Saturday, December 31, 2011

Monthly Total Earnings for December 2011

Well this is the last monthly earnings total for 2011 and it brings with it some interesting developments. I had hoped to have set up a number of Amazon review sites in time for Christmas. Whilst I did achieve this I had not developed them as much as I would have liked nor did I think I had done enough to get decent traffic. Nevertheless a couple of the sites did attract quite a bit of traffic in the run up to Christmas and made a number of sales. In total I made 64 sales on Amazon.com and 60 sales on Amazon.co.uk this month. This made me a combined total of $229.00. This smashes my previous record by a significant margin. I do have to be realistic though and recognize that sales will plummet in the months following the Christmas rush. However, it is very encouraging that I have been able to achieve this and if I can develop the other review sites further then I should be able to expect some sustained growth in commissions.

Unfortunately Amazon takes a couple of months to verify its commissions so I won't get to see this money until February. Traditionally in these monthly earnings posts I only count what I have actually received so the total is not nearly as impressive. Here is what I have received this month:

Clickbank: $20.58
Surveys: $6.21
Squidoo: $1.23

Total = $28.02

Not a very impressive total in the end, but I am looking forward to receiving my Amazon commissions in February.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Why Has Squidoo Locked My Lens?

I have been building Squidoo lenses for quite a while now, although recently I have been spending less time on them preferring instead to build my own sites. It seems that recently Squidoo has been getting stricter on lensmasters who do not keep to the terms of use and any dubious lenses are locked. The reasons for getting a lens locked usually relate to things like containing duplicate content, being overly promotional or just plain spammy.

I have had a couple of lenses locked previously and to be honest I don't think I had much to complain about as there was some duplicate content lifted from Amazon and the lenses existed purely to sell a product with my Amazon affiliate links. I figured there was no real way back for these so I just deleted them.

However, I have more recently had another lens blocked that contains entirely original content and is not promotional - it does contain three Amazon affiliate links to books related to the subject, but this is entirely within the rules. It also contains Squidoo's Ebay module. It contain a dead link which is what I am guessing tripped off Squidoo systems. This was to a Clickbank product which no longer exists - this was one single link at the end of the lens. I have now removed this link.

I have e-mailed the folks at Squidoo a while ago now and have had no response. This is very frustrating as if there is no response within 60 days then the lens will just be deleted from Squidoo. This is all rather ironic as this is probably the most original of my lenses and I really put it together to be useful to other people rather than to make any money. It is the lens that has had the most comments and positive feedback and one of my most visited lenses. Ultimately if I get no response then I will have to export my content elsewhere.

This has dented my faith in Squidoo somewhat, but has reinforced for me the need to focus on my own websites rather than relying on making money from posting content on someone else's.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Total Earnings for November 2011

Another month gone and I have been extremely bad at posting not only here but on my other blog. I had hoped to devote my time to getting some sites ready to maximize my earnings from Christmas, but as ever time has run away from me. I do have some sites which have been making some money from Christmas shoppers, but they are not as well developed and as visible in the search engines as I would like. I am intending to continue to develop these over the coming months and hopefully they will continue to earn me some money.

I have continued to make sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk and I am expecting to receive a payout from both of these shortly. My total this month was particularly helped by a big sale on Ebay.

Here are the totals:

Ebay: $383.38
Clickbank: $11.20
Surveys: $25.04
Swagbucks: $5.00
Squidoo: $2.64

Total = $427.26

A pretty decent total all in all, but this is not something I can really repeat as it was only brought about by selling an item on Ebay that I don't need any more and I don't have many more of those!