December 2009 Earnings and Year End Summary 2009

Well December 2009 finished up a bit from November and my adsense earnings were 690.80 for the month. 2009 has been a dramatic improvement over my earnings in 2008 and I thought I would take a chance in this post to sum up the year, compare it to the prior year and ramble on for a bit about why 2009 was better than 2008.

First though, December was a better month than November for a couple reasons, it doesn't hurt that there is an extra day, nor does it hurt that the Christmas to New Years holiday stretch is usually longer and less hectic than the Thanksgiving weekend in November. My earnings were down over the Thanksgiving weekend, but up for the week or two surrounding Christmas. There could be a couple other reasons for this though. In November my "other work" had kept me too busy to really have good fresh content on my big current money maker site. For those of you that don't know, although I have a LOT of sites, currently there is one that accounts for probably 50% of my earnings and 4 sites probably cover 80-90% of my adsense revenue. The site that brings in the most right now is bringing in the most because the content is trending search content in a specific niche. The search phrases shift a bit each week and sometimes one search phrase will have legs for a couple weeks. By contrast the other sites I work on tend to be for search phrases that are solid long term searches.

My hope (of course) is to finally get to a point where these stable, high volume over the long haul searches are what I am making most of my adsense earnings from, but since they're stable long term searches there are a few other people trying to do the same. It's a long term plan. However right now my money is coming mostly from short term stuff and if I don't update then.... my content gets stale and I see a decline which I think is what happened in November. December saw a rebound because I had (and took) more time to work on content for my sites as well as promotion through a number of methods.

So... for the year 2009 I made approximately (since they've started listing estimated earnings until the payments are finalized...) 5569.35 which is an average of 15.25 per day. (Currently my average over the last two weeks is almost twice that which I find encouraging as it still means I'm on an up-trend.)

2008 by comparison was the year I started back into adsense and search targeting for my sites. I toyed with it early in 2008, but then returned seriously about August/September of 2008.... so the total for 2008 was.... 895.15 or $2.44 (and a half) cents per day (366 days for 2008).

And 2007 when everything was pretty much left to run itself as 261.17 or 71.5 cents per day.

So, from 2008 to 2009 I've increased my online business revenue by over 6 times. (Over 600%?) Given everything that is being said about the economy I have to be happy with this. Not content, because I want to see it grow another 6.22 times.... In fact the growth from 2007 to 2008 is a fairly reasonable 3.4 times growth (or 340% increase.) I can tell you my stock holdings haven't seen that kind of growth this last year or two. So... if my growth rate continues for calendar year 2010 then I may see between 18,000 and 34,000 for the year (?!) We'll see. I'm not going to just sit around and hold my breath waiting on it to happen.

Really 2009 was not heading to be such a huge increase until I tripped over an idea in September that pushed my current big earning site into big earnings. Even extracting that sites increased earnings from the total for the year leaves me with about 4.88 times an increase over the prior year. So everything seems to be growing, some things faster than others.

So, how did I get this far? Lots and Lots of time soaking up information and then acting on it. Build sites, write content, promote, gain more sources of traffic, write more and keep at it. Don't waste your time buying every product that is shoved your way promising the secret to making lots of money with no work. Don't believe them, it's work... it may not be the same as cleaning toilets or plowing a field, but you're going to spend some time even if you have some capital to outsource the grunt work... it even takes time to manage outsourcing projects.

This year I have done more in the way of outsourcing because I can. I've designated 15% of my adsense revenues to plow back in (and 100% of my lulu.com revenues) and use to finance resources that are beneficial to getting better search rankings. Take that as you will, I've hired article writers from time to time, and other promotional services from time to time as well. There is no single "magic" silver bullet. As some say though it's just about MASSIVE ACTION. Get it done, and keep moving forward.

Now, to close.... I know $5500 isn't a great amount of money to get excited about in the big scheme of things, but it's like that old puzzler about a kid asking a guy for a job and asking to only be paid a penny on day one and then double the pay each day... it adds up to some really money quicker than you think. In fact, 2 more years at this growth rate and things could be VERY interesting!