Graphs are all well and good but the exciting bit are the figures

*1 – From the inline text adverts comparison.
*2 – With the Chitika income I’ve knocked off 10% to reflect the likely effect of auditing

Amazon.co.uk, Affiliate Future and Affiliate Window

All of these affiliates are UK based, even though I’m based in the UK I tend to target the US market (41% of my readers are in the US) but do write about UK stores when appropriate, I’ll also of earned a bit of commission on all of my Christmas shopping

Prank Place

This is one of those affiliates who don’t use a network for their affiliate program, I don’t normally use individual sites but at one stage I was crazily getting a fair amount of traffic for the daft tattoo sleeves, so I joined the program and automatically convert their links to affiliate ones which for the sake of 10 minutes work was certainly worth it.

Blog Ads

I made more from affiliate sales from my own blog ads experiment then I did from blog ads advertisers, so so I reckon some advertisers got a bit of a bargain here.

Click Bank

I only started messing with one product on Click Bank in November, I’ll do a full case study on this in a future post.

Tribal Fusion

This was a steady performer and as my traffic was up in December so was their CPM income. This is an area that I could certainly improve by selling the space privately rather than through the network. My 3 TF ad units combined have a Net CPM of less than a dollar which is absolute crap so I will be remedying this.

FeedBurner

This was probably my biggest percentile increase over previous months, I don’t know if it was caused by the Google aquisition or just the silly season, either way I don’t mind

Chitika

I still like Chitika, their RP units were my best performer but Chitika Lynx was also good.

Commision Junction

My two best affiliates with CJ were Think Geek and Hammacher both sell products that I’ll write about anyway and getting paid for them is an obvious bonus. I wrote various gift guides to push sales and learnt a lot about what products sell (guess what I’ll be pushing next year).

Amazon

I did quite a bit of experimenting with Amazon and they managed to just scrape into second place. During December we sold 2,414 products valued at $158,114.97 taking us to the 8.25% commission tier. The one downside is I sold a lot of electrical products (gadgets so expected) which only pay a commission of 4%, still I’m not complaining.

Adsense

I took Adsense off my affiliate pages, I pushed affiliates as much as possible but yet again Adsense continues to amaze me making up nearly 50% of the sites income, $30,334.66, thank you Google.

I had my first $1,000 Adsense day in November and they continued right up to just before Christmas and peaked at just under $1,500. I think I can safely say that Adsense works pretty well in my niche, Google still didn’t send me a present mind, though they did send me a card and I’m quite looking forward to the EFT off them at the end of the month .

Expenses

At the moment I don’t use any PPC or paid marketing, all traffic is organic from search engines, subscribers and natural links from related sites. My expenses are a dedicated server (~$350 per month) and a great team of 4 paid writers who are paid on a per post basis which amounts to under $3,000 per month, though they will be getting a surprise bonus .

Conclusion

On 22nd September 2004 I earned $0.82 from Adsense, after a lot of hard work, ups & downs and earning by learning I’m able to write this post. If you’re just starting out on your online adventure I hope you find this post inspiring, with effort the sky is the limit to what you can earn.

I said I’d give $100 to anybody that could guess the order of my revenue streams. The closest was probably David who got 2 out of the top 3, but there’s no prizes for closest (other than the link I suppose) so the $100 is off to charity.

This is the next instalment of the history of the Coolest Gadgets site. It’s for October 2006, month 14 of the sites life.

Finding new gadgets to write about was fairly easy with the crazy USB Hamster Wheel bringing in a nice number or organic links. I also coded a simple plugin to create image based summaries of recent posts which helped get more visitors to the site from feed subscribers and automagically create internal link love.

I was also pleasantly surprised to receive a box full of free gadgets from Proporta which I was happy to review (sending a site owner freebies/review items is a great way of getting cheap/free links and a nice bit of press). One of my guest posters also kicked up a storm with his post Muslims offended by Apple Store, I’d not seen that many comments in a while and just shows what a topical post can do.

The downer of the month was Google blocking our translation script, which resulted in a drop in traffic and Adsense revenue. The translated pages were never that great from a quality point of view so I didn’t really mind, and as the translated pages had made just over $7,000 in the time they’d been up, they’d certainly done their job.

Traffic

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

Both page views and traffic were down from the previous month. This was purely caused by our translation engine ceasing to function, it was a fun ride whilst it lasted .

Revenue

Overall revenue was up on the previous month. The loss of translated pages had hit the Adsense revenue, I find Adsense worked pretty well with foreign visitors so that was a bit of a loss. However, back then Chitika discounted the majority of foreign clicks so losing the translated content made no odds and we also implemented the highly profitable RPU which caused our Chitika income to double over night. The affiliate income was also on the up, the affiliate programs we promote are targeted at a UK and US audience so the loss of foreign traffic was no great shakes, and the fact that some folk start their Christmas shopping in October resulted in a nice increase in sales.

By this time there were a few more income streams, but due to lack of accurate historical stats I can’t report them here.

Conclusion
Traffic down, income up, some Geo visitors are more profitable than others.

