June 2006 - Adsense Income up 154%

Gryphon
From reading various forums I’d come to learn that Summer can be a quiet time for many niches due to holidays and what not. As this was the first Summer for CG I wasn’t really sure what to expect but prepared myself for the worst, then more by luck than judgement I find myself thinking “Geez if this is the slump in Summer I can’t wait for Christmas!”.

During June 2006, CG found itself on the front page of Digg twice, the first time was for a post about the ChargeBox which I found out about in some newspaper and contacted the company for further details. The second Digg was for a DIY projector which was a great find by my writer Paz and if you want a projector on the cheap is well worth checking out.


Another cool post we did was about the Gryphon, a wing based parachute system. This is one that I again read about in a newspaper and then contacted the company for a photograph (to which they obliged). The great thing about getting stories this way is you have no where to link to for further information so if you get quoted you become the end of the link trail so to speak, great for traffic and SEO. That post got picked up by a load of places, including Engadget (5,541 new visitors, thank you very much) and as far as I knew I had the original image so it was easy to see which sites gave credit and which ones didn’t.

One of the downsides of the increased traffic is server load, at this time CG was on a shared hosting account with A Small Orange. I choose to go with ASO as I’d had some great personal recommendations and over the last 9 months had upgraded with them to the top shared package available. As traffic continued to climb I got an email off one of the top technical guys there saying CG was using over 40% of the servers’ CPU and memory, which considering I was sharing with other sites on the same machine was a bit of a worry.

This is were choosing a great host is of real benefit. A crappy host would simply suspend your account until you’d fixed it. However, a proper host like ASO worked with me and advised me on how to reduce the load, we tried various modifications and caching mechanisms, all to no avail, so in the end we had to move the site to a dedicated server. This is where ASO proved to me that I’d chosen right , they didn’t have any dedicated servers available so went out and bought one for me and installed it in the datacentre, this took a couple of weeks so I should probably apologise to everybody that was on the same shared server as me at that time.

cg-analytics-june-2006.jpg

Traffic
Thanks to Digg, our improved SERPs and reasons already mentioned, traffic had more than doubled on the previous month. Google was (and still is) our best source but looking at reports we received traffic that month from 1,693 different sites, meaning we had a fair few inbound links which could only help our position in Google. This is a nice vicious circle to be in, you get more links so you are not as reliant on Google for your traffic, Google sees more links and starts sending you more traffic 🙂 .

Visitors: 176,041 (82,754)
Page Views: 359,159 (175,168)

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

Revenue
As you’d expect with the increased traffic, revenue was also on the up. My main goal was to get Adsense into 4 figures 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 minimal work.

June 2006
Google Adsense 2,463.54 (969.59)
Chitika 168.82 (131.83)
Commision Junction 178.81 (452.71)
Total 2,811.17 (1,554.13)

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Conclusion
June 2006 was a great month and I now started to put into motion the steps required to leave my 9 to 5 job. I had a holiday planned for the following month and everything looked cool, how wrong was I.

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. Leaving it again on a cliff hanger. LOL. Congratulations on another good month there! I guess we will be waiting till Friday 22nd June for the next installment of this series.

    Do you know the reason for the decline of CJ? I am guessing you didnt promote products via CJ as much this month maybe? I see the same with Affiliate window. I have good months, and other months where I dont push anything much through them.

  2. I remember when you posted that guy with the wings, kept me on edge for until I found a video of it later on. The funniest part for me was the video made it sound like they were the first to talk about it, guess they don’t have web access. Of course I had no idea your website was doing so well for you - congratulations and thanks for letting us all take a peek inside.

  3. Sounds like you were lucky to have such a great hosting service. I would love to be talking to mine about over-working their servers…someday! 😉

    • A good host is a must, I thought my previous host was good, great price and what seemed like good support, until one day a minor problem which could have been resolved in 2 minutes if they had emailed me or called me ended up taking down all my sites for a whole day and them really messing me about, so I ditched them as soon as I found a good replacement and have been very happy with me new host since.

  4. ASO sound like a good company

    I might give them a try later on when I start making some constant monthly revenue.

    Congrats on yet another successful month.

    I don’t recon that your earning will decline over the summer becuase people will have more time to spend ‘browsing leisurely’ thus likely to increase your traffic and income.

    Could that be a way of looking at it?

  5. I use ASO for my blog - I cannot fault them in any area and would certainly recommend them based on my own experiences.

    Well done with the revenue - looks set to be a great summer for you 🙂

    - Martin Reed

  6. It looks like your Adsense revenue grew even faster than your traffic. That’s amazing considering that you credit Digg with some of your traffic success. They’re generally not great clickers on ads.

  7. I think Adsense has a sloping affect. Monthly numbers start out small and each month they grow bigger. How else could many websites achieve 100%+ growth month after month.

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