Report from Business and Military Leaders: Nation Benefits from Oil Boom, but Global Oil Market Reve
May 11th, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsThe current oil boom is creating tremendous economic benefits for the nation, but unfortunately, it won’t shield the United States from the price volatility that is inherent in the global oil market, according to a new report from business and former military leaders on the Energy Security Leadership Council (ESLC), a project of Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE).
The ESLC report, “The New American Oil Boom: Implications for Energy Security,” examines the notion of energy independence, which is typically defined as ending reliance on foreign oil, in light of the renaissance in domestic liquid fuel production, rising demand from… View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
April Net Worth Report +012% – Never Spend Money You Haven’t Earned Yet (Again!)
April 23rd, 2012 | Posted by Global Investors
It is with mixed feelings that I’m writing this net worth report. I say mixed feelings because on one side, I’ve managed to drop my debt this month. I was able to pay off $1,284 in debts in a month which it pretty good! It’s very good considering everything that’s happened over the past 30 months (I’ll get to that in a second). But the problem is that I was expecting a huge income tax refund this year (roughly 6K) that was meant to pay for my pool (for which I will owe $5,500 on it starting in June). Unfortunately, my tax return wasn’t that big…
The Complexity of Taxes in Quebec
There are lot things I like about living in the Belle Province (I mean besides our big student babies who boycott University for 2 months). Unfortunately, taxes are far from being one! Last year, I received a tax refund of 2K. This year, I put 10K in my RRSP (as compared to the usual 3.5K-4K I’m allowed). This is why I was expecting a much bigger tax refund. But what I didn’t consider (since I’m not doing my own taxes) was the other tax credit that I was eligible for last year and that I’m not this year. Guess what; the tax credit totals roughly 3K! So I’ll let you do the math…. My refund check is slightly under 2K instead of being slightly over 5K! So I’ll have to keep my pool loan until next January so I can pay it off with my year-end bonus… Man, I just can’t wait to have this darn bonus to spend to enjoy myself instead of paying off debts each year!
Having said that, I should have definitely called my accountant prior to making my purchase! At least, I’m not going anywhere on vacation this year so my “vacation budget” can be allocated to pay a part of the pool!
Tons of Expenses in April!
Along with my regular budget, I ran into extra expenses once again. But this time, it was quite brutal! It all started with $450 going towards municipal taxes. I was completely aware of this one but it always takes a hit on my monthly budget since I using my employer’s stock (once or twice a year) to pay for my taxes. Since I already paid $900 in taxes and haven’t cashed a single stock yet, this expense should have shown on my line of credit. But the next expense was unexpected and hurt a lot… cars!
In a single week, I had to pay for $2K in car repairs. When I wrote last month that my car was going to be worth less than a Caramilk, I didn’t think it was going to happen so fast! Well this is what happens when you drive 50,000Km in a single year because you are working at 85km from home! It’s a blessing that I’m now working 4km from home! This should not happen again.
So my total “extra expenses” for this month is $2,467. Considering that I just deposited my income tax refund of $1,945 and my current debt level is $1,284 less than the previous month, I’m pretty happy about April. This means that my monthly spending has dropped enough so I could “technically” (without any bad luck!) decrease my debts by $1,806 per month ($1,284+$2,467-$1,945). This is perfect since my main personal finance goal for 2012 is to drop my total debts below the $300,000 level.
My Secret Debt Killer Weapon
As my plan starts to take place and that I seem to be able to pay for 16K of debts by the end of the year, I’m also counting on 2 secret debt killer weapons. The first one is my employer’s stocks which I cash in annually to pay off some of my debts. I currently invest $500 per month and my employer is giving me a “free” 25% contribution. This why my employer stock goes up so fast. It’s because I have $625 per month of new money coming in. I’m trying to not touch this account for the first time this year and trying to accumulate them. However, if I really need extra money to pay off my debts, I should have around $9,500 in this account by the end of the year. 75% of this amount is redeemable once a year (in order to continue the program). So it makes $7,125 available for me to pay additional debts.
My second secret debt killer weapon is not so secret as you know about it already; it’s my year-end bonus. By switching job, I explained that I should not be making a crazy bonus this year. However, now that I’ve started my new job and that I’m already bringing in results, I might be able to get a decent bonus! I didn’t think that it was possible because I’m starting a whole new book of clients, but apparently, everything is possible! So I might be able to count on a few extra thousand to put towards my debts as well.
Looking Forward to May!
