May Total Earnings: $715.85 ($458.84 more than April’s Earnings)

Gosh I’m really happy with the increase in my income during this last month. If I increased my income by that percentage every month I would be making $32 million a month by this time next year. Increasing by the same dollar amount I increased this month – $458.84 – would bring my income to over $6000 per month over the next year. Let’s hope that it falls somewhere in between.

Thanks everyone for your visits, links, and participation!

A very unexpected thing happened in May as Adsense was not my top earner for the month, in fact it was third best. Here’s how it all went down:

• Kontera – $220.77
• ProudDomains – $209.55
• Adsense – $196.53
• PayPerPost- $57
• BloggerWave – $26
• Smorty – $6

Kontera – Wow $220.77
This month Kontera was simply amazing, I was left speechless. During the last 2 weeks of the month my Kontera clicks started becoming worth a ton of money. Kontera must be selling ads to a lot more advertisers because I was amazed at the amount my clicks were generating.

From reading what other bloggers and webmasters have to say about Kontera, it seems that I’m doing better than most with it. I think there are two reasons why I’ve done better with Kontera than most:

1. My posts are a lot longer than the posts you will find on most blogs. This means that there is a lot more material for Kontera to work with. Most of my content posts are 1000-5000 words and I believe that this is a major factor in the amount of income I’m able to create with Kontera.
2. I deep-link a lot in my posts. I’m always linking to old articles that help me to explain the topics I cover. I think that my readers are used to clicking on those links and it’s no accident that my Kontera ads are the exact same color.

I don’t know if Kontera can survive as my number one earner – it will be interesting to see how it works out in June. So far, I’m loving it and you can expect it to be a source of income here for a long time.

My Kontera earnings for May tripled the earnings from April.

ProudDomains – $209.55
I told you about ProudDomains last month for the first time. ProudDomains.com is a domain reseller that I purchased from GoDaddy. I promote it on this site – CourtneyTuttle.com is actually the only way I promote it.

When I started this site, I created a monstrosity of an article called, “5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog.” The article helps people to understand how to set up profitable blogs, and walks them step-by-step through how to buy a domain name, set up hosting, and install WordPress – using ProudDomains. The article is one of my most popular, and because of it I’m able to sell some domains and hosting. My prices are really reasonable, they’re actually the same as GoDaddy.

Using ProudDomains.com has made it so I’m able to create a residual income for CourtneyTuttle.com – part of the revenue it generates is from hosting, which is renewed either monthly or annually, depending on how people set it up when they buy their plans. I think I have over $100 month now that is residual. The other $100+ was from new purchases that occurred this month.

My Income From ProudDomains.com nearly tripled what I was able to earn in April.

Google Adsense
Adsense was somewhat of a disappointment for the month. I was tweaking my placement like crazy – I changed the placement once each week to test. My current placement is here to stay. The 300 x 250 inline box was the best placement by far.

Look forward to seeing ads in my posts, they get clicked on the most.

My Adsense income didn’t even double my earnings from April, even though my traffic tripled. This is mostly my fault since I was tweaking relentlessly. Watch for Adsense to be a more significant factor in my earnings for June – they did make $65 in the last week of April, which was more than Kontera and ProudDomains.com.

PayPerPost
Those of you that follow the site know that I have introduced some new forms of monetization this month, including PayPerPost sponsored posts. I didn’t do a ton of it – the last thing I will ever do is stop providing the content I have been producing over the last few months. When I do write sponsored posts, they won’t be the only thing published that day – you can still expect to find my 7:00 a.m., daily content.

That said, I’ve been really happy with PayPerPost as a company. For many bloggers, PayPerPost will give them a chance to create more revenue than Adsense and other contextual-type ad programs. I made $57 even though I only wrote six posts. That $57 probably took a total of one hour to write.

I will be continuing to use PayPerPost as a method of monetization – if your site is struggling to produce I would consider using PayPerPost to monetize. Writing even a $5 post each day could make you $150 in a month.

BloggerWave
I actually wasn’t planning on including the $26 of income from BloggerWave in my report. I hadn’t heard of anyone being paid by them, so I wasn’t really expecting to be. They paid me $26 two days ago for three sponsored posts that I wrote in May.

BloggerWave is very much like PayPerPost. They don’t have any opportunities in their console for more posts, so I expect to discontinue BloggerWave from my arsenal. If they get their act together maybe you’ll see them on a future earning’s report someday.

Smorty
Smorty is also a service like PayPerPost. I’m glad to see some other services pop up because frankly PayPerPost doesn’t always have a sponsored opportunity that relates to the subject material of this site. It’s good to have more than one option.

I wrote one post for Smorty, and was paid $6. There aren’t a ton of opportunities available in Smorty currently, but I’ll keep checking back occasionally. I took a pay cut by writing the post for Smorty – there was actually an opportunity in PayPerPost the same day, but the Smorty post was more related to my site. You may see a Smorty post or two this month.

Plans To Increase Revenue

Increase Traffic
My traffic tripled during May, but I still have a long way to go. I’m going to be using an arsenal of promotion methods, but more importantly I’m going to be working a lot harder to come up with content that will help my readers. I know that I need to help more people in order to increase my traffic.

If you’re interested in the methods I’ll be using to increase traffic, take a look at these articles from the archives:

• The Secret Of Building A High Traffic Site
• Offsite Optimization – SEO That Works For A Change
• The Effective Way To Market With Articles

Additional Revenue Streams
During June I’m hoping that ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads will finally approve me! Unfortunately I applied for them a little too soon. I think I could easily qualify now but I’m playing the waiting game. I have emailed both of them to let them know that my traffic has increased substantially.

SponsoredReviews.com – I have already added one new revenue stream to the site. I actually wrote a review that someone ordered from me this morning. I’m not planning on reviewing a ton of products from SponsoredReviews, but I think it will be a fairly significant stream of income for June. I set my review price at $20 – I want to keep it low to provide the maximum value for advertisers.

If ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads come through, that will add 3 new revenue streams to the site. If you can’t tell, I firmly believe that using multiple revenue streams will help you to have the most ‘make money online’ success.

I’m looking forward to this month, stay tuned for an earning’s report in exactly one month!