Residual Income Report – February 2010

It’s that time again for another online residual income report. Most people who do these kinds of reports tend to do them right after the first of the month however if you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time you surely have noticed that I don’t usually fully report my residual income until at lest a good week or more into the next month.

Along these lines February came and went and It’s almost a full week and a half behind us. In the month I didn’t write too much here on the blog other than a marathon post: The Ultimate Guide To Making The Most Money Writing Online. Yeah, I know the title stinks. I couldn’t water it down. It’s like my posts, way too long. Other than that I previewed my upcoming Xomba Xomblurb experiment in which I intended on backlinking every single one of my blog posts from How To Live Long as well as some articles online. Well I can safely say that 17 days later I have hit 200 blurbs in total and if you can believe it or not my blurbs are already making more money than my InfoBarrel articles which have been aging for 2-3 months by now. Crazy! I’m really liking Xomba so far.

In addition to these articles I also previewed my research case study on the Home & Garden category at eHow specifically focusing in on long time writers there who have noticed a large drop in earnings. That experiment culminated in early March with my post Re-Examining The eHow Earnings Algorithm. Check it out if you missed it.

Needless to say my February was pretty booked because in addition to all of this I made a kamikaze run on a niche site that I started from scratch. I made a hunch on a topic getting really big by the end of February and I peaked at about 75 search visitors a day but the niche slowly fizzled and died. My site now gets about 5-10 a day and the topic is slowly fading from the news. I had my fingers crossed on that one and spent some good time setting myself to cash in on it. Too bad. For all my efforts on this one niche site I made $0.00 total. Of course the site does still exist and I do have PR on it after only 5 weeks of being live so it should be a good blog to send backlinks from later on as needed.

So how about earnings you may ask. Let me give a few details about earnings. As always I will stay slightly coy with my actual totals because I don’t feel that is information that should be public. Nobody talks about their paychecks at work; why should things be any different online.

InfoBarrel Earnings Report – February 2010

In the month of February I slowed down considerably on InfoBarrel. Mostly because I was using the site initially to send backlinks to my eHow articles. For the most part I did that plenty. By month end I had over 120 articles posted on InfoBarrel with most every one of them sending backlinks at my eHow articles and some at my blog posts.

Not only that but I continued to go back to my early IB articles and tweaked then to be more SEO friendly. To this date I haven’t yet finished tweaking them all but am satisfied with what is there. This may be a continual project of mine for when I don’t feel up to writing new content.

Anyway, as my work slowed on InfoBarrel my traffic increased as did my earnings. My stats lay below for your pleasure.

Dec 2009 - 90 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $14.61
Jan 2010 - 110 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $15.33
Feb 2010 - 121 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $15.84

As you can see my earnings per search visitor stat is rising every month. Also of note, though I don’t publish my amount of page views I see no problem with saying my page views have increased each month over the previous. February was in fact 6 percent higher than January despite the three days advantage January had. Not bad.

For a long time now I’ve been preaching to everyone to use InfoBarrel to backlink your eHow articles; well I still think this is the best part of IB. Because despite the nice high numbers page views there just aren’t what they are anywhere else. The domain is just not strong enough to generate lots of organic traffic without backlinks. Maybe in the future but for now the links are why the site is great.

In the future I will be placing a huge effort on sending backlinks from IB back to all my quality blog posts; this will take some time but it should bump up my post count there considerably when I get around to this task.

eHow Residual Income Report

eHow continues to be one of the hottest topics in the content site arena these days. Everyone seems to have strong opinions over eHow, their business practices, their long-term outlook for writers, their earnings algorithm. I have even gotten deeply entrenched in trying to analyze their algorithm by watching earnings trends very closely and writing about them very thoroughly here on this blog. However I don’t believe I have ever stated passionately one way or another what I believe about eHow and the merits of writing for them.

I haven’t said what I think because frankly I don’t know what I think. I know eHow is the easiest site to make money with quickly but will they be around in 5-10 years? I don’t know. Will their earnings algorithm change for the worse? I don’t know. The thing is however the same questions and answers can be said for any site you don’t own. The same can be said for Blogspot blogs by Google Blogger which I host virtually all of my blogs on.

I don’t know the answer to these questions so I continue to use them until I see evidence otherwise. The only caveat being I try to diversify. This is why I now write for eHow, InfoBarrel, Xomba, and a few Blogger Blogs. In the future I will likely experiment with Hubpages, Weebly, and Wordpress. Nobody knows what will happen to a site if you don’t own and control everything yourself. So I march on.

Getting back to my residual income from eHow in February I want to say that most of it was residual. For the most part during the month of February I was involved in projects circling around InfoBarrel, Article Marketing, Niche Blogs, and Xomba though I did add three articles to my eHow library and a fairly solid collection of backlinks to older articles there early in the month.

The earnings dip that I experienced in January by the way disappeared completed and I saw the best month ever for earnings at eHow for me in terms of raw dollars and in terms of earnings per 1000 page views. Due to the short month my page view total was fairly flat but the efficiency of those articles was very good.