I’m definitely looking forward to May right now as I hope that I’ll have a “normal” month. It has been a shaky start to the year with our newborn, a drop in income due to my parental leave and over 3,5K in car repairs (next time, I’m going to sell my RX-8 and buy a skateboard!). I hope that I’ll be able to post a 1,8K decrease in debts for the first time on this blog! Wish me luck!
Assets:
ASSETS
PREVIOUS
MONTH ($)CURRENT
MONTH ($)CHANGE (%)
CHECKING ACCOUNT
$1,000
$1,000
0.0%
EMPLOYER STOCK
ACCOUNT $3,574
$3,898
9.1%
RRSP ACCOUNT
$29,167
$28,628
-1.8%
PENSION PLAN
$20,218
$20,218
0.0%
HOME
$345,640
$345,640
0.0%
COMPANY SHARES
$98,000
$98,000
0.0%
MAZDA TRIBUTE
$16,926
$16,492
-2.6%
MAZDA RX-8
$4,800
$4,400
-8.3%
TOTAL
$519,325
$518,276
-0.2%
Liabilities :
DEBTS
PREVIOUS
MONTH ($)CURRENT
MONTH ($)CHANGE (%)
CREDIT CARD
$6,371
$6,152
-3.4%
LINE OF CREDIT
$19,945
$19,922
-0.1%
HELOC
$263,400
$263,000
-0.2%
CAR LOAN
$16,926
$16,492
-2.6%
Personal Loan
$10,416
$10,208
-2.0%
TOTAL
$317,058
$315,774
-0.4%
View full post on The Financial Blogger
April 5th, 2012 | Posted by Global Investors
Last week, I declared that I will stop my blog income report. But it doesn’t mean that I won’t be disclosing what I do within my online company. This is why I’m modifying my Blog Income Report into a Blog Evolution Report. I think I’ve proven myself by providing my income for the past 14 months, now it’s time for you to show some faith and follow my blog without knowing the real numbers. Don’t worry; you’ll still get a few hints here and there 
.
In this “revamped” edition of my report, the categories have changed a little bit. I ask you to suggest other categories if there is a specific topic you want me to cover. Instead of talking about my numbers, I’ll be disclosing information regarding my strategies for various topics.
The most important stepping stone of our business is obviously traffic. I recently shared our most recent traffic jump experience through Pinterest.com (click here to see the huge traffic spike). This is always fun to see when looking at your stats and graphics. Unfortunately, such traffic peaks usually don’t generate much income or additional subscribers. It’s exactly what happened again this time; a lot of traffic, a modest Adsense spike and a few new RSS subscribers.
I would rather work on more sustainable and meaningful traffic hikes. For example, we host the Best Stock Pick Contest for 2012 and The Dividend Growth Index on a quarterly basis. These 2 group projects enable us to share readers with other bloggers that are interested in the same topics. I’m currently looking to start another group project with the same idea in mind. When you gather a few great bloggers and share your point of view on the same topic, it automatically drives more traffic to everybody. The best part is that it offers readers the possibility to follow other bloggers in your niche. They’re always fun projects to do… and it’s good for natural link building on top of everything else!
As I recently mentioned in my “how to survive Google” article, my goal is to improve my affiliate program income. I’m currently working on redesigning one of my sites in order to place affiliate programs in more strategic places on this site. How do I know that it will work? It’s simple: I’ve studied other blogs who are making more money than I with the same affiliate programs. I looked at their traffic, design and how they present the products. This is how I know where to make modifications. I hope to recoup my redesign cost within 4 months with this technique.
I’ve taken a great amount of time during my parental leave to create a new newsletter project. I wanted to create a huge newsletter funnel (click here to learn more about how I manage my newsletters) that leads to an “epic series”. The newsletter series is 12 emails of 1,000 words each. It covers 1 specific topic from A to Z. It was a huge project as I wanted to combine the idea of something incredibly useful that will also lead to more income (through affiliate programs).
I invested several hours and had it read by 3 different individuals to make sure that #1 it was useful and #2 it wasn’t too spammy. There is a very thin line between offering a link to a useful affiliate product and plugging a spammy link to make money. Most people are allergic to advertisements so it’s important to only offer useful and coherent products/services. I removed several affiliate links throughout the series as I would rather keep my audience than push products down their throats. I am almost ready now to launch the series; it should start in April. I’m really looking forward to generating some additional income .
My niche site projects are going pretty well. I was even able to make $13.73 from my latest one; EMT Classes. After 1 month in action, I was able to generate $13.73 in Adsense and get roughly 10-15 visitors per day now. About 75% of them are coming from search engines and this is exactly what I was looking for. Now, the next step will be to gradually increase the traffic through several link building strategies. I’ve made $320.24 in Adsense only across my niche sites. I’m still far away from my 2K monthly objective but its increasing continuously.
