Hard to believe that it’s been another three months. It’s time for another $3k Challenge Update. This has been my best quarter yet, but I’m still a long way short of my goal.
Last quarter you may recall that I was up to $60. This quarter, I easily made 5 times that amount. Which is nice, but really, to make my goal, I should have been making that much each month all year.
I made another ~$9 in AdSense revenue this quarter. I’m seriously considering removing AdSense from this site. Of that $9, just over $1 came from here and the other $8 came from If You Can Read, You Can Cook. Actually, I think I have to go back to how I had my AdSense ads previously set up. I read a popular book on AdSense that said that text ads do much better than banner ads, so I switched. Clickthroughs here basically stopped. So much for said popular AdSense book!
Speaking of advertising, I also am in the Foodie Blogrol publisher program. Results there have tended to be pretty pathetic, as they only seem to fill about 30% of ad requests with paying ads. But they recently introduced a new advertising stream by partnering with a group that inserts coupons for ingredients into recipes. It started late last month and my revenue has been trending upward. This month I broke $1 for the first time and could actually reach $2.
But other efforts were much more productive. Private advertising deals for other sites within my sphere of influence brought in $210.
SEAM Publishing also had it’s best quarter to date, with $104 income. I was lucky to do some work for some fellow Yakezie Network bloggers. The Yakezie network is full of money-minded bloggers interested in supplemental income via selling ebooks, so I’m happy to get my name out there.
I do have high hopes for Q4 with SEAM Publishing because of a $50 credit I received for LinkedIn Ads. I have done Facebook and AdWords advertising in the past with credits I’ve received for those platforms; they resulted in some paid traffic, 1 lead, and no sales. My LinkedIn ad seems to be doing better. It’s been up 2 days so far, and I’ve spent $10 generating 2 leads. The one I’m farther along with could be quite profitable if I’m able to reel that one in.
The taco seasoning is completely stalled out. I will grant that I haven’t actually tried in this quarter. I think I’ll play the slow game on that one and let the site get more traffic overall. The site’s traffic is up over 300% this year and it’s not quite fully out of the sandbox in terms of Google rankings. By this time next year, I should be at over 10,000 pageviews per month. Hopefully, at that point more traffic will be noticing the sales page.
I do have another cookbook in the works, although I’ve been so busy with other projects that I really haven’t put the time into it that I should be.I missed the launch date I wanted (just before school started), so instead I’ll aim for getting it out in December in hopes of getting some Christmas sales.
So that’s it. I’m not quite up to $400. It would be nice to get up to $1000 by the end of the year, but I don’t really see that happening. I don’t have anything that big planned for the next three months. And I certainly don’t have anything $2600 big planned in that time, so I’ll certainly fall short of my goal.
But in the end, I’m okay with that. My original purpose for trying to come up with an extra $3000 was that was the projected difference between what I owed in credit card debt and what I would be able to pay off towards my credit card debt. Various hiccups in life put me $1500 behind what I thought I could afford to pay, so even if I had accomplished my online goal, I still would have had CC debt at the end of the year.
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