Double checked on Google and today SwishWorld broke the $100 barrier for Google Adsense earnings! The new site went up on the 22nd October and it's just hit a few cents over $100!!! That's over $50 a month. I'm more than happy with that figure especially if I can keep or even raise it more. $50 a month = $600 a year = a nice holiday away for Dave and I nnThere are more improvements to come on the web site, once I have time probably between Christmas and New Year (I seem to be saying that to everything though!!!).

Amongst all the crap that happened last week I had my best day yet on Adsense, over $8 in total, over $6 for my SwishWorld site. Not bad considering I've not had time to do much to it recently due to client work. Visitors are averaging around 70 a day and I still have a lot of amendments to do to the web site. My Amazon sales of the book however are not so good. Trouble is I'm a UK Amazon affiliate and most of my visitors are from the US. I've looked at joining the US Amazon affiliate scheme however the payout methods are not very good in my opinion as I would have to receive a cheque and lose a lot in charges.nnSo I'm thinking of pushing the Swish templates on the web site and putting the book back to the shop page and off the side bar. I can set the templates to rotate in the display and perhaps I may get more sales this way (or should I say 'a' sale this way!).nnOnce I have time I also have another site that currently is just a holding page and an ad block on it. This page gets around 10 visitors a day due to an image on it and clicks on it can pull in a lot of cash per click so I'm hoping to set up a quick site and perhaps make more money off it. But this will be done when I finally have the time. I currently have about 5 client web sites on the go and am losing track over what's what! I need some organisation now i've moved, back to running my own office.

A quick run down for anyone who's interested.nnSwishWorld:n$53 on Adsensen£1.40 at Amazonn77 visits/day average (including the slow days before indexing)nnTribal Tattoos (live since 21st)n$10 in AdsensenNo salesnVisitors still building, last 2 day average is 89 per day.nnIn total adsense I made $63, doubling the entire total for the previous 2 years (ahem) !! So now I can expect a cheque finally. I also sold a template off another site, $13, and have had a few other affiliations made money, so in total I would say I've made around $90 in total which isn't too bad for the month. Okay I have put work in to the sites but the dip in visitors on Swish World has now started to rise back up to the 100 per day mark which I'm happy with as I guess it means the few adjustments I am doing are working.nnWell we're off to Dublin this afternoon. The plan was to make enough to cover the trip – well the flights have been paid for at least, and we've got another 2 months before the credit card will come in for the room payment (we leave on the 5th so it'll just miss January's bill) – so we have 2 months to get the sites to earn £200 plus meal costs. There's my new target!nnOh and do some client work in the mean time!!nnPS. it's advent calendar time

I've spent the whole of today staring at a tiny number of clicks making a tiny amount of cash (I could probably pick up more between the house and the car). Yet in the last hour my adsense earnings updated and made my eyes open for the first time since the Swish site went live. Now I know I'm not meant to discuss clicks and figures so we'll use algebra (well I am a mathematician afterall!). For the first part of the day I had x number of clicks making y cents. Then 1 extra click made y * 10+ times earnings. I know anyone who deals with using adsense will probably understand what I'm saying, basically why is it that on the same web site you can make anything between 1c and over $1 in a click? And more to the point, how do I get the higher paying adverts on every page??!! I've started to rewrite my current page text and add more content to the internal pages, targeting better phrases on each page, hoping to bring in the higher paying ads. I know the media partners bot from google reads your site and then determines the likelyhood of the advert displayed being clicked on and more to the point making a sale via that click.nnI've made more on this site with 2 clicks than i have with 30-40 clicks on my swish site – it's just very frustrating. Unfortunately I don't have the time to download the new version of the software and play around with it to give me the knowledge to write any articles, plus my content writing is bad enough as it is! The only help I can offer is with PHP but I don't think you can use that with Swish, just Flash.nnTo add to this, the Amazon links are for Amazon UK and of course most of my visitors are from the US. I've looked at signing up with amazon.com (I'm sure once a long time ago I had…!) however the options available for payments is amazon.com credit, a cheque for $100 less $8 fee ($8 to write a bloody cheque?!!) or else payment into a US bank account. Handy that last one I'm thinking about the options and if I did set up with amazon.com as well (I can't seem to find any other book site selling the book) then I guess the account credit would be used for stuff. Of course a cheque for $92 would be better than nothing, but I just feel that 8% of it going back into amazon's pocket is a bit much. Still I have a lot of looking around to do once the busy period of work is over with, I've just not had a great deal of time to research stuff, plus I get paid more per hour by clients than I currently do by my sideline sites so I can't justify the time at the moment!

I thought I'd do a quick round up of my Swish World AIS site's earnings as it's been a month and a 3 days since I purchased the site and started work on it (and I'm bored and fed up of doing client work!).nnPaid out £20 for the web site:nAdsense – $51nAmazon – £1.40nnTherefore this site has definitely covered the money paid out for it from my perspective. Of course there's 4 years worth of domain fees that my friend has paid out so I can't say for sure if it's broken even on money yet. However time is another thing. I've spent around 5-10 hours on this website, adding products, cleaning up the pages, researching key phrases etc. Unfortunately there is a lot I would like to do to the site however time is one thing I don't have much of recently due to my business.nnThat said, the visitor numbers are beginning to drop from their post-indexed-in-google high of 140 down to around 70-80 a day. Whilst I still get into double figures for clicks, the money generated per click is just miniscule. In theory, if I'd had payouts that I've received on other sites (such as this and even a contentless holding page) I'd be looking at over $500 of adsense revenue easily! It's just a shame that it's a low paying topic when it comes to adwords.nnI have managed to find another template source tonight however so I've signed up to that as an affiliate and just waiting for confirmation. Whilst the Template Monster templates are great to sell and easy to set up… everyone sells them! A lot of the Swish sites I've looked at have Swish templates from template monster for sale. Unfortunately when something gets a little repetitive people get fed up of seeing it! So I'm hoping to source other products or templates that I can sell.nnI've also started to work on pulling all the files into the root directory. This makes it easier to update, easier for the linking and hopefully google will not see the directory structure as a 'footprint' of a link directory site and be nicer to me! I've started to add content to each page too hoping to trigger better paying adverts and also give something for the spiders to feed off. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like Googlebot is at all interested again as it's not indexed any of the altered pages I put up last week I know my content writing is bad but that bad?!! I've not looked into the raw logs to see where googlebot is actually going during visits so I'm hoping that it'll notice an update on the sitemap and the 302 permanent redirects I've put in place for the old to new pages and perhaps re-cache the pages.nnHowever on to bigger and better things! The Tribal Tattoo site has had 15 pages indexed since going live on Monday, yesterday's visitor count was 51 and so far we've had 35 visitors via search engines, Google supplying 33 of them. Money wise, no Tattoo Flashes have been sold yet and the adsense doesn't even hit $5 but it's early days and you have to bear in mind this website is completely brand new unlike the Swish World one, so it's still taking time to get the spiders in – but I hope things will start to change soon. Again we have a lot of work and products still to add to this site too, I'm just looking for the time inbetween client work, contract work and sleeping.nnOh and I sold a template last night for $13 commission so that's spurned me on to get my template site more up-to-date with more template suppliers as I think there's more money to be made quicker in that business