Writing a book for me is synonymous with having a lot of fun. However, I’m currently in the only period that I truly hate; revising and rewriting! Since I’m doing 2 versions of the same book (Canadian and American versions), I have to revise and rewrite half of it to make sure that each book is genuine content. It’s quite a challenge to stay motivated and can see the slow progression in the past 6 weeks as compared to what I accomplished in the last Quarter. My main objective this quarter will be to finish the book and send it for formatting. I’m also going to have a Kindle version to cover a bigger market.
My 2 main focuses for April will be to launch my big newsletter funnel and to finish writing the second version of my eBook. If I accomplish both this month, it will be a great month .
Do you have any questions about my new format? Do you like it? I know it’s not like providing real figures… but hey! I’m still trying to share as much as I can!
View full post on The Financial Blogger
February Blog Income Report + 1 Big Announcement
March 5th, 2012 | Posted by Global Investors
Hey, what’s up?
We are starting the March Madness with a big announcement today! But if you want to know what I’m talking about, you’ll have to read until the end of this post to know what I’m talking about J. Do you remember my 2012 blogging goals?, well one major step has been accomplished in order to reach the average of $15,000 per month that I’ve fixed as a milestone to achieve in 2012. Don’t jump too fast, I’m not telling you that I’m starting my streak right away. So let’s look at the number first and then, we will see what is so important in my business!
We are definitely on a roll in term of traffic. All our major sites have taken a few more visitors per month and I’m surprised each time I look at my traffic stats! On top of that, some of my niche websites are starting to get some tractions and I don’t count them in this stats. For example, Canadian Dividend Stock got over 4,500 visitors and What is dividend is surfing over 3,300 for about 4 months now. The secret behind my success? Quality content and heavy internal back linking! Each time I remember that I’ve wrote an interesting piece about the same topic, I link it back on my new post. This doesn’t take much time but it brings continuous SEO to your site.
If the traffic goes up, Adsense follows! This is one of the basic rules you have to remember while monetizing your site: you need Google’s traffic to make Google’s dollars. I’ve slightly modified my color theme for The Dividend Guy Blog (by taking off the red url and changing it to grey on the big ads) and it worked perfectly. I’m now looking to make this switch on every channel to see if I’ll see the same result. At $2,500/month, I’m now shy of $1,000/month to reach my goal of making $3,500/month with Adsense. The secret to gain the next $1,000 monthly is quite simple when you think about it:
- Increase your SE traffic
- Increase your CTR with better color theme and ad placement
- Write SEO friendly articles about things that pay (such as investment or credit card ).
In order to achieve this, I’ll play a little bit more with Market Samurai in order to find topics where I can write series about and start ranking for additional keywords. I haven’t done this for a while but I think that it’s import to go back to this strategy in order to increase my Adsense income. The good news is that I’ll be making more in February than I did in January with 3 days less! I can’t wait to see how much I’ll do in March with those extra days!
This has been a very slow month in term of brokering deals. I was expecting to close an additional $10,000 worth of deal this month and it didn’t go as planned. The arrival of Caleb is probably a part of the answer. The other part is that I wasn’t too greedy and I didn’t go after any advertisers this month. This is probably why it has been a slow month. However, I’ve my VA coming gradually coming back from maternity leave that will help me with this. She will be handling most of the admin behind all my private deals and broker services. Hopefully, I’ll have better news to share with you in March!
Then again, this is not the biggest month in term of private advertising. For some reasons, I’ve lost 2 major deals (that would have included my own sites + my clients). The sad part is that both deals were lost due to “acts of God”. It wasn’t related to bad negotiation skills or a bad move in term of business relationship. It was 2 unrelated events happening on my advertiser’ side and both of us didn’t have any control over it.
If there is one awesome point in this month is definitely the fact that my niche websites are growing steadily. We start to see some interesting traffic and the sources of income are not coming solely from Adsense anymore. With Sunil’s method, I’ve recently developed a new niche site for EMT: EMT Classes. Since I’m on paternity leaves, I’ve the luxury of working each night on my sites while I watch over Caleb. This allowed me to build a whole site with about 70 unique articles. Instead of paying to build my site, I’ve simply taken a lot of my own time and build it exactly the way I want. This is a big challenge as it’s one of our only niche sites that is not related to the financial world. However, it follows my niche sites rules:
- It’s a sizeable niche: there are a lot of searches for everything regarding paramedic courses and EMT jobs.