My eHow earnings stats for February 2010 are below:

• 77 published articles earned at a combined rate of $11.78 per 1,000 PV – up from $8.30 in January. Last month I stated that the $8.30/1000 PV to be a temporary dip due to the eHow UK fix. This month my thoughts were confirmed as my earnings pace rebounded to an all time high. Thank you eHow for the redirects – there I said it.
• 80 percent of my earnings came from 22 percent of my articles – up from 19 percent in January. – Always pleased to have this number higher.
• 20 percent of my earnings came from 36 percent of my articles – up from 38 percent in January.
• 42 percent of my articles had no earnings at all – down from 43 percent in January. – Would be nice to see this number drop down into the 30s sometime soon.
• Overall, 9% of my published articles have never earned a penny (7 articles). This is a slight improvement from last month. In the future I may start lifting these from the site to publish elsewhere for backlinks however this is likely going to more work than I feel is worth it.

My eHow Earnings Trends
August 2009 - $8.84 / 1000 Page Views
September 2009 - $9.76 / 1000 Page Views
October 2009 - $10.19 / 1000 Page Views
November 2009 - $10.25 / 1000 Page Views
December 2009 - $10.41 / 1000 Page Views
January 2010 - $8.30 / 1000 Page Views
February 2010 - $11.78 per 1000 Page Views

As you can see from the above stats the trend in earnings efficiency is basically improving month after month. This is (I think) due to the ad optimization. The longer your article sits online making money from Adsense the better Adsense gets at knowing which ads will convert into clicks. This is why the efficiency of earnings increases over time. It also could be due to editing articles after publication for better optimization but not in my case because I never go back to edit my articles.

Regarding Page view totals I don’t disclose these because you could simply calculate what I make and I have chosen to keep this information confidential however I will say that my page views were flat for the month over January.

Other Residual Income Streams

I’ve got a few other streams of residual income to report, most notably my main blog, How To Live A Longer Life which saw another excellent month. It wasn’t a record breaker in terms of dollars or earnings per 1000 PV but it was close. Also I earned small bits on Hubpages (I’ve got less than 10 articles there; this is not worth going into) and my niche blogs are not yet monetized for the most part. Again this is not worth delving into yet. In future months I will have to start addressing these as they will only become significant in time.

Xomba Xomblurbs
I plan on doing an entire lengthy post devoted to Xomba in the near future. Can’t say when because I’ve got some travels coming up and may not have much time online available to me for at least a week but to summarize I’ll say this.

Roughly 19 days ago I started a Xomba Xomblurb Experiment. In the past 19 days I’ve posted over 200 Xomblurbs for the sole purpose of funneling traffic through the nofollow links Xomba offers to try and get a trickle of targeted search traffic to my archived blog posts that don’t get any traffic at all. As of today, less than 3 weeks into this project Xomba is my number one source of referral traffic to my longevity blog, my number one source of referral traffic converting to earnings on my blog, and I already am making more money on the Blurbs themselves in Adsense that I make on the 120 Infobarrel articles I have up. My earning efficiency at Xomba is amazing.

Even though they only split Adsense views with you at a 50 percent clip all of the views convert better. My Xomblubs so far have the highest CTR in Adsense of any of my web properties. I fully expect this to be a good long term relationship.

Because Adsense won’t allow you to publish detailed stats I can’t say what my earnings per 1000 PV is at Xomba but let’s just say it’s more than twice as good as eHow or InfoBarrel. I definitely recommend Xomba Xomblurbs to anyone and everyone! You can sign up on your own or be kind and sign up under my referral link. If you sign up or are already a member there stay tuned for my upcoming in depth post on Xomba and How to effectively work the system.

Of Note – Upcoming Focus of this Blog
I said this in my last online residual earnings report; I don’t expect this blog to ever only be about writing blogs and content articles for money. I want to round out the concept of residual income. In the future expect a slow introduction to a wider variety of topics all relating to residual income. I plan on touching on the business side of things and what to do with the residual income we make to leverage it and turn the income into compounded residual income. This will be slow to come but it will come.

Also, these residual income reports are great and I like looking back on them as I thinks many others do as well but I am going to switch this to a quarterly report in the future. This means you can expect another one of these in a month for the 1st quarter and then one every three months thereafter. I’m sure you understand why as residual income fluctuates and a quarterly report will smooth out the results. It will also focus my efforts on making money rather than talking about what I made.

Overall Online Residual Earnings Goal

Last month I benefited from increasing revenues on my blogs to increase my residual income; this month the gains came from InfoBarrel and eHow predominantly. Due to the short month the increase in my goal was slight but it was still there. In January at was at 2.62 Percent achieved and this month I’m at 2.81 percent. – March, BTW, is on pace to blow this out of the water. I’m seeing unbelievable gains across the board. That however is another post. :)

Your comments are always welcome and appreciated.