Yet again time has been flying by and the past two months have seen some firsts. I have had my first AdSense payment in FOUR YEARS! I don’t know why I ignored this income stream for so long, it really didn’t take that long to reach the payment threshold once I incorporated it into some of my sites. Of course you cannot rely on it as a major income source, but it is an additional income that certainly helps.
Another first, which isn’t as big as the AdSense first, it that I have finally made a sale from a site that had been seeing plenty of visitors, but no conversions to sale. Yay me, the site is now profitable 
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Another first is my first insane conversion rate – of 250% – on the Amazon affiliate program (the US version). I have set up a couple of hubs to sell baby stuff, out of two click throughs I sold 5 items, and they weren’t even related to baby stuff. That’s the great thing about the amazon affiliate program, just get them to the site and 9 out of 10 times Amazon will do the rest.
The amazon conversion....
Targets for September include getting a single sale with the Amazon UK program. I was kindly informed a couple of months ago that unless I made a sale, Amazon were going to charge me £10 just for the privilege of being part of their affiliate program. How lovely.
Update: With regard to rankings on Bing I have seem some substantial success (in my view, anyway). The previous check I did at the end of July put my site all over the place for some keywords, one a very competitive one. I have since re-checked the rankings, and my site has been slowly making its way to the top…
Cuterank analysis of my website for three keywords as at 11 September 2010
As you can see the site is doing well for both Bing and Yahoo, but the best progress has been in Google, where it has been steadily rising to the top! Of course this may be a combination of factors – These keywords are seasonal, so rankings for these keywords tend to be higher when they are searched more often(i.e. in summer) – and I have done a little backlinking for them. However, beyond that I have not really done much to promote the website.
So, for now I will concentrate on the UK Amazon program. Once my targets have been met on that it’s back to seeing what can be done to make the other sites more profitable.