- People are ready to spend: EMT students want to make sure they past their exam and they are willing to pay a few extra bucks to make it happen.
I’ll tell you more on this later… if EMT is a success .
Since I’ve taken a lot of my time to create EMT, I haven’t spent much to operate our business. So the cost of running our operation is fairly stable once again. I don’t expect to spend more on my business this year as most of our projects can be done within a $4K/month budget.
I’m a bit disappointed in February results to be honest. I know I’ve worked hard during several nights and, unfortunately, results don’t happen overnight. Instead of working on immediate revenue generators (such as running after advertisers), I’ve preferred to think about the future of my company and take action that will assure a sustainable business model.
On the other side, February 2012 revenues are kicking February 2011! (I’m +32.10% as compared to last year). The best part is that my cost structure hasn’t increase by a cent! In fact, my cost forecast for 2011 was even higher! But I better be careful; March 2011 was a killer month last year so I better be ready to make some extra effort in order to make it!
On yeah… a thousand words and still no news about this big announcement J. I’ve actually achieve one of my 2012 blogging goals already: I bought not 1 but 2 sites!
Fabulously Broke (Read the introductionary post here)
I really like FB as the previous author was embracing a lot of my values and I miss writing about personal finance stuff as TFB has become a more entrepreneurial blog now. I’m expecting to write on this once a week and write an exclusive newsletter every 2 weeks. So if you miss my personal finance thinking; you will find it again on this blog .
As for everyday minimalist, you may laugh because it’s definitely not my bag. However, my partner is a little bit more toward this idea. Since both were selling in a package deal, we thought it wouldn’t hurt to buy both of them (there is also a great synergie between the 2 sites).
Those 2 sites are a major addition to our company as each of them qualify under the major sites criterion. I’m giving myself 2 more months to fully integrate them into our business model, but I’m sure I’ll bet able to make a killing with those 2 new sites . Watch out for killer traffic stats in next month blog income report!
View full post on The Financial Blogger
Blog Monthly Income Report A Kung Fu Panda Month!
February 2nd, 2012 | Posted by Global InvestorsI really feel like Kung Fu Panda while writing this post.
I feel like him because I LOVE eating and I made some delicious dishes over the past 2 weeks…
Oh wait… this is not where we should be going with the post.
There is another reason why I feel like Kung Fu Panda….
It’s because I’ve kicked ass in January!!!
It’s really about the income (I’m pretty stable on that side) but it’s more about how quickly the business evolved in a single month:
- I’ve made major advances in my book.
- I successfully monetized my mailing list for the first time.
- We closed some great deals through our advertising management service.
- We found a professional designer to do both our book layout and a mini site to sell it.
This is why I’m so excited!!! But the stats for January are cool too! Let’s look at them:
Ahhh, it feels good to be back to normal! This shows similar stats to the ones published back in November. However, we had a few server difficulties with some of our sites during the month of January. Therefore, I expect next month to be even bigger. I’m actually preparing a few great posts about servers and hosting services. If you have any questions, now’s the time to send them .
February’s stats should be a lot bigger due to the inclusion of our latest purchase too. I’m not going to disclose the site name since the transfer is currently in progress (so it’s not quite ours yet lol!).
The Adsense December payment was obviously smaller than the previous month but stats have come back for January. There is one thing I find particularly interesting: my niche websites are starting to contribute more significantly of late. In January (for which the payment will land in February), What is Dividend and Canadian Dividend Stock generated over $150 in Adsense! If I can continue to increase their traffic, these 2 sites will become cash cows as well 
. I’m now waiting to see their PR increase to include a few private adverting deals on them!
While I didn’t receive many cheques in January, the bulk of my income for this segment came from my broker activities. I’ve closed a total of $10,775 in advertising for my clients which generated a profit of $1,426. My profit is still higher than my 8.33% commission rate since I get paid for full commission on a 6 month deal (and the client gets the full 6 month renewal if I renew the ad). With this month, I’m getting closer to my $2,000/month objective for 2012. What will help me is that I’ll have a VA take care of managing the deals starting in February .This is why I expect to be able to rack up a steady $10,000/month worth of advertising for my clients (hopefully!). I must admit that since the beginning of this “official” program, I never thought of making this much with it!
I don’t want to go crazy on private advertising. I’ve written it many times but my goal is to keep an average of $5K-$6K. I see a trend from advertiser to aim for 6 month and 12 month deals. I can’t complaint about this trend since you get more money upfront and advertisers usually renew 6 month deals. They get a rebate by paying upfront while I get assured that my ad spot is taken for the year. If you want to know how I manage my ads, I suggest you start by reading my “build a media kit” series.
