December 2008 Adsense Earnings and 2008 Overall Photo Earnings.

Adsense Earnings for December 2008 are $225 - my worst month since, well - as long as I can remember, although December is traditionally not very good for me as I do not have any really good Christmas Wallpapers.

2008 has been very similar to 2007 in that earnings from all other stuff that I have tried (CPA / Affiliate stuff etc) - amounts to pretty much ZERO. So while I may grumble form time to time about how poor Adsense can be - it is still far and away my biggest earner AND takes up very little of my time!

I had a BIG drop in visitors a few months back, caused by all my images disappearing from Google Image Search after I moved them from ni-photos.jmcwd.com to irishviews.com using a 301 redirect (which worked fine for normal 'web' results but NOT for 'image' results!). With any luck, they'll be back in a few months (new images placed on my web site tend to take at least 3 or 4 months to appear in Google image search in my experience). But hopefully it be worth it in the long run. (It was a bit confusing and untidy having all the photos on a sub domain of my web design web site).

Irishmyspace.com, ireland-screensavers.com, and this blog also generated a small amount of income - but not enough for me to even be bothered adding it up and listing it here!

So to recap - Adsense Earnings for 2008 by month (In US Dollars):-
Jan 2008 - 558
Feb 2008 - 660
Mar 2008 - 797
Apr 2008 - 693
May 2008 - 800
June 2008 - 593
July 2008 - 574
Aug 2008 - 550
Sep 2008 - 745
Oct 2008 - 754
Nov 2008 - 296
Dec 2008 - 225
2008 Adsense Total - 7245

Total Earned From Hi-Res Photo Sales / Photo Usage Rights = Approx $900 (This is approximate as most of my sales were in GBP). I think the lesson to be learned here is that you do not need to have absolutely amazing images to be able to sell them. Most of the images I sold were just a bit above average in my opinion, and would probably not even have been accepted if you tried to submit them to a stock photo web site such as istockphoto.com. If you can get a huge numbers of people to view your photos, you will make sales. As to how you should price your high resolution photos, here is an online stock photo price calculator which can give you some sort of idea what to charge. I always price mine on the low side as I am conscious of the fact that most of my photos are not exactly 'award winning' material, and most of my visitors are cheapskates who generally just want free or nearly free images. Also bear in mind that when trying to agree a fee on an ad hoc basis, you will get a lot of time wasters, and sometimes a lot of emails to and fro just to secure a small payment. But for me, it has been worth the hassle this year!

Chitika Earnings in 2008 = approx $130.

Project Wonderful Earnings for 2008 = $50

Total Photo Related Earnings For 2008 Are Approx $8,325

Since the purpose of this post is to boast about how fantastic my earnings are :-), I'll gloss over the fact that my outgoings for the year for hosting, travel, camera equipment, payments to other people for the use of their photos etc. are probably well in excess of $2000!

P.S. - Most of my earnings are due to 'SEO' - and I thoroughly recommend the Search Engine Optimization For Dummies book :-

which taught me most of what I know about Search Engine Optimization.
SEO For Dummies is the only book I recommend 100% without any hesitation whatsoever. It will save you hours (and hours) tracking down similar, and not always accurate information on the Internet. Even if you already know 99% of everything there is to know about Search Engine Optimization, it is still worth getting!


Click Here To Subscribe To My RSS Feed
Click Here To Subscribe To Feed By Email
Click Here For Information On Using My Photos On Your Blog Free Of Charge.
Click Here To Join Wealthy Affiliate University