The month of August meant more to me than just the sad anniversary of my beloved pet dog passing away three years ago, it also marked the first full month that I had decided to take this blogging lark from a part-time hobby and turn it into a full-time job.

I did not fully achieve this, I took pretty much every Friday, Saturday and Sunday off and I would often take days off during the week. Actually I did pretty much nothing for the last four or five days of August.

This is 100% my own fault though and something that I must address immediately if I am to make a serious go of this. I really don’t want to have to go back to an offline 9-5 job any time soon!

Page Impressions & Visitor Count

The unique visitor count for August stands at 1,064, which is a nice increase of 329 from the month of July.

The page impression count for August stands at 2,289, which is a massive increase of 711 from the month of July.

This means that each unique visitor looked at 2.15 pages.

I think this has to be the highest monthly traffic count I have ever received. I am not going to count back when I was using the StatTraq plugin because they would count admin clicks, robots and web spiders.

Money Money Money!

Adbrite = $0.45 (-$0.48)
AdsDaq = $0.62 (+$0.09)
Adsense = $1.88 (-$0.99)
Adtoll = $0.00 (+/-$0.00)
Infolinks = $0.43 (-$1.76)
Kontera = $0.00 (-$0.05)
Passive Income = $2.09 (new)
Private Ad = $60.00 (new)
Reviews = $246.36 (-$9.98)
Smowtion = $0.61 (+$0.21)
TLA = $6.66 (-$3.34)
UnderDog = $0.11 (-$0.07)

Total = $319.21 (+$25.27)

- Infolinks has had to be removed from this blog because it was accepted into the PayU2Blog network and they refuse to work with blogs who have in-line ads. I’ll make much more money with PayU2Blog.

- I have not added the money I earned from Twitter because more than a couple of them have locked publishers out of their accounts without explanations.

- I have added a new income stream this month, it is called passive income. I will write a proper post about this soon, but what it is in a nutshell is a way of earning money by submitting your articles to article sites and getting paid every time someone visits one.

Top Five Search Terms

I like this part of the monthly income report. It is amazing how people find this blog on search engines.

1. i need discipline
2. unfollow non followers
3. specticles
4. wordpress internal server error
5. need of discipline

Popular Posts Of The Month

1. 19 Blog Review Networks
2. July 2010 Blog Income Report
3. I’ve Been Accused Of Posting Duplicate Content
4. 5 Free Twitter Tools To Unfollow Non-Followers
5. 4 Ways To Make Money With Facebook

5 Top Site Referrals

The top five sites that sent the most visitors to this blog.

1. forums.digitalpoint.com
2. twitter.com
3. intensedebate.com
4. cafeblogger.net
5. facebook.com

- I do not include Google in this part because it ALWAYS comes top.

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Google Analytic has been something of a Godsend for me. I have used countless traffic tracking plugins, scripts and websites over the years and nothing has come remotely close to being as accurate as Google Analytic has.

Although many of us use this free stats tool I am going to gamble by saying that very few of us actually know just how powerful this site can be. It has little features that even I have only just found out about and I’ve been using this site for around two years now.

Two of the features, that I recently discovered, have made my online income-earning life so much more easier that I thought I would create a post and share them both with you.

1. Have Your Traffic Reports Emailed To You

On the first of every month I log into my Google Analytics account to get the information that I need to write my monthly Blog Income Reports. This is the most time-consuming part of the process and sometime it can become quite tiresome.

So just how must it feel for people who like/have to check their stats more than once a month, like once a week?

Google Analytics have a lovely feature where you can have the stats emailed to your email address. This means no more having to visit their site and login just to look at your stats and they will only email you the information you ask for.

It is easy to set up as well.

To send on a regularly scheduled basis:

(a) Click Email below the title of the report you want to send.
(b) When the Set-up Email screen appears, find the Schedule tab.
(c) Enter a list of recipients in the To field.
(d) Specify a format for the email (XML, PDF, CSV or TSV).
(e) Provide a subject and description.
(f) Select a schedule from the drop-down menu of daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.
(g) Click Schedule.