Here’s good news and bad news at the same time: the good news is that I was able to generate for $267 in adsense for the month. The bad news is that I wasn’t able to generate any big private advertising deals. So the “stable” income is increasing but it doesn’t put more money in my pocket either! I definitely have a long way to go before I meet my $2K/month objective. I’ve made some great progress but I still need to tweak all my sites to make it happen.
About a year ago, I wrote about my cost structure. Many of you were skeptical on why I was spending so much on my company. I was forecasting a total cost of 66,7K which never happened (my main VA went in maternity leaves and was not replaced). This is how I got down to spending roughly $4K on my online company since then.
I can understand your skepticism since 4K/month seems a lot of money for a sideline. However, I want to outline that my cost structure has not grown for the past year while my income has. In fact, my last 6 months show an average of $10,833 while the last 12 months show an average income of $9,770. So the extra $1,000 of income is just pure profit in our pockets . In 2012, I expect to have an average expense of $5K per month (4K as a stable budget + random peaks according to our needs). For example, we will soon pay for another design for our ebook and mini site. This will cost about 2K in total.
I’m very proud of what we earned in January even though it’s not an astronomical number. Why? Because it’s the fifth month in a row we show an income exceeding 10K. This is also an increase of 43% compared to January 2011 (when we made $7,626). I’m posting our blog income progression with a comparison to the 2011 numbers (I hope that all the red columns will be bigger than the blue columns ).
In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be home (as we’re expecting our 3rd child to arrive anytime now!).
View full post on The Financial Blogger
December Blog Income Report, I won’t Impress Anyone With This
January 9th, 2012 | Posted by Global Investors
I must admit it, the end of the Holidays were brutal to me. While I was away from my computer, I was pretty busy with other things!
The first one was being Mr. Mom while my wife had to stop doing everything so we can have a chance that the baby doesn’t arrive before she reaches 36 weeks (which she just did last Thursday, thank God!)
The second one was being Mr. Broke because my darn car stopped working (in front on my son’s school on December 22nd!). It will cost over $1,000 to bring it back to life (starter, coil, wiring and all the stuff that makes your car start in the morning).
The third one was being Mr. Sick as I caught 2 colds (yup 2 back to back!) during the Holidays and I finished that with huge back pain (simply because I threw my Xmas three out the window with one hand!).
The fourth one was being Mr. Fat, ‘cause I ate a lot and stopped going to the gym at the same time (note to myself: this is a very bad calculation of calories!). With my back pain, I won’t go back to the gym until later on this week so I’ll become Mr. Fatter by then!
So because of these adventures, I have become pretty late with everything to do with my company… including my blog income report! And I won’t impress anyone with this update… as I’m not impressed either! Why? Not because I have had a bad month, but because I’m putting additional pressure on my shoulders to get higher numbers month after month.
When it doesn’t happen, I smirk when looking at my results, at best. And this is the case for December…
I’m not surprised to see my traffic head down in December as it follows the “regular” trend in my market. Since I focus more on entrepreneurship and investing topics, I don’t get many visitors since they are all searching for “Xmas gift”, “frugal Holidays” and “Boxing Day deals”. This is also the reason why I stop writing between Christmas and the New Year; because nobody is reading my sites! Lol!
It is nice to see that we have recovered from the Panda Hit and as a result Adsense income is slowly coming back to its previous level. While December’s payment will be lower, I think we could hope to see Adsense income head back up to $2,500 in January. My best months were paying me over $3,000 so I’m still behind at the moment. One of the reasons was that I have cancelled almost all my Adsense blocks on The Financial Blogger a few months ago. What is funny is that by keeping Adsense on about 10 pages (out of 1000+ pages on TFB), I’m still making roughly $300/month. It gives you a great example of how much you can make with your best Adsense pages and how little the rest is doing!
This was another great month on this side of my business with a contribution from both affiliates and my Ad management service. While I worked less than 15 days in the month, I was still able to generate $4,100 worth of deals for my clients and I have another deal sealed (getting the payment this week!) for another $5K+. My goal with this Ad management service is to generate slightly over $10,000 in deals so I can earn nearly $1,000/month in commission (I charge 1 month worth of advertising per year for commission, so it’s the equivalent to 8.3%).
So far, I’ve been adding about 10 sites per month since November and I wanted to limit it to a small number because I wanted to make sure that I give the best service to my clients. To this date, I’m at over 40 clients and I’ll have to put additional clients on a “waiting list” since I want to make sure that I provide more deals to my existing client first. I’m currently streamlining this process to make sure I can have a VA do all the work in a few months in a highly effective way (after all, productivity is one of my biggest strengths ).
