This is the first of my monthly income reports. In an effort to try and be timely with these reports, I will only be reporting on my gross revenue, both for my Yahoo store and Amazon. I do have some other online and offline income, but these reports will focus only on income associated with product sales.
I have to admit that I’m a little embarrassed about sharing this information because my main ecommerce site was hit by Google’s Penguin algorithm update on April 24th, so I’ve seen a big drop in income over the last few weeks. Fortunately, I was recently promoted at work, which resulted in a pay increase that’s offset my loss in online income. Unfortunately, I’m in contract to buy a home right now, so I’d really like to see my income going UP!
My goal is to bring my online income back to pre-Penguin levels by year end, so the real purpose of these reports is to hold myself accountable and allow you to follow the process.
What Happened in May?
To be honest, not much. Like I mentioned in the intro, my Google rankings took a hit towards the end of April, so I spent a lot of May waiting to see if Google would “fix” it’s algorithm. A lot of high quality sites were impacted by Penguin, so my hope was that they would tweak the algorithm after realizing that it was flawed. So far, my site hasn’t recovered, so it looks like I’ll have to take matters into my own hands. In any event, my revenue breakdown for May was as follows:
May 2012 Income Breakdown
- Yahoo Store (May):
- Total sales: $4,063.05
- Unique visitors: 8,628
- Page views/visitor: 4.21
- Orders: 59
- Avg. order size: $68.87
Prior to Penguin, I’d typically have between $5,000 – $7,000 in monthly revenue for my Yahoo store, with about 100 orders per month this time of year. My April revenue was $5,713.05 with 89 orders.
The good news is that my Amazon revenue has actually gone up during this period, so that’s been a big help financially.
- Amazon (May):
- Total sales: $9,132.29
- Orders: 440
- Avg. order size: $20.76
This compares to $8,559.24 in revenue for April with 408 orders.
So, in total I had gross revenue of $13,195.34 for May 2012.
On a final note, I can already tell you that my June sales through my Yahoo store are looking even worse than May, although yesterday (June 18th) was my best day in weeks.
Mr Invicto says
Good work buddy .. next time i wanna see you cross 20k mark.
JJ Wong says
That’s really impressive to say Dax.
My blog is having much more traffic than this yet I’m just making 2 figures income per month, looks like my targeted visitors and ways of my monetization is really far behind this.
It really matter on where the traffics from, and way of us presenting things to sell and monetize.
Dax Deegan says
Of course, targeted visitors is very important, but remember that these are not blogs with affiliate links. I am selling physical prodcuts through my own website and Amazon, so the revenue numbers I provide are before the cost of goods and other expenses. It is still much more profitable than if it was an affiliate site, but it’s not an apples to apples comparison.