Itinerant Lifestyle

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This is the first post on the new Itinerant Lifestyle. I wanted to take it in a different direction, so what better way than to start again.

Something I have been attempting for a while is to use my websites to make a supplemental income online. There are quite a few different business models regarding monetizing websites, which have been explained countless times on other blogs, so I wont go into those here, I will just say that my efforts so far have mainly centred around Google Adsense.

Current Situation

In total I have eight niche sites, but only two of them have any real traffic and income. I am using Adsense to monetize the sites, my earnings from which are shown below. From the graph you can see the earnings are generally below £1 per day, with the occasional day in excess of £2. As of the end September I’d earned £131.61 in 2011, which equates to an average £14.62 per month, or just under £0.50 per day. Nothing to write home about, but it pays my hosting bill at least.

This income is generated from mainly one site (which from now on I will refer to as DIY), but I am developing the second site (refer to as Email) and it is doing very well, by far eclipsing the earnings of my main site (so far) in October. The other sites either have decent content and no visitors, or visitors but no decent content.

I’m not allowed to talk about click-through-rate or cost-per-click specifics, but I have been doing some testing on second site, which is the main reason that the earnings are improving. I will talk about this in a future post as it is something that is fairly simple to do, but will take some explaining.

I have also messed around a little with Clickbank, Amazon Affiliates and other advertising, but this has been on the other smaller sites, and so far without success!

The Future

My hope is to develop the Email niche site and hopefully increase earnings up to around £50 per month. At the same time I want to develop the other sites by adding some great content and improving their search engine ranking to get some traffic, which should in turn lead to more earnings.

For the time being I plan to stick with Adsense as my main method of monetization, as I think I have a good idea of how to position ads and improve click-though-rates. In time I’d like to investigate other revenue streams such as creating and selling my own products.

Aims for this Blog

I would like to emulate Pat from Smart Passive Income who is not only making a ton of money from the internet, but also writes a great blog. The thing I like about Pat is his honesty regarding the how, where and why he is so successful. With every post/video/podcast, readers/viewers/listeners are given a personal insight into the thought processes that have led to his success.

I am a firm believer that one of the main reasons why Smart Passive Income is so successful is Pat’s writing style. The blog is very engaging and is written in such a way that readers get the impression that they have known Pat for years, even though they’ve probably never even met him.

I would like to keep a record of my progress and (hopefully) increased income. By doing this I can focus my attention and recall how and why I did things, but also I hope readers will gain from my thoughts and actions on how to start earning some additional income from the internet. I don’t ever expect to be as popular as Pat, but a few readers would be welcome!

Anyway I’ll expand more on this as the days and weeks pass. Thanks for reading this far!