Private advertising is still my Achilles’ Heel as my monthly income heavily depends on how great (or bad!) I do with it. This month, I hadn’t had the chance to close a major deal as I had been able to for the past 2 months. The private advertising business has its highs and lows but across our network, we are able to maintain a certain level. I’d say that my “regular” month is considered to be between $5K and $6K and a great month will be around 8K. If you are wondering how I manage my private advertising, I suggest you read my How to build a Media kit series where I talk pretty much about everything I do to get my money.
This was another interesting month from my niche websites. While I didn’t get to the level I expected for 2011 (I was aiming for $1000/month), I now have a very stable $200 in Adsense income and I can sell a few private advertising deals here and there. With my latest website (Canadian Dividend Stock), I’m also building a mailing list to add more value to the site. After 3 months, I’m now at 102 subscribers!
In 2012, I’m not expecting to launch many other niche sites. I would rather work on the existing ones while I plan on launching only 3 other sites that still be considered as niche sites but with a larger scale. The designs are currently being done and I expect to launch the first site at the end of Q1.
Wow! More expenses and less income! That sucks… not really Because the $2,000 extra in expenses went to people! We gave away 2 iPads (about $600 each) plus $800 for charity. Each year, our goal is to double our donation. We started with $100 each, then $200 each and this year $400 each. That will be fun to give $1,600 next year!
So the net income for this month is about $5,000. What was cool about December is while I personally made $2,500 (50% of it), I only worked 2 weeks… We are gradually getting to the point that we can really call this passive income as we are making more and more without necessarily working more! Here’s the income progression for 2011:
As you can see, our business is becoming a lot more stable since September. I’m expecting a good month in January as people usually go back to their computer and setup their personal finances .
I have a feeling that 2012 will be a turning point for our company. We are going to work on many major projects (3 sites + 2 books) and this year’s results will definitely determine if we have a company or a good sideline. I’m eager to see which one it is!!!!
View full post on The Financial Blogger
Blog Income Report Record Month!
December 6th, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsAnother great month has passed and I can tell you that I’ve surpassed my all time record in November. How much did I make in online income? You’ll have to read ‘till the end to know more about it .
After being hit twice by Google (once in April that made us drop 30% of our traffic and another one in October that helped us gain most of our ranking back), we are growing once again. Unfortunately, we have had some severe server issues across our network and I apologize for that. We have addressed these problems and recently switched servers too. I’m preparing a big series on servers and hosting services, so your questions are welcome!
As I mentioned last month, the fact that our search engine traffic went up is directly correlated to Adsense income going up too. Our October revenue is 17% more than what we received in September and I can confirm that our November income (that will figure in our December income statement) will be even bigger. We are slowly getting back towards the marvelous $3,000+ earned back in February!
So there is one big lesson to learn from this: search engine visitors are those who click on Adsense. You can’t have a better proof than this! The other thing I can confirm is that investment topics do very well with Adsense. My most profitable keywords are all investment related. I know that there are other topics that generate a lot of money too but I want to speak about what I truly know. So if you want to increase your Adsense income, you have to do 3 things
1) Write investment articles (duh!)
2) Include Adsense in your investment articles with a blended color set
3) Optimize these articles for search engines (hint: you are better off talking about very specific topics so you can rank more easily).
The best examples would be our latest investing niche websites:
These 3 sites contain very specific keywords that are all investment related. I don’t get that much traffic from them (total of 4,498 visits last month) but I made $93.01 in Adsense from these visits. That’s $0.02 per visitor as compared to $0.007 for my whole network. So if I can now focus on increasing the number of visitors on these sites, I’ll be making a lot more money from Adsense .
There is a great increase in this part of our business and this is due to our recent Ad Management Service that we launched during our latest blog income report. After I made the announcement, I was fully booked by 10am the very same day (I aimed for 10 clients and got more than that!).
In November, I’ve brokered $8,100 in advertising for my clients and made $1,015 in profits from it. The commission seems slightly higher than my price (I charge 8.33% so 1/12 of the deal) because I get the first monthly payment as my commission and then, I start paying my clients. So technically, I made for more than $8,100, it is just that some deals are on a monthly basis and will be recurrent each month (but I won’t be making money from the deal for another 11 months as my commission is recurrent every year).
It has been a great experience and I’m opening an additional 10 spots for my ad management service. Almost all of my clients made money the first month and they are all pretty happy about it. It’s a win-win situation as we all make money (isn’t life beautiful sometimes?). Mind you, I only offer text links, banners and in-content text links. So if you are interested, shoot me an email at thefinancialblogger at gmail dot com .
