasoned you are in AdSense, you’ll always benefit from Grizzly’s insights on making money with AdSense and other programs and methods. He continually convinced me that we should be chasing organic (a.k.a. search engine) traffic instead of social traffic if we’re seriously into the making money online business. One of his recent eye-opening advices is that you may make more money by not posting. It makes sense, and this seems to be true for my case. My subscribers have jumped more than triple in the last couple of months, mostly obtained through organic traffic, and 80% subscribed via e-mail (the rest are RSS aggregators and search engine updaters). I only spend one hour a week updating my niche site, posting 3 original content at the most per update. Yet, by doing so, I still get more search engine visits every day. The nice thing about it is that even during my month-long hiatus in December, traffic is constantly increasing without me updating the site. Chasing organic traffic also helped me increase my ads earning from Chitika, AdBrite, and shockingly, Amazon.com! I’m not eligible for eBay affiliate for some reason, but I’ll keep trying to apply until I get it. I’d hazard a guess that revenue from eBay could burst through the roof In any case, enjoy Grizz’s long and valuable posts, and for those who’d like to get started making money online, he has a set of tutorials for you to refer to. Just scroll down the navigation bar on the right until you see the sections called “Make Money Blogging” and “AdSense Lessons”.

I’m checking out another program to see its effectiveness, but I’m taking my time on this fella. I’m going to work full-time starting next week, so I’m sure there’s a lot of things going on for me soon.

Besides, I’m starting two more blogs. Yeah, can you believe it? As if I’m not busy enough with my 30 other blogs! WebGrrrl.net (this site) will focus more on technology, the Internet and WordPress. Blogging Fu is going to be my space for exposing my techniques on how I actually update my 30+ blogs, as well as tutorials on how to start a blog. Lastly, Looking For Niches is a site that tells you how I go about researching and making money from my niche sites, as well as the tools I used to do my research. Both Blogging Fu and Looking For Niches will be launched as early as mid-Feb, so stay tuned!

By now, a few of you may have realized my slow and steady attempt at making money online. One of the best thing about making money online earnings is that most of them are handled using the US currency, so just a few hundred dollars can translate to more than a thousand Malaysian Ringgit a month for me. Not too shabby for a stay-at-home mom.

I’m currently doing a few things simultaneously to generate my income online, from paid posting to WordPress services, and moving towards affiliate programs and ads revenue as both of these can turn to become passive income once the ball gets rolling. As mentioned in my previous post, things are looking well with my arts and crafts site which are generating income through three programs (CPC programs they call it) — AdSense, Chitika and AdBrite. These three ads work well together, and Chitika and AdBrite are AdSense-friendly.

On the other hand, my affiliate programs (CPA programs I think they call it) aren’t doing well; in fact, they’re not generating any income at all. The three programs that I’ve joined are Clickbank, Commission Junction and Amazon.com. I’m not giving up hope, though. I’m still very fond of CJ and Amazon, but I’m thinking of switching from Clickbank to Clickbooth. I’ve totally forgotten that I’ve signed up for them until I got the newsletter from them recently. The great thing about this program is that they currently have what is called Clickbooth Webinars, a collection of online videos featuring top affiliate marketers on the Net, sharing their success tips to users of Clickbooth. This is more than enough to convince me to switch. Hopefully I’ll have better luck after using the techniques taught in the webinars.

I remembered now why I removed AdSense almost entirely out of this site — doing so actually increased my earnings! I truly forgot that WebGrrrl.net is getting smart priced all this while, and when you have one site that’s being smart priced, the rest of the sites that are using your AdSense account can also be affected. You can read more about smart pricing at Griz’s money making site.

I mentioned how unfocused WebGrrrl.net’s content is, which is the main reason why my blog isn’t earning as much. In February I noticed that I was earning in the single digits (and in cents, moreover) per day at first. The more AdSense ads I removed from WebGrrrl.net however, the more I started to earn in the double digits through my arts and crafts site. Since I’m earning in the dollars, I’m not about to ruin my earnings now.

So goodbye again, AdSense. Well, not entirely. I’ll still have it in my games posts, and I would have removed them entirely by now if those darn pages didn’t have such high click-through rates of almost 15%.

I know, I know. I swore off using AdSense last year. So why is it back in WebGrrrl.net?

Frequent visitors to my site may have noticed that posts in this site has been sporadic these past months. The reason is because I’ve only started to create niche sites that not only am I passionate about, but plan to monetize on. Lots of it failed, but I managed to flip them and get a few extra buck out of them. Still, I’ve finally hit the jackpot with one of my site that focuses on a pretty small arts and crafts niche, which is earning me about $6 in September, and has jumped to $27 in October.

Back to the matter of putting AdSense. The thing about WebGrrrl.net’s traffic stats is that this site gets around 3,000 unique visits a month, with about 70 feed subscribers, and an 80% bounce rate. A bounce rate that low, for those of you who are not familiar with the term, means that out of 10 people who visit my site, 8 will never return. That’s pretty bad. Page views are about 1 to 2 pages per visit.

My stats on the new niche site of mine (note the word site, not blog) only recently gets around 3,000 unique visits a month, up from just about 60 uniques in July. It currently has 30 subscribers, half of it via e-mail, and a fantastic 35% bounce rate. Page views per person is at least 10 to 15 pages per visit. Isn’t that great?

However, due to the nature of that niche site, its earnings are pretty low. This WebGrrrl.net blog, on the other hand, tends to get higher CTR even though page impressions are less than 50 (only my games-related posts have AdSense). Plus, being an IT / computer / technology blog of sorts means that there tends to be more high-paying advertisers in the market.

So I’m putting up ads back in WebGrrrl.net to see exactly how AdSense earnings are influenced by this blog’s niche (which is a bit too broad for my liking) as well as the influence that the site’s stats has on the ads earning. After 6 months, I’ll be switching off the ads again, and make a comparison with my niche site to see what I can conclude from them. Please bear with the interruption as I research my way into this. (more…)