Now that June has come to a close it’s time for another income report. You can click the “Continue reading…” link here or below to skip right to the goods, but for those that are new to my blog I like to include this disclaimer: These income reports aren’t meant to brag at all as many people make considerably more money than me, 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. With that said, let’s get onto the earnings:

Income Graph:

Income Analysis:

I decided to include every source of income from my online business like I did last month so that you can see even more detail. This takes a lot more time and was more of a pain on my end so I may not do it in the future and instead just stick to income earners over $100 in future income reports.

Amazon Associates:

My biggest earner of the month was again the Amazon Associates program with $4,734.50 which took up 79% of my total income. I’m down about $300 from last month’s Amazon earnings; however, I believe this is primarily due to the slow down in overall traffic caused by Summer. Numerous people email me every day asking for more details on how I earn money with Amazon’s Associates program and because of the requests I am releasing a free eBook that outlines a lot of the information you can use to make money with Amazon (subscribe to my blog so that you don’t miss out).For those of you looking for info you can use right now please check out my article on the Top 7 tips I used to make $41,438.42 in 2009 with Amazon Associates. I also suggest that if you’re struggling to earn money with Amazon Associates be sure to avoid these common pitfalls.

Google Adsense:

Google Adsense is about double where it was in the beginning of the year; however, it is still over $500 away from where I’d like it to be ($1,000+). I haven’t stopped doing any optimization of the ads, but the gains from my optimization are starting to level out so it’s more about gaining traffic now. If you’re struggling to make much from Adsense remember that first you need to have traffic and second that you need to optimize the ad units to find the best performance. Testing is very important and I do it easily by cycling my ad units via the OIOpublisher plugin.

Private Advertisers:

I haven’t had much luck with private advertising but I’m going to contact some companies directly and put my sales skills to the test. I haven’t tried to actively pitch any of my websites to companies yet and instead have relied on third party ad networks to sell ad space which hasn’t worked well at all. As I’ve said before, I believe my best chance at succeeding in my goal of earning over $150,000 in 2010 will require me to start making at least four figures a month from private advertisers. I’m sure I could open up ad space on this blog here and make some additional money, but I still like a clean look devoid of advertising. I would only want advertisers whose products and services I believe in which adds a lot of work for me if I have to screen each advertiser. I believe it’s not worth selling advertising until I could earn over $1,000 a month from this blog (10,000 subscribers would probably be enough to do that). What do you think though? Do you care if I sell advertising on this blog or not?

Vibrant Media, Click Bank, eBay Partner Network and other Misc Earnings

I earned $187.15 from Vibrant Media and really should expand it across my other niche websites. So far I’ve pretty much determined that the in text advertising hasn’t cannibalized my other income sources but I may try and do some more testing that runs every other day with the ad code to see if clicks are higher to my other networks than without. ClickBank is another source I’m looking to try out more in the future as I’ve slowly started to make decent money with them. eBay Partner Network only gave $73.77, but I only use them on a couple websites in a single skyscraper ad slot (sort of like an Adsense alternative). PriceGrabber hasn’t been doing very well for me, but I don’t provide them much visibility so if I did push them more I could probably make much more with them each month. I got several referrals for PHPzon and one for OIO Publisher which probably came from my trusted resources page. Lastly, I decided to try out a sponsored blog post here in June. I was paid $150 to write a short summary about a service I was already interested in checking out so it was a win win. That was done via Social Spark.

Plans for Next Month:

I’m going to contact some companies directly that I know might be interested in advertising on my various websites because the third party networks haven’t worked well (BuySellAds, Technorati etc). I’m getting more requests from companies to advertise on my blog here, so I may be taking some of these on as well but only if it’s enough money to move the needle otherwise it’s not worth it to me. I’ve never understood why people even bother to sell ad space if it’s only like $10 for the spot.

Diversification Strategies:

I’m having my very first iPhone application developed by a company I found through Odesk this month (I get the final estimate tomorrow) and I’m hoping to have that completed for under $1,000 but we will see how it goes. I’m also starting a new case study that will be run on this blog about affiliate marketing and I’ll be working with ClickBooth to do it. I met some of the guys there back at Elite Retreat and I’ve talked with Eric Schechter from ClickBooth for a while now and they seem like a good company to work with. So starting this month I’ll be trying my hand at more traditional style paid affiliate marketing as opposed to focusing on just Amazon like I have been doing. Lastly, as I said in May I have a few major website ideas that I’m going to pursue that if done correctly could be seven or eight figure sales a few years from now. So for those ideas I’m still in the process of finding programmers in Seattle that want to partner up (if you are one please contact me). As these are developed I’ll cover them on this blog in more detail of course.

Stick Around:

In addition to the affiliate marketing case study I’ll be running in July I also have a free eBook on making money with Amazon.com that you can only get by subscribing to my newsletter. The eBook is based on feedback I received in this article, so if you have any questions that haven’t been asked please don’t hesitate to share in that blog post. You can conveniently sign up for my newsletter below and in doing so you’ll receive a free eBook on my top ways to make money online along with 3 free WordPress themes just for joining: