Its been a yoook month in a number of ways and there is a storm a brewing – hope you like the pic of the South China Sea – north coast of Sarawak. That is what I predicted and this is precisely what came true, but for somewhat unexpected reasons.

In brief, I sense that Google god have now re-ranked, de-ranked quite a few of my eBay earning sites (thus also affecting my AdSense income). Up till the 18th of January, all was going as normal on eBay. Traffic was decent-ish, income was reasonable. Then suddenly that was to change. Traffic went down by more than half and income followed suit. Some days I was seeing around £7 income from eBay, which is about 11 bucks US. I’ve not witnessed such low figures as this for 6 months, so it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.

And what is worse I don’t think there is going to be much improvement on this – ever! Bye bye eBay income… And thank you Google god!

I had a couple of days where I was very badly ill. So did not get online at all during those days. When I finally did, I opened an email to tell me that one of my two Hostgator accounts was suspended. Fortunately I was able to turn that around and its open again. But this account is by far my biggest account for eBay sites, so there goes the best part of two days income from that side of things too.

Is there anything bright to discuss about January? Would seem not much, no.

Is there anything particularly bright to look forward to in February? Well yes, one thing in particular – the eBook revamp should be completed and hopefully up on Clickbank within a couple of weeks, just before I head on back over the oceans to the UK.

Anyways, this is supposed to be an income report and not a crying session. I’ll get to discussing other projects and various progressions (or otherwise) in a post I’ve already partly put together and will add that to the blog over the next few days. No – its not all doom and gloom, that is for sure!

So as always I will start off with expenditure. Same as usual – dollar to pound I will value at 1.58 to give constant parity to my previous income posts.

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Expenditure:

Outsourcing: $207. This includes writing and graphic design.

My blog “upheaval”: I got Andrew from WeBuildYourBlog to help me with this – move the blog over to http://josepharchibald.com and help with a few more tweaks. More to come over the next few weeks.
           : $90

Tools: $267

Products purchased: $60

Domains purchased: x 2 at about $18 US. I dumped 10 more domains this month.

Total Expenditure for January: $642
(that’s a reduction of $417 on last month, which is a bit of a relief actually!)

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As I say each time – a great big thank you to everyone who either purchased via my affiliate links, or who purchased my eBook!

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I’ll begin this month with my horrible eBay income. See the graph for how things went with eBay.

There is one thing to add in with this month’s eBay income, and that is last month’s bonus. You may remember me saying that eBay provided a bonus for November and December sales. My bonus from November was a welcome £87.77. My bonus from December, which is not paid until mid January – hence I add that in to this months income – was a whopping £474.69! Oh well, seems obvious I will not be receiving anything like that next year so I best enjoy it now

Total eBay income: £1333.38 ($2106.74) which is down on last months income of £1550.96 ($2450.52) by $343.78..

Next up, AdSense. Yook! AdSense never got going for me at all during January (smart pricing!), and tailed off in the last couple of weeks, mainly due to the fact that my main AdSense earner is one of my eBay sites. So AdSense is a bit of a lost cause right now. But I’m actually working on a couple of AdSense sites – one which does reasonably well for me and so I’ve added quite a few more posts to it – really building this thing out. Click thru tends to be good for this site, even though cpc is very low at around 35 cents a click on average. The other is a newer site which appears to have “sandboxed”. But I’m slowly working on getting that out and have reasonable hopes that this could be at least half decent for income given a few months time.

AdSense income for January: £207.49 ($327.80) which is way down on December’s income of £442.28 ($698.80). Ouch!!

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Next up – my 40 Days Challenge eBook.

Again, sales are a bit down on previous month. Gee – nothing is going well, is it! Last month’s income from my eBook sales was $549.34. This month its $511.40 so a $37.94 short fall on December. Still, this is very pleasing!

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Travel site. I’m kinda letting this drift off a bit and not now backlinking to it. I guess its not a good time of year to stop all backlinking because no doubt folks will be looking to book holidays for summer. But on the whole, even though my travel site is ranking well for a number of decent keyword phrases, it does not bring in much income month to month. Time to cut losses, is what I say.

Income from travel site this month: $17.81 which is down on last month by $3.21.

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Amazon. No doubt Amazon will be way down on last month, which of course is to be expected, so no matter how much I make here, I can’t be too disappointed. Income from Amazon for January was $20.05 which is down on December’s income of $106.26 by $86.21.

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Clickbank: $180.41 this month which is up on last month (finally – woohooooo!) by $52.09.

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PaydotCom: $179 which is up $139 from last month. Ah, we’re flying now, lol!

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Other affiliate income: $17.10 from Build my Rank and that’s it for this month – down on last month by $23.50.

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Unique Article Wizard: last month it was a mere $80.40, while this month the total is $160.80, so that is doubled up on last month.

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Okay, now for something else that was added into the mix. Another webite sale! I had a site that was basically sitting doing very little. Rankings were slowly tailing off and I thought it best just to get rid of the thing. At one time this site was getting around 15k uniques per month, and that had gone way down to about half that by last month. I discussed this with Chris, my young joint venture partner and business partner as I knew he has a fair bit of experience in flipping sites. So we came up with a plan of action and to cut a long-ish story short, managed to flip this baby for a profit (after all auction costs of $80 that is) of $370. Now okay, nothing huge is it, but its better that than letting this thing slide into oblivion, which I probably would have done. So we split that 50/50 which gives me a bonus income of $185 for January for the site flip. In fact, you can see the auction here…

https://flippa.com/auctions/120745/8K-UNIQUESMONTH-TOP-OF-GOOGLE-YAHOO-BING-Huge-Potential-Profits

Site flip: $185 profit

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So, just how bad was January for income? Here are the final figures…

$3706.11 US

which is £2346 UK

which is around about 11,730 Malaysian (RMG).

Hehe, well okay, not nearly as bad as I had thought and its only now that I see that. Throughout the month its felt fairly terrible! Its pretty much on par with Novembers income, and only $459 down on Decembers high of $4165.26. And because my expenses this month were $417 lower than December’s – well, the over-all nett income is hand in hand to December’s really – only about $42 short.

Okay, that’s all very well and good, but how the heck am I going to get through February? Not only is it a very short month for us internet marketers and self employed folks, but I’ve got the eBay and AdSense problem to face up to. I sense that I’m doooooommmmeeeddddd!

But also because I’m heading back to UK shores just after mid-month, I’ll have little time to come up with some novel way of propping up the income. We’ll see, we will see…

I’ve been asked to do an interview later on this afternoon so that should be fun – its all about me, me, me! lol! First time I’ve ever done an interview when its been about me alone – other than the time I was arrested by the police, hahahaha!

Its also Chinese New Year’s eve here, so there will be lots of fireworks and partying tonight in this part of the world. Not a bad thing when you can celebrate 2 New Years every year – even more reason to get drunk and party like an animal. Now come on – do you think I would do that now, do you?

Happy New Year to everyone who celebrates the Chinese version!