May flew past in the blink of an eye, literally. The good thing is I was so productive that a lot of work was generated during this month. Here is a summary of my public income statement for May.

(Note: I did not include income from any of my authority or purchased sites as this table is meant to show only income from niche sites I created myself.)

The great thing is the continuing growth of the new site’s income. At this rate of growth, I am hoping to see a 1k contribution from the new sites alone. Old sites still bring in the same amount even though there is a shift in the composition of the earnings. More on that later as I talked about my old niche sites later.

In terms of comic selling, I have seriously cut back on the selling part. It is not that it is not profitable but I think their selling potential will come in 2016 and beyond so I am conversing my supply in that sense.

New niche site challenge

The encouraging thing about the new sites is that almost all of them made some money. I was expecting #1 and #7 to be doomed forever but even they contributed which surprised me the most. #3 continues to be the big money maker while #6 is showing very good promise. Overall, it was an encouraging month for the new sites.

Old niche site update

As I mentioned in the previous update, I put in a ton of work on #2. The hard work is finally paying off as the site’s income increase from $20 to $110. I see it growing even further as the traffic trend just kept on increasing. My hope is that this can be a $400 site eventually when its traffic hit 5k per month.

Although the income from these 4 old niche site increase, the overall earnings for old niche sites remain static. Why? It is because the cpc from Media.net has been dropping like a fly. I am not sure why that is happening but I am not worried since the income from these 4 sites are balancing out the drop. In fact, I feel better to be less dependent on a cpc model that I can’t control vs these 4 affiliate sites that I can always monetise with different options.

Making 1k with Amazon niche sites

The biggest news for May is that I finally broke the 1k earnings mark from being an Amazon affiliate. My earnings reported above was always a mixed of Media.net, Amazon and Skimlinks. This is the first month that Amazon itself will send me a 1k cheque 🙂

(Note: not all my Amazon earnings are reported above as I don’t include earnings from sites I have purchased. All the income you see above are only from niche sites that I created myself)

Amazon was not really my strength as my specialty was always in Adsense. It took me a while but I finally develop my own system to make money with Amazon and I am happy that the system has bear fruit. It is pretty simple but my system consist of using very low competition keywords that have high priced items on Amazon with many reviews. I then use lots of content to draw in all kinds of long tail traffic for the sites. I seldom, if ever, used backlinks.

On the surface, my system is very familiar to others but I am way stricter on the niche and level of competition. It goes beyond the K score in Long Tail Pro. My preferred way to access competition is always to eyeball the Google result and to see if there is any realistic way of my site entering the first page. Usually, I can’t do it for competitive niche keywords such as “best product niche” or “product niche reviews”. Instead, I dig deeper and find even longer tail keywords to rank for.

This system works because the keywords I target has so low competition that no backlinks are needed. In this case, I don’t run the risk of Google penalizing my sites as long as the content I produced isn’t rubbish.

Overall, it was a very satisfactory month. My reported income is now steadily above 1k without selling comics and I see even further growth in the remaining 2015.