We were now approaching (well in) the Christmas season, revenue was looking good and the fact I had 2 properties along with 2 mortgages and had just handed my notice in at the 9-5 what on earth to could go wrong .

I will cover November and December 2006 in 2 later posts and that will be the end of the month by month series. I will do some posts concentrating on revenue, traffic etc. over longer periods of time but if you’d like me to share any more info of the site’s history please let me know via the comments.

Over the last few months the growth of CG’s traffic and revenue had been exciting to watch so September was something of an anti-climax with both staying pretty level or dropping slightly. Which in retrospect works quite well as I’m currently on holiday and it means there is not too much to write about, so every cloud and all .

Traffic

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

Revenue

The one plus point with the revenue was the increase in revenue from Commission Junction. This was down to a variety of products mainly from Think Geek, I think it was more due to me reporting on desirable products rather than the time of year.
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Conclusion
As previously mentioned not too much to say about September, if you have any questions feel free to ask but as I’m hopefully lounging by a pool; it may take a little while for me to answer .

Traffic and revenue continued to grow in August (I’ll document those in a bit) but the other major addition to CG was a gadget forum. To give the forum a flying start I kicked it off with a posting competition, prizes for which were all kindly donated from sites we’d previously promoted (a friendly email asking for prizes in return for a bit of promotion can work wonders).

I couldn’t of hoped for a better forum launch, we got over a 1,000 new members in the space of a week but the launch of the forum was it’s one and only high point. Nowadays it’s pretty dead, I hope to revitalise it soon but for now it’s a bit of a posters graveyard, so lookout for a later post on “How to successfully launch a forum and then really cock it up”.

Traffic
We hit over half a million page views for the first time in August, this was helped by a Digg front page for the iTheater video glasses and again Gizmodo were very generous in their links sending us over 6,000 visitors and wished us a Happy Birthday (I might of told them about that ).

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

Revenue
Income continued to grow in line with traffic (I’ve not calculated that it just looks about right), and was now at about 50% of my 9-5 wage, this meant I could save a fair a bit towards my leaving the 9 – 5 master plan and also afford to buy flights and hotels to visit CES.

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Conclusion
It was cool birthday. The forum looked to be flying, traffic and revenue was on the up, what more could I want? Well to continue into September would of been nice!

Before the holiday I was able to post date a post for each day I was away and also organised extra cover from my writers, this meant I should be able to spend 2 weeks relaxing in the sun and do an intensive 1 week PADI SCUBA diving course. Haha, yeah right.

Just before going away on holiday I encountered a bug in the blog software where the admin pages wouldn’t always display, meaning nobody could post. I re-installed everything and the problem “seemed” to go away. I’m now about as prepared as I could be to go away.

Holiday Day 1
Found Internet Cafe, checked sites and email – all ok.
Found SCUBA diving centre, organised course.

Holiday Day 2
Visited Internet Cafe, checked email, found messages from all my writers saying they couldn’t log in. Spent the day researching problem, to no avail. A re-install again did “seem” to fix the problem.

Holiday Day 3
See Day2

Holiday Day 4
See Day 3

Holiday Day 5
Found an Internet enabled PUB, things were looking up. It was at this point I chatted to my provider about the problem, they couldn’t help as it was software related but did ask if I’d tried restarting the server. As I’d only just moved to a dedicated I didn’t realise you could restart it as and when you wanted and flicking the virtual switch up and down did do the trick.

For the rest of the holiday I went to the same pub each day (great excuse for a pint) and did a server restart. I never did find out what was causing the problem but I did an upgrade in the future and it went away forever (or so I hope).

Last Day of Holiday
Found best eating establishment on the island, typical.

Other than that July was pretty uneventful, the coolest product we wrote about were the powerizers which I so need to get.

Traffic
Our traffic continued to grow, Google sent us over 110,000 visitors and we also received traffic from 1,818 other sources.

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

Revenue

Despite all the problems revenue rose pretty nicely in July and was about 50% up on June. Adsense continued to be the best performer especially with search engine traffic. By this time I had added some other revenue sources, like Blog Ads and private sales but I can’t include those in the totals as my record keeping back then was not great (my book keeper would say it’s still not great).

Conclusion
Don’t go on holiday If all else fails go to the pub For me the conclusion to this would be to always have enough information on you to be able to log in and fix your sites if required. Two weeks downtime would of been disastrous for CG, so neglecting the sun for the first week of the holiday was a small price to pay. I’m away for 2 weeks next month, I wonder what the Net gremlins have in store for me this time.

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.

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 .

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.

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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.

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

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.

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

Revenue

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

After a pretty slow start to 2006, April was the month were Coolest Gadgets really started to take off. With the slowness of the previous months we were down to one paid writer, though my friend Keith also freely wrote about a fair few gadgets. Between us we were averaging about 5 posts per day (many of which I think I did in my “lunch hour” at work ).

Whilst doing my daily gadget hunt I came across this really cool GPS tracker on Think Geek. It’s the sort of gadget that’s easy to write about and the fact it was also an affiliate product was an added bonus though I would of reported on it anyway. I never realised it at the time but that post was the turning point of the site.

