It looks like March was the peak of my attempts to live off polluting the internet with yet more bad content. Things have seriously gone downhill since then. I have been really late in posting this update, due to a set of setbacks both to my internet access, and to this site, of which I shall write more (well my inborn laziness also played a part).
Anyway let us sit around a fire (or a monitor) and tell sad tales of past glories.
- Squidoo Amazon….$83
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Squidoo Adshare…$50
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HubPages Amazon….$104
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HubPages ad payout…..$27.5
- Zazzle etc……….$17
Adding up to $280, which is almost $300 which is almost £200, so about 1/10th of what I would need to survive (especially if I moved out of the big smoke), and 1/15th of what I would really like to earn.
So still far from what I would hope all of my writings online were making. It is pretty horrific to think of writing 10x as much as I have written so far, never mind 15x, but at least I was making progress.
Unfortunately things went downhill since then. First of all, although my HP traffic was still strong, my Amazon conversion rate halved. It was quite suspicious and other people have mentioned seeing similar problems, although not all. One thing that was strange is that I now seem to be only making sales of items which I either link to directly or that are closely related to the items I write about.
The beauty of being an Amazon affiliate, which somewhat makes up for their really low rate, and the fact that the Amazon cookie only lives for a day, is that I would get paid for any item somebody bought from the site when they visited from one of my links. As far as I know Amazon’s policy is not changed. But they have been cracking down on “friends’ sales”, where people would ask their friends and relatives to go to Amazon through one of their links.
Since I have very few friends, and no relatives, in the States, I haven’t done that. But it’s possible that Amazon discounts sales of unrelated items from my links on the principle that they might be from friends. But then again, it might be nothing that complicated and it might just be that people are buying less (no general indication of such a tendency though), or that I’ve just been unlucky since March.
The other problem is that Squidoo’s traffic has continued to slide after March 14th, and I’m continually losing visitors there. My best lens, which had an average of 100 visitors a day, now gets 10 on a lucky day. What is worse is that HP appears to be hit by whatever cute black and white animal was unleashed around May 9th. It appears to have lost about 20% of traffic. At the rate this is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if I fall under the $100 threshold this month.
