I have decided that I would start publishing my earning reports for each month. I would like to give my overall thoughts as well as my ideas for improving my earnings for the next month. Here is the reports and then I’ll tell you what I think below!

Google Adsense: $139.26

Kontera: $77.23

ProudDomains: $76.52

April Total: $293.01

Google Adsense

Halfway through the month Kontera was my number one earner. I knew that this didn’t really make sense so I decided to tweak my Adsense placement. I added a 468×60 Adsense banner at the top of the page, and Adsense caught up and passed Kontera in a hurry. I was happy with the increased click-through, but am far from done with my experimentation, as you’ll see in the section below where I talk about my ideas for the next month.

As you can see, Adsense was by far my biggest earner for April.

Kontera

JohnChow.com recommended using Kontera as an alternate revenue stream, and I’m quite happy with how it worked out! The payout on the clicks isn’t huge, but I think Kontera does especially well for me because I tend to write articles that are really long. Articles that have 5,000 words won’t have multiple Adsense units, so Kontera ads are the only ones that appear towards the bottom. I think this is the main reason why my Kontera ads were outperforming Adsense for a while.

I’m definitely going to keep Kontera at least until I have enough impressions to try IntelliTXT. In order to use IntelliTXT you have to have at least 500,000 page impressions per month, which I don’t have yet. As soon as I get there, I’ll give it a shot to see if the payouts are better.

ProudDomains.com

Most of you are probably wondering what ProudDomains.com is. It is a reseller account that I bought through GoDaddy.com. I get paid commissions when people buy domains, hosting, and other tools. I haven’t really ever done much with it until I started this site.

When I created this site, I decided to create a walk-through that would help beginners to set up a blog. The article I created was, “5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog.” I thought that it would be a good resource, but had no idea that it would be my most popular article.

In the article, I walk people through setting up a blog on ProudDomains.com, and quite a few people have done it! I get a residual, monthly income from their hosting accounts, and also get a residual, annual income from their domain purchases. That article is really my only method of promoting Proud Domains, and I have had quite a few people set up blogs because of it. As you can see, it has turned out to be a vital method of monetizing CourtneyTuttle.com.

My Ideas To Increase Revenue For May

• Increase traffic.
• Optimize my Adsense placement.
• Promote my ‘5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog‘ article so that I can increase my residual income for ProudDomains.com.
• Add some additional revenue streams.

Increasing Traffic

This site is still a baby, and isn’t even close to where it needs to be with it’s traffic. I’m surprised at how much word of mouth traffic I’ve been able to get, it seems like a lot of people have told family and friends about it because the amount of traffic I have been getting doesn’t really add up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad!

My search engine traffic isn’t even close to where I want it to be, and that is mostly because this site is still so young. The site has been up for less than 3 months. This month I’m going to get to work on targeting keywords and getting more back-links. I’m pretty confident that my search engine traffic will increase a lot in May.

I have also started submitting my good articles to blog carnivals, and that has added to the amount of incoming links I’ve been able to get, and has brought some additional visitors.

My main focus this month, however, will be on getting really social. I want to meet a ton of new bloggers this month. Don’t be surprised if you see me checking out your site, I want to meet a few hundred new bloggers in May. Surely this will lead to some additional visitors and links.

Optimizing Adsense Placement

For the next week, I’m going to remove the 468×60 Adsense banner at the top of the pages, and add a 300×250 inline box to each post. Many of you are probably wondering why I would mess with it if the 468×60 banner was doing well. My answer is that I would rather experiment now with hundreds of dollars on the line. I don’t want to be messing with my ad placement when thousands of dollars are hanging in the balance.

If the 300×250 inline box out-performs that 468X60 banner I will obviously stick with it. If not, I’ll switch back to the 468X60.

Promote My ‘5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog‘ Article

This might sound silly, but as more people find that article I am able to sell more domains and hosting accounts. Every time I sell a domain I make about $1 per year, and every time I sell a hosting account I make $2-$5 per month. Even if I shut CourtneyTuttle.com down right now, I would still make residual money from the hosting accounts that have been setup. I would probably have a $50 residual for a long time.

The residual that I’m able to make will go up every time someone starts a new blog at ProudDomains. This setup has created a win-win situation because they can learn how to make their blogs profitable by using the article and CourtneyTuttle.com. People have to pay for hosting anyway, so I think they might as well pay me for it. I’ll do everything I can to help everyone to make a profit.

Add Some Additional Revenue Streams

My site got bumped up to PageRank 3 during this last update, and that will lead to some increased opportunities for advertising. In the month of May, I plan on adding at least three revenue streams to the site:

• Text-Link-Ads
• ReviewMe
• PayPerPost

I have been waiting for the PageRank update for each of those three! I also am going to have to wait a little bit longer for PayPerPost because they won’t let you in until your site has been up for over 90 days. On May 12 I’ll be able to start with that one.

I’m also waiting for an email from Text-Link-Ads because when I submitted CourtneyTuttle.com to publish links the site was too new. They rejected the site in the first half of April and said that they would re-evaluate in May. Hopefully I’ll be able to get in for May, but if not I’m sure that I’ll have text-link-ads for June.

I haven’t even tried with ReviewMe, but now that I have some PageRank I’m going to get set up with them.

If I can get into those three services, I will surely be able to add some significant revenue for May.

Does anyone have any questions or comments about my earnings for April?