AIS by Sarah

June 08 Earnings

July 1, 2008 – 2:49 pm

It's been quiet round here of late. Actually most of the AIS/Money Making sites I subscribe to have been quiet of late. Could be the weather, the football (European Cup), Wimbledon, or just one of those periods where everyone stops blogging and actually starts concentrating on their sites!

For me it's been a mix of a few things. Work has continued to be mad and whilst it's relaxed this week I can see it escalating further in the next few weeks. In between work I've been trying to get our CMS Plugins site finished off. I'm mainly left with the content and checking over the first plugins ready to go up for sale. It's just sitting down and doing it. I'm hoping to set the site live ASAP, maybe on or after the weekend, although Wimbledon is also taking up my spare time!

Anyway, to the nitty gritty, last month was another successful month and we've finally cracked the $400 mark! This has been the highest monthly income ever, which I'm pretty pleased about. The final figure has come in at $445. We're just $55 off cracking the $500 mark which I'd love to do before the end of the year.

Other good news is that real cash in the bank has topped £900 (I've not got all the payments in/cleared yet so I can't give the exact figure) which gives us a monthly average of over £150 a month, about £25 a month more than last year, again something I'm pleased with but would love to get this up to £200 a month before the end of the year.

Considering it's the summer, where earnings tend to drop slightly (adsense definitely has), I'm quite pleased with these figures. I hope you've all set another milestone in your earnings

Update: Cash in the bank for the month is now at £950 after the various payments were in. Plus I suddenly got $10 in from Chitika, somewhere I rarely every check, so that was a nice surprise! So that's almost an average of £160 a month, which is a good improvement over last year

Posted in AIS | 2 Comments »

Earnings for May 08

June 2, 2008 – 9:55 pm

May earnings were pretty good, mainly due to the first sales of my commercial plugins. The total income for the month was $374 which almost works out evenly between advertising (link sales), AdSense and product sales. Not a bad turn around from last year where about 75% of our income was from AdSense, which is never desirable.

This is a step in the right direction of increasing our monthly income, now all we need is the exchange rate to sort itself out and our dollars earned will be worth more! There's always hope!

I've yet to finalise the current cash balance, however we've cleared over £127 at least, so we've hit the monthly target yet again.

Posted in AIS | 11 Comments »

Commercial Plugin Site Update

May 30, 2008 – 12:07 pm

It's been a bit quiet around here as I've been working on our new commercial plugin site. We've now got a design for it which is being coded up into a WordPress theme, as we're going to use WordPress to power the site (obviously!). We're using Secure Delivery to deal with the delivery of the products after purchase, makes my life easier!

We've got 4 plugins ready to sell, plus a few to give away for free. I'll also be writing at least one other for use on the site which I'll also put up for sale. I've got plenty more to do, it's just finding the time! I mentioned last time about pricing products and the different structures available. For selling the standard products this is just a one off payment, but for the yearly upgrade and support license there's more involved. My plan is to sell this as a product and then manually create a user account in WordPress for the buyer. We'll then have a different page set up for each plugin and the member's account will be given access to each plugin they've subscribed to. This should be possible with a couple of plugins, although it is the trickiest part. For the payment I'll most likely set it so that if someone subscribes I'll set up the subscription via PayPal for their account and then if payment isn't received the following year their account will just be suspended for up to X weeks and then terminated.

I'm also intending to set up a demo WordPress install with the plugins available to try out so that people know what they're paying for. Obviously with a CRON job to refresh the database back to its original state every so often.

So things are getting there slowly. I've upgraded a couple of the plugins to WordPress 2.5 now, so I just have the others to check over. Then I'll make a start on the content and getting our subscription area sorted out. Unfortunately we've both been swamped with work for the past couple of weeks, and it doesn't look to be slowing right now, so it's a case of getting little bits done here and there when there's a spare moment. Still, should be good when it's live

The good news is we've already made a sale on 2 of the plugins for 2 multi site licenses and the yearly upgrade/support.

Posted in Product Selling | 9 Comments »

Pricing Products

May 16, 2008 – 12:40 pm

I know, it's been a fortnight, I've been busy! We've been working on getting our new WordPress plugins site up and running. I originally had just a couple of commercial plugins to sell however I've been working on more and so we'll have a few more products to launch with. Luckily the plugins have all been written from requests so every plugin has been sold once at least which means that time isn't 100% wasted if it doesn't sell again!

We've worked out our pricing structure for this as we want to try and offer something for everyone. As the plugins are not anything major we're not looking at charging a lot for them, but charging enough to make it worth while. Obviously each plugin is charged according to the complexity and time taken to create it, however with a few other sites selling plugins too, we also need to keep it competitive.