The private advertising seems to be picking up right, left and center these past 3 months. To be honest, I don’t expect to maintain this level forever. I’m expecting an average of $5,000 per month but I’ll take these spikes with a smile ;-0. Another great piece of news is the discovery that sharing my advertising network with my clients didn’t take away any of my own business. Now, I’ll be trying to implement the same reflex amongst my clients so we can all share advertising contacts and make more money!
The Adsense income has been stable (about $200 more or less) but I’ve booked a few private advertising deals as well. This is why we see such a great jump. While my niche sites are not where I want them to be (my goal was to have 10 sites making $100/month at the end of 2011), I’ve learned a lot about how to build niche websites and what to do with them. My most recent sites are making more money and getting more traffic. This will definitely become a great source of diversification over the long run!
My expenses have been pretty stable for the past few months. One of my VAs is on maternity leave and I’m doing part of her job in the meantime. This is slowing us on some parts of our business but at least it doesn’t show in the income report . I’m currently working on several projects around my dividend websites so they will have to wait until Q1 and Q2 or 2012 to be launched!
More expenses will hit in December as we have 2 iPads to buy .
Wow! More than 12K! I just made a chart with my income progression for this year and you can see that the past 3 months have been pretty good for us! So far, we are averaging slightly over $9,300/month on average. I want to increase that to over 10K in 2012!
View full post on The Financial Blogger
October Monthly Income Report Or How I Make $218.15 an hour
November 2nd, 2011 | Posted by Global Investors
I’ll be honest with you, the month of October has been life changing for me. It all started at the Fincon11 in Chicago at the beginning of the month. What’s weird about this, these kind of conferences usually create a great buzz and give you some motivation to keep going forward but it all fades pretty fast. So most people get back home with tons of great intentions that eventually become… nothing because you are too busy watching Dr House . But this time, it was different for me as I did something most people don’t do when they come back from a conference.
The first action I took was to improve my level of writing on TFB. I hope that you have noticed a difference as I take twice the time I used to when writing a post. They are longer, offer more insightful information and are meant to be more useful. Each time I write, I make sure that you can actually get something out of the post (such as my private advertiser management series). I don’t write just because it is Tuesday anymore .
The second action I did was to take adsense off the TFB posts. You will still see some adsense blocks in the side bar and on a few very old pages (that earn me the lion share of adsense revenue ). The reason why I wanted to lose money on purpose was to gain more readers. I want to have my top screen clean of ads as I want to make sure that new visitors want to hang around and read more than one post. So far, it is going great as my newsletter subscribers have increased ;-D.
The last action we took as a team is to establish quarterly priorities. We have tons of projects on our board right now but we were working on too many sites at the same time. Therefore, some of our time was lost and also had a decrease in motivation due to the fact that “nothing” is moving really forward quickly. Now, we have a maximum of 3 priorities (projects) per quarter. This has made a huge increase in our productivity and the rate at which we are developing our projects .
What I like the most about an online company is that as soon as you take action, you see results within the first month. But the best part is yet to come as the actions you take now have an exponential impact on your results in the years to come!
Traffic is on fire for October! There are 2 things that explain this:
a) The stock markets have gone back up and most of my sites discuss investment topics
b) I got hit by the Panda again… but this time, quality won the fight!
Yup! I’ll discuss that in another article but Google ran another Panda update in the middle of October and I got all my previous rankings back. This is why my traffic had gone up by so much in so little time . The good news about the first hit is that I have learned to keep my readers on my blog longer and have them sign-up for my newsletter. This is a big accomplishment as our company grew stronger in during rough times and is now ready to crush it while we get a boost of traffic ;-D.
This is my September payment. Since traffic was pretty similar from August to September, I’m not surprised to see about the same payment amount. However, I can tell you that with the panda update, my next adsense cheque will be higher. This should continue as my traffic is definitely picking up at the moment (my last 15 days is better than the first half of the month).
Private Ads: $8531.45 (+2.47%)
Using all the tricks mentioned in my newsletter about how to increase my private income, I have another month over $8,000 in private advertising. This is pretty good as one of my biggest advertisers lost one of his clients which resulted in canceling a healthy campaign on almost all of my sites! This is why it is so important to keep contact with many advertisers at the same time .
Months come and go and they all look different for brokerage deals and affiliate programs. While Market Samurai and Questrade still do wonders for me, I have several ups and downs during the year. This is why I have decided to push on the brokering side of the business a little bit more. Keep reading further down and I’ll tell you more about it ;-D.