Traffic
Traffic continued to grow throughout the month. Google was sending us ~500 visitors a day (it seemed a colossal amount back then) and was our best referrer. We didn’t have any big single keywords for traffic but did rank well for thousands of long tailed searches. We now also ranked #1 for our chosen keywords “coolest gadgets” which as I discussed in this post was a totally anti-climax, even though it was our best keyword traffic wise, it still only brought a total of 310 visitors that month.

The big peak on the above graph was due to that post we did about the GPS tracker and the fact that one of our readers thought it was also pretty cool and submitted it to that little user driven news site known as Digg. The story hit the front page and brought us something like 25,000 extra pairs of eyeballs to the site. Along with the extra traffic the site got a fair few new inbound links and regular readers both of which were great for future growth.

Revenue
It’s often said that Digg traffic isn’t valuable, for me I found that to be absolute tosh. Due to the product being so techie in nature it was of interest to a fair few Digg referred visitors. In the last 6 days of April we sold (well referred) 15 GPS tracker units bringing us in commissions of ~$300, most if not all sales would of been to visitors from Digg, thank you Digg.

Other revenue sources were also on the up, mainly due to the consistent increased traffic rather than the big Digg peak.

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

Conclusion
Overall it was a great month for CG. Traffic continued to grow and the Digg front page was the icing on the cake. Revenue had increased by over 100% on the previous month and that was just the start of what was to follow .

Traffic
As you can see from the graph traffic was pretty steady, the site was averaging just under a thousand unique visitors a day. The two peaks towards the end of the quarter were caused by of our stories being picked up by Gizmodo again. Through out the quarter we were picking up a fair few natural links from other sites, they just weren’t converting into any form of significant traffic.

Overall the lack of growth was disappointing, we’d worked really hard for the past 6 months and there wasn’t much to see for it, but by sticking at it and continuing to post quality content it would just be a matter of time until the site was rewarded (or so I hoped).

Revenue
The revenue followed the traffic trend somewhat (i.e. crap)

Even combined they were a long way off the $12,000+ CG enjoyed last month.

Conclusion
I’ve seen many site owners lose interest when the growth stops (or worse declines) and I’ll freely admit I’ve done that myself in the past. But if you want to be successful at anything you’ve got to persevere and that is especially true for websites. CG was about to turn the a corner next month (April 2006) and so that I can end this post on a bit of a high (and a cliffhanger before the next instalment ) this is how one of the income streams grew throughout the year, the professional blue highlighting is the period covered by this post (graph thanks to the DP Adsense Charts).

This was the fourth full month of CG and being the Christmas season and following on from the $1000 in November I had high hopes for both revenue and traffic, which wouldn’t be the first time and I’m sure not the last that my expectations exceeded reality.

Traffic
As you can see on the graph there was a nice spike on December 7th, this was caused by the exceedingly cool game Deflexion and a big thanks to friends I hadn’t met yet over at Gizmodo. I love it when I find a really cool gadget to write about and if you get in early (before the majority of other gadget sites) you can get a fair few natural organic links. The link from Gizmodo sent ~2000 visitors over the space of the month which at that time was loads for CG and it also made me think how much traffic the larger gadget sites must be getting and what possibilities there were.

Other than the search engines the other notable traffic source was Cool Site Of The Day (see November for more on that) who continued to send visitors our way the month after we were featured, the figure for December being 1,302.

The number one source for traffic as you’d probably expect was Google, sending 6,458 visitors. One of the most popular keywords we ranked for was Deflexion, so it just shows the power of links with regards to the big G, I’ve just checked now and we are still on the first page for that term which is surprising but also goes to show how work down well over a year a go will still bring in traffic and revenue.

Overall, apart from the Giz peak I’d say traffic was lower than I was anticipating and seemed to be declining rather than growing which was a worrying sign.

Revenue

Adense income was pretty comparable to last month, $640.61 (up $10, wow!). Chitika income was, err I don’t know as the Chitika control panel has not let me log in for the last few days but if memory serves was also comparable to the previous month.

The revenue stream that I was hoping for the most improvement in was affiliates. I though as it was Christmas people would be looking for presents, so I skewed my gadget seeking towards gift like gadgets that ideally had an affiliate program. This did seem to work as affiliate income went up to over $150 a relatively vast improvement from Novembers $35.

I could of made a fair bit more out of affiliate sales if I’d found an appropriate stockist for Deflexion before I made the post, unfortunately at the time of posting nobody was selling it though Think Geek did begin stocking it late on in the month so I probably picked up a few sales there.

One of the problems I had with affiliate sales is that other then the merchant I had no idea what had been sold. I later learnt that you can include a pid parameter in most affiliate links which you can use for tracking purposes. I implemented this towards the end of the month so I’d at least be able to fathom out what future sales were and see what products I could concentrate on promoting.

Summary

The highlight of the month was definitely the link from Giz but other than that the site just seemed to be ticking over, it was still making a profit (just) but no where near enough to quit the 9-5.

Sorry if this is a some what boring post but that’s history for ya