Our pricing options for these plugins are going to be

• Single site license
• Multi site license
• Yearly upgrade license

The 3rd option can only be purchased if one of the first two options have been purchased in the past. This way someone who just wants a cheapy plugin can grab the single site license, but as WordPress upgrades or if we happen to add more features in, then the yearly upgrade license will have to be paid for to get an upgraded version. Of course if a major amount of new features are added then I'll probably release it as a new product as a Pro version.

To deal with the pricing we're going for simple maths ie. a Single site license costs X, the multi will cost 2.5*X and the yearly upgrade will cost 0.5*X. I think this works out reasonable. Of course the single vs multi site usage goes on trust, but hopefully most of the businesses that buy from us will be honest, as the plugins are not going to be exceptionally expensive in the first place.

We'll also be offering a couple of freebie plugins, mainly because one has been available on my own site for quite a while (and is pretty basic) and the other uses partly modified code from another plugin, and naturally I wouldn't want to be selling someone else's GPL code! Plus I think offering a couple of products for free will attract the buyers in and we'll be offering all the plugins for free to registered charity sites too.

So hopefully the site will be virtually ready to go live soon. I've just got the hard part to do now, write the content!

Posted in Product Selling | 8 Comments »

April 08 Earnings

May 2, 2008 – 3:17 pm

April Earnings came in at $284 so just $8 short of March, which has an extra day in it (well that's my excuse!). Cash in the bank (the real stuff not just virtual figures) has hit £603 which compared to last year's average (£127*4 = £508) is almost £100 improvement. We're averaging £150 a month at the moment which would give us £1800 for the end of the year. I'm hoping to go over £2k so hopefully the two major sites I've been working on all month will help towards increasing the average.

The past month I've been a bit quiet and a lot of my spare time has been taken up with tinkering with WP eCommerce for one of our sites that has over 100 products for sale on it. I've uploaded about 20, it's a bit time consuming! However once those are up and I've finished customising the code for the cart then that will be done for the time being. My other site is the plugin site which we're still working on getting some content on it, however we already know of one sale that'll be made (once I've written the plugin!) plus a yearly license for upgrades. This site, although not finished, is also eagerly awaiting the shopping cart system that Secure Delivery is about to unveil, so it'll be great to put that to the test too.

However, it's a bank holiday weekend here and I'm taking the weekend off (besides writing my article for BloggingTips) so hope you have a good one

Posted in AIS | 5 Comments »

WP e-Commerce, WordPress Plugin

April 21, 2008 – 4:06 pm

I've been working on setting up my new site and decided to try out the WP e-Commerce plugin on it for dealing with selling the products. I would have used Secure Delivery however I need to give the option of a shopping cart to visitors as most will hopefully purchase two products, the main product and an upgrade license (more on this another time).

WP e-Commerce is just like any other plugin for the installation. Just unzip the files and upload the directory to your plugins directory, and activate it in the WordPress admin. You then get an extra menu for it, where you can set your shop settings, other preferences, and start adding categories, brands and product information. It can deal with physical products or digital products, the latter was what I was interested in. You can also easily select which fields to have in the form on the front end, and which of these fields to send PayPal so that they're prefilled. As I'm only looking to sell digital products I took the address details out as these are not needed.

The lite version of this plugin allows you to sell products via PayPal only. Whilst it's called 'lite' it's not that simple as such. You can have your products in categories, there's a shopping basket and it uses the PayPal IPN for instant notification. I've not gone through the whole process but I would assume that if you're selling a digital product it will also then provide a download link to the buyer to download the product, as I've had the option to set how many times the product can be downloaded by the buyer.

There are optional extras that cost a little extra (very little to be honest!) which I may look at in the future if the site gets busy enough to need them. Whilst I could have coded this all myself I figured that it was worth looking at the plugin and to be honest it's a good plugin to use. I may also convert one of our other product selling sites over to it as that's been needing a shopping basket for months but I've just not had the time to sit down and really finish the coding myself. With this plugin I could probably get everything added over a couple of days (100+ products) and convert the site to WordPress and hopefully, if my thinking is right, see the sales rocket

So if you're after a free, light, product selling script then this is a good option to look at.

Posted in Product Selling | 27 Comments »

Brief Update

April 8, 2008 – 3:21 pm

Bit quiet around here at present as I've got a couple of things underway. The first is the continued work on adding to my Foodie site. I'm adding a 'bookshelf' page, listing all of my cookbooks (I have a couple!) with links through to Amazon, along with a kitchenware page, again listing products I have or recommend, linking through to places to buy them. It won't be a major money spinner but once the pages are set up (I'll use a database table to hold the info and just populate the pages from it) then it could make a little additional income. If I can find a decent kitchen affiliate site then that would be better, so I'll have a look through my affiliate networks too (any suggestions gratefully received).