This is not a big surprise to come down to my $200 average right now as I didn’t close any big deals this month for my niche websites. I keep working on new sites (my latest on is almost finished!) and I didn’t work on promoting them at all. With the recent panda update, I’ve seen my traffic go up and I have now more than one site with over 1,000 visits per month without even trying! When I work on promotion (probably in Q2 of 2012), I’m convinced to bring these numbers into the thousands of monthly visits ;-D.
I’m not good a bookkeeping (this is why I have an accountant right?) but I know that my expenses are roughly $4,000 for the month (this includes my pay for the day of blogging). In order to be fair, you need to factor your hours in there too. If not, you are not calculating real profits . I detail the cost of running my business in this post .
Since I have a partner, this makes $3,500 in profits for roughly 16 hours of work in a month (this is the time I spend writing as the rest of my time is calculated in the cost of operations). I’m now making $218.75/hour writing … how cool is that!
Last week, I produced a 3 part series on how to manage private advertisers:
The first part was about knowing your site
The second part is about building your media kit
The third part is about making money without working your ass off!
There is also a 2,250 words complement to this series for my newsletter subscribers
I created this series as I knew that there were a lot of interest in private advertising and you wanted to know how I manage it. In the meantime, I tried brokering some ads for a fellow blogger. I used to this at large a while back ago. I had stopped during last year as I was too busy with other projects. But now that I have a full team working with me, I opened up the business.
In a single month, we were able to generate $650 worth of deals (this includes two 6 month agreements and 2 new Paypal subscription). We could have jumped this to $1,650 but we had technical difficulties while adding a specific widget. With this great success, I’m opening up my offer to other bloggers in limited numbers (as I want to ensure a high quality service along with high quality advertisers ).
Here’s the deal:
I have a huge load of advertiser contacts and am well known in the industry (I’ve been blogging since 2006!). Therefore, it’s easy for me to generate more advertising opportunities and my sites are pretty full right now. So I am offering to manage and negotiate the ads for you for a very small price.
What I offer:
- I find, negotiate and manage advertising space for you.
- I also handle the renewals.
- It’s not exclusive so you can continue to find and close deals on your own.
- So less time spent on your blog, more money for you, how does this sound?
What I’m expecting from you:
- I want blogs that are PR3 and above (Sorry guys but Google sets the rule on this playground)
- I want 1 year of history (I want to deal with serious bloggers only and the threshold is usually 6 to 12 months before a blogger quits)
- I want bloggers that will put the ad in place within 24 hours
What’s the cost?
My process is pretty streamlined so I don’t want to charge you an arm and a leg for that. So here’s how it works: I take 1 month worth of advertising as a commission that is renewable on a yearly basis.
So for a monthly deal (through paypal subscriptions), I take the first payment in full and then, set a paypal subscription to pay you the following months.
For 6 month agreement, I take 1/6 of the deal and you keep the rest. If the advertiser renews in 6 month, you get the full payment (I will only take another commission if we can keep the advertiser on board the year after).
For 12 month deals, I obviously take 1/12 of the payment and you are good to go for 12 months .
I’ve already got 2 new clients for November, so I’m already at 3 and will take a maximum of 10 clients right now so hurry up!
View full post on The Financial Blogger
Facebook’s Failures, Criticisms and Missteps Revealed in New Research Report From WordStream
October 21st, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsFollowing Facebook’s release of an iPad app last week — an app that has drawn a “too little, too late” response from critics so far — WordStream Inc., a provider of search marketing software and services, released a “Facebook Wall of Shame (http://www.wordstream.com/articles/facebook-failures)” infographic detailing Facebook’s criticisms, missteps and outright failures over the seven years since its inception.
The social networking company boasts approximately 800 million active users worldwide and an estimated $4.27 billion in estimated annual revenue — but you don’t approach the 1-billion-users mark without making a few mistakes along…
View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
Report On Family Dollar Stores, Inc. (NYSE:FDO)
October 20th, 2011 | Posted by Global InvestorsFinancials:Family Dollar Stores, Inc. (NYSE:FDO) generated the total revenue of $2.13 billion for the quarter ended August 27th, 2011 as compared to revenue of $1.95 billion for the same period last year. The company reported the net profit of $79.85 million or earnings of $0.66 per share for the respective quarter as compared to net income of $73.95 million or earnings of $0.56 per share last year.The company?s total assets accumulate up to $2.99 billion out of which fixed assets have the highest proportion. The company maintains a strong short term liquidity position as per its current ratio of 1.51… View full post on Live News from PR-USA.net
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