Moving into my first year as full time internet entrepreneur is both a stressful and exciting time. I’ve decided that I would document my process by sharing my earnings publicly via this blog. These posts aren’t meant to brag or anything instead I’m trying to use this as a means to help motivate myself to reach my goal of $150k in 2010 while at the same time keeping me publicly accountable. Besides, I know internet entrepreneurs out there making significantly more money than I do (most of them I met at the Elite Retreat). In any case, I believe what I share in these reports will help other part time internet entrepreneurs looking to make the leap full time and newbies alike. While I personally didn’t have the luxury of deciding when to quit my job and work for myself – because I was fired – I am always willing to help out others that ask questions. I respond to every blog comment as well as personal emails. With that disclaimer in place, let’s move onto the earnings continued after the break:

Income Graph:

Analysis

Amazon Associates:

My biggest earner of the month was of course the Amazon Associates program with $5,595.79 at a whopping 90% piece of the pie. I knew this number would drop after my record high of about $13,000 in December but I’m really not that upset with the results. Of course more is always better, but shopping months in particular are always going to be huge (just check out my tips on how to improve your Amazon Associates earnings). My goal moving forward with Amazon will be to continue to maintain a $5,000+ per month earnings window.

Google Adsense:

Google Adsense was also cut nearly in half over December’s level but I’m not too concerned about the results. One of the big pushes I’m working on right now is in spending more time this month really testing and analyzing ways to improve my Google Adsense earnings through minor tweaks (i.e. color, border / no border) as well as mixing up the placement. I’ll of course document this process along with my results so that you can help improve your Adsense earnings as well. My goal for Google Adsense is to reach $1,000+ per month before Q2 and move on from there.

eBay Partner Network:

I’ve been testing this program out and I think it has some potential to be a solid earner, but again like Google Adsense I need to experiment more with placement, colors, etc. I use PHPbay exclusively to power my eBay partner network ads and the plugin works really well. If you’re looking to implement ads on your blog from the eBay partner network I recommend try it out. The price is currently $79.

Private Advertisers:

This is something I’m looking to heavily push in 2010 and what I believe will be my best chance at succeeding in my goal of earning over $150,000 in 2010. I think that using Private Advertisers over programs like Google Adsense and eBay Partner Network will always provide more money because you’re cutting out the middle man. More importantly, if you have a web property that matches up really well with a company that sells a product related to your niche then you can often times find a solid recurring revenue stream. You can also petition them for some freebies to giveaway on your website too :). Part of why I went to CES was to network and find people at companies I can build a lasting relationship with. This will ultimately lead to me feeling comfortable enough to sell them on the idea of paying for advertising on my websites. I believe by years end this figure could rival the $5,000k plus I currently pull in from Amazon Associates.

Wrap up:

So my main focus points for February include optimizing both Google Adsense and eBay Partner Network as well as selling more private advertising space. I currently use OIOpublisher to serve ads on my blogs and I use that plugin to help optimize and test my ad space. Without a doubt it’s the best $47 I’ve spent in this space. If you’re a blogger and don’t have it yet, buy it. I may drop Infolinks entirely. At only $42.94 per month it probably isn’t even worth the money when web visitors tend to get annoyed by the double underlink ads. Then again, I see them on all the big websites so perhaps people just have to live with it? There are a few other sales here and there that come in during the month and I’ll try to do a better job of including those in these reports as well i.e. SEObook. But perhaps I’ll set a minimum of a $100 and then if a program doesn’t make that amount I’ll simply leave it out of my reports. What do you think? Want to see it all?

In any case I’m looking forward to next month and hopefully earning more than $6,231.52. My next post will cover a difficult topic for any self employed person and should be a good read for all – How much should I pay myself? After that I’ll give an update to my case study on how I moved this blog from ChrisGuthrie.net to it’s new home here at MakeMoneyontheInternet.com UpFuel.com.