The second is a new product selling site selling what I'm (semi) good at, programming. After writing a few plugins for commercial sites running WordPress, a friend and I have decided to set up a site selling WordPress plugins designed for the commercial market. Most of these are designed for CMS usage as opposed to blogging usage, so we're hoping to target people using WordPress for a budget site and website developers who offer WordPress as a CMS. We've found a great domain name available (a rarity these days) so just need to get the site set up reading to sell the products. We'll most likely use Secure Delivery to deal with taking payments and 'delivering' the products, and then set up a members area for receiving upgrades. Of course, WordPress will be used to power all of this too.

So a couple of things on the go

Posted in Everything Else | 6 Comments »

New Google Ad?

April 4, 2008 – 11:24 am

I may not be on the ball here, so forgive me if this is old, but I noticed this on one my sites today. On the ad shown left, you'll notice up and down arrows below the ad in the bottom left. Spotting this I decided to click it to see what would happen. It then allowed me to scroll through 5 different adverts. I've also got a single ad elsewhere on the same page but that didn't have this feature, however one is a small horizontal banner and the one in the image is a 125*125 button.

It's quite a cool feature although I wonder if it's that noticeable. Also, my reason for putting one advert there was because the highest paying ad would be shown, if there are 5 there I presume it goes into the order of payment, which means I could lose out if they don't click the highest earning ad. But then again, it's not like they make much these days anyway

Posted in Pay Per Click | 10 Comments »

March 08 Earnings

April 2, 2008 – 1:45 pm

This month has been pretty good for earnings. Our AdSense has gone back up by a 25% increase, I had a couple more Text Link Ads 'sales' too, which has helped with the income, plus a couple more sales on DIY Covers. Total for the month comes to $292, which is a good increase on the past two months.

More importantly is cash in the bank. We didn't get an AdSense payout this month (although the one due this month will be about £90), but with a few other payments in we've had almost £120 come in, and that's without AdSense, so just £7 short of the monthly target. However overall we've got £436.82 total which is £55 over the combined average (average last year was £381 at this point). With an AdSense payment every other month instead of every month the targets will not always be met, however I'm really happy to almost reach our monthly target without have AdSense included, afterall we all know it's not good to rely on just one main source of income.

This month has seen a refresh of 2 existing sites. One sells osCommerce templates and eBooks which was half on WordPress and half not (I set it up on WP before I knew about page templates!), so this month I finally got to integrate the site into WordPress properly, give the site a new theme courtesey of WPDesigner, and altered the site a bit to show a random template in the sidebar on every page (something I've been meaning to do), clean up the code and give a couple more options. I've got a few more ideas for the site which I'll be working on over the next month.

The second site is my Food and Drink blog. It's more of a passion than an AIS site as I do blog on there, however I've got a couple of ideas to maybe make a bit of additional income from it which I see as AIS as I would still blog there even if I didn't make any money from it

So this month I'm intending to get these finished off and am then thinking about an overhaul on our Tattoo site. I've yet to finish the shopping cart on it (typically it just gets put to the bottom of the to do list) which I kick myself for as we could have made a fair few sales via it. Plus I have new tattoos to add which I think will be popular, along with some eBooks that I have the resale rights for.

Hope your month of March was good and April is prosperous for you too

Posted in AIS | 24 Comments »

Incremental Pricing Site Launched

April 1, 2008 – 10:35 am

After writing about 1 month last year, it was put on hold by Gary, however he's now officially launched the first product for sale on the site. For sale is his 5 Starred script, but on the incremental pricing structure, so today it's $1, tomorrow it'll be $2 and so on until the 30th of April it'll be $30.

5 Starred is a script that allows you to create a list of top web sites, allowing people to vote on their favourites to determine who's top. People can easily submit a URL to the list (which goes into an approval queue). You've also got the option of showing and using Google PageRank, Technorati Rank and Alexa Rank in the algorithm to determine the top spot. It's a nice addition to any niche subject site, I'm currently part way through adding it to my Food blog to list the top food and drink blogs online. Another good example is at Club osCommerce.

Why have a top sites list on your site? Mark at 45n5n has proven that a good list can really drive the traffic to your site, and the success of his list and subsequent Money Links has really shown. I even read other blogs that I've not connected to Mark and suddenly see them mention the famous top 100 and 45n5! So, sure maybe it's an ego thing, but when the product costs just $1 (today), why not grab it and give it a try. It's a good little marketing tool. You can't lose much now

Posted in Marketing | 2 Comments »