Back in May I started a little experiment with a hobby site that was monetized, but not really doing anything. The traffic was still low, but at a point that it definitely could have been performing much better. I decided to spend some time on the site to see if I couldn’t get more out of it.

I wrote first about it here: Monetizing A Hobby Site - Without Adsense

I wrote an update for May’s results here: The Numbers Are In

May’s commissions totalled $90.36, a big improvement from what I had been achieving.

Here are June’s stats for that site:

Traffic:

3076 Uniques
4723 Visits

Search Engines:

1709 Yahoo
384 MSN
290 Other Engines
66 Google (just gets better and better doesn’t it :lol:)

Bookmarks:

435 (14.1% Bookmark Rate)

Fairly consistent traffic count between May and June.

May I earned: $90.36
June I earned: $158.99

Commission Increase: $68.63

Things are improving! Could it be better? Ummm Yeah!

A few things to note:

Although the traffic count is pretty close between the two months, May did have a boost here and there with better ‘money’ traffic. This site has 5 subject areas. Two of those subjects aren’t monetized as well as the other three. The affiliate creatives I’m using are a much better fit with three of the five subjects. May’s traffic boost was in the three ‘money’ subjects. Did ya follow that?

June was a bit different, I’m getting much more traffic for one of the subjects that isn’t such a good fit with the affiliate stuff I’m using. I’m still keeping my eyes open for better affiliate products to use on those pages.

So with the changes I made with where I placed the affiliate items (noted in last month’s blog entry), I did increase the site’s income by nearly $70 last month. But I think it would have been more significant if I had the same type of traffic I had in May.

I decided not to make any changes to the site for this month and just watch and see what happens. In an ideal world, I’ll get a better match for the ‘top three’ traffic and really get an idea of how much things improved.

Remember - no adsense, popups and crap allowed!