May 2006 - Crazy gadgets and automated content makes extra $$$

Hot Sauce Spray

I’ve had a few emails (well 2) asking me when the next $100K site history instalment was going to be, so here it is and in future I’ll be posting about it every other Friday.

The month of May was again pretty good for CG, traffic was growing and income along with it. We were still getting a few sales from the GPS tracker post from last month and I had another $5,000 hour (though I didn’t know it at the time).

The most profitable post in May was the one we did about adjustable heat sauce, a very cool gadget that lets one bottle of chilli sauce have variable strengths. The hot sauce post took a bit more work than normal as I had to contact the manufacturer to get a photo, which they happily supplied. The extra effort (not that sending an email is that much efofrt) was well worth it as the post got picked up by Gizmodo (extra 1,029 visitors, thank you very much Giz) and from there it was picked up by Dave Barry (an extra 1,490 visitors on the day, thank you very very much Dave). These extra visitors are the first peak on the following Analytics graph

cg-anayltics-may2006.jpg

Another noteworthy addition in May was adding automatic site translation (as I wrote about in the examples of the $5000 hour), this resulted in oodles more pages being indexed, a fair amount of extra search engine visitors and ~$150 extra Adsense income.

Traffic
Visitors and page views continued to increase over previous months, we were now getting more traffic from Google and found that any decent posts that we made had a fair chance of being picked up by other blogs, giving us traffic and a bit more Google juice.

Visitors: 82,754 (73,645)
Page Views: 175,168 (155,058)

The figures in brackets are for the previous month, March 2006.

Revenue

May 2006
Google Adsense 969.59 (757.67)
Chitika 131.83 (171.44)
Commision Junction 452.71 (348.40)
Total 1,554.13 (1,277.51)

Income continued to grow throughout May, the only stream that declined was Chitika but that really came good by the end of the year. We didn’t double income like last month but the growth was steady and a sign of things to come.

Conclusion
May might not of been as exciting as April but it was a solid month, it also confirmed in my mind that the $10K per month goal by December 2006 was optimistically possible. The goal for next month was to get over $1,000 from Adsense which was overshot a little bit :)

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. Congratulations on having a good month back then! I have been looking over the translation scripts available and am thinking of testing it myself, although I also read that you had to drop it due to google blocking your site if I remember correctly.

    • Yeah I was using Google to do the translation and then they stopped due to automated queries. I never lost any non translated SE traffic I just removed the translated pages and things went back to as they where.

  2. It’s amazing how a couple posts can have such a huge long term affect for your site. Great post.

    • I find that surprising too, at the time you don’t realise it at all but if you do enough posts eventually you’ll get the break.

      I also find it’s often the post you have to out that extra bit of effort into that makes the difference. The number of times I couldn’t really be bothered to do a post but forced myself into it and then saw that post do really well is pretty high.

  3. Thanks for the info on how much your site is making. It is a great inspiration to those of use who are just starting out with our webpages. Gives us something to shoot for.

    +1 Digg, Stumble

    Scott

    • Thanks Scott, hopefully later posts in this series will be a bit more inspiring as the money starts increasing :)

  4. I often find that completing the smaller projects that have been on my ‘to-do- list for the longest time turn out to be the most profitable over the long term. The lesson? More doing, and less procrastinating!

    - Martin Reed

    • Totally with you on that Martin. One of the projects I’m working on now I had planned for last year and I’l=m sure it will be a nice earner, but I missed last years Christmas sales for not pulling my finger out and starting it earlier. This year will be another story though.

  5. its good to see your traffic increase again. has adsense risen at the same level as traffic? :)

  6. If anything I’d say Adsense income has increased at a higher level than traffic. In later months I missed tinkered with placement a fair bit and saw some great increases because of it. The biggest monthly increase was over $3K but you’ll have to wait a fair few weeks for that post.

  7. Thanks for this great series of posts about this, its a real inspiration, looking forward to the next one.

  8. I’m not sure I quite understand one part of your article. What part of your content was automated? I would love to figure out a clever way to autogenerate some good content, but so far my ideas are too spammy for me to take seriously.

Trackbacks

  1. […] which we kind of smashed, jumping from $969 to $2,463. The translation script that we installed last month was also doing a nice job and was responsible for ~20% of the Adsense income, a nice addition for […]

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