Well our tale continues…you will recall we are attempting to secure an income of £1000 from our website in the year to 31st December 2011. This is the 4th month of the project and we have continued to develop the site – so how did we do in April?
This month we again continued to improve the website content, continued with this blog, and also started a twitter account (http://twitter.com/Alex_Brogan) to generate interest and hopefully drive traffic to the website and blog. I also added an affiliate advert to the sidebar of the website. This has not proven to be successful at all, and so I will be removing this asap. But it still means I need to look at how I can maximise any other affiliate income apart from Amazon (we have not managed to generate any non-google / amazon income so far).
For May I intend to add some Google ad units at the bottom of every page, and perhaps some additional google ads on certain pages. Here are the stats for the month:
| Earnings | Pageviews | Adsense Clicks | |
| April 2010 | £38.38 | 7393 | 106 |
| April 2011 | £145.76 | 20022 | 437 |
| Change – April 2010 vs April 2011 | +420% | +235% | +334% |
| Average daily income April 2011 | £4.86 | ||
| Ave per day required May-Dec 2011 to make £1000 (based on Google income) | £2.16 |
The number of visitors to the website in April 2011 was: 10,675 (10,101 in March 2011), of which 9117 (8699 in March 2011) were unique visitors (i.e. they had not previously visited in April 2011). This represents a 5.7% increase in visitor numbers over March 2011.
Incoming Links
Yahoo is showing 50 inlinks – up from 41 last month. For some reason Google is only reporting 39 links – down from 41 last month. I really don’t understand the discrepancy between the results, but this will not help the website page rank on Google which remains stuck at 2. Need to continue trying to drive up the number of inlinks next month probably through doing articles for sites such as ezinearticles.com which will link back to the website.
Affiliate income
Details in April from Amazon were:
| Total Cilcks thro to Amazon | Items ordered | Total Earnings |
| 93 | 3 | £1.81 |
This shows a reduction in orders from 7 last month, and a commensurate reduction in income from £4.19 in March 2011. Disappointing.
Key Points
- All in all April has been another good month
- Earnings have increased again to a daily average in April of £4.86 from £4.38 last month
- Total visitor numbers have increased but only marginally however April was only a 30 day month
- Amazon was a little disappointing this month. Total income from sales so far from Amazon from January 2011 is: £7.47
- For reference the earnings so far for the first 4 months of the project are: Jan: £42.31, Feb: £81.15, March: £135.75, April: £145.76
- Total website earning from 1st Jan to 30th April 2011 stand at: £404.97 from Google ads and £7.47 from Amazon commission = £412.44
- The website now needs to maintain an average daily earnings (Google ads and Amazon) of £2.14 per day to achieve the target £1000 by 31st December 2011.
Things are largely on plan, and we will continue to focus on content, inlinks, social media and better utilisation of google ads on the site to improve income for next month.