2. Exclude Traffic That Is Generated By You

I am sure you have done this, you visit your blog every now and again to check out if the posts are showing up OK or if the ads or widgets are not messing about with the overall design of your blog.

If, like me, you do it regularly then this can play a bit of havoc with your stats because Google Analytics will count these hits.

You can use a neat little feature to exclude your own visits from the stats and all you have to do is enter your IP address (or a collection of IP addresses). It will then exclude any visits form the IP addresses you listed.

(a) Click Filter Manager from the Analytics Settings page
(b) Enter a Filter Name for this filter
(c) From the Filter Type drop-down list, select Exclude all traffic from an IP address
(d) The IP address field will auto-populate with an example IP address. Enter the correct value. Remember to use regular expressions when entering any IP address. For example, if the IP address to filter is:

176.168.1.1
then the IP address value will be:
176\.168\.1\.1

You may also enter a range of IP addresses. For example:
Range: 176.168.1.1-25 and 10.0.0.1-14
IP address value : ^176\.168\.1\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$|^10\.0\.0\.([1-9]|1[0-4])$

For help finding the correct expression for your range of IP addresses, use our tool:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55572

(e) Select the profiles to which this filter should be applied in the Available Website Profiles box
(f) Click Add to move the selected profiles into the Selected Website Profiles list
(g) Click Finish to save this filter, or Cancel to return to the previous page

A more detailed tutorial can be found here

There are many other features but I think those two are the ones that we will be able to get the most from for now. Did you already know about these? Are you using ones that I have not mentioned? Drop us a comment below and let us all know.

Believe it or not I actually need to do a big ‘thank you’ to John Chow right now (no I have not lost my senses), for it was him, and his useless blog, that initially exposed me to the pleasures of making money online by writing paid and sponsored review posts.

From looking at the amount I have earnt from them it might come to you as a surprise to find out that ReviewMe were in fact the very first review network that I had ever joined. The reason I had only earnt about $30 is down to my blog not ranking high enough.

Today I received news that after years of waiting my blog had finally been accepted into their premium market place. This is great news as it means I can now be found by the advertisers and I can select my own price for reviews.

When you first join the network you are not put into their premium market place, your blog has to undergo a second review by the admin team to see if it meets their high standards. So while that is happening you are left in ReviewMe Limbo scratching around for the few $5.00 review scraps that are thrown your way, but you have to fight for these with the other blogs who are also in ReviewMe Limbo with you.

But when you do get into their premium market place then you can be found by thousands of advertisers and you can charge whatever you want, some charge as little as $30 a review while others charge the maximum of $1,000. When I first joined John Chow was charging $750 a go and doing several a week.

The first thing that stands out from ReviewMe is that they insist that every review be accompanied with an announcement that it is a paid post. This is hardly ever heard of and I am sitting here scratching my head trying to think of another network that even insists that some are accompanied with one, never mind every single one.

I like that because I think that if you tell your reader it is a paid review then they will be less inclined to jump down your throat when you stop writing about your normal topics and publish a post about credit card protection or even a Branson vacation package.

Another great thing that puts them higher than other networks is that they don’t just accept PayPal. This may be a shock but not everyone on the internet uses PayPal, there are actually countries that ban it. So to offer the ability to be paid by check is a big enticement. They also offer payment via a prepaid Debit MasterCard powered by Payoneer.

Their payout is slightly confusing. I took up their PayPal option and it clearly says they require you to have a minimum of $25 before you can be paid, but I have received my $30 in $5 instalments. So I’m not sure if they have abolished the $25 rule and just haven’t updated their site.

They do have an affiliate program, which is new, but I’m not too sure about it. They only offer to pay you if you sign-up advertisers and not bloggers. But if you can attract advertisers to sign-up (and launch a campaign) then they will pay you $25 for each one. Now if they could only set one up for the bloggers.

ReviewMe have been around for since 2006 so they are clearly not a fly-by-night operation and if the big guns like John Chow, TechCrunch, ShoeMoney, Jim Karter, etc, are saying good things about them then they must be doing a lot of things right.

Pros
- Pay every fortnight.
- Easy & simple layout.
- Insist you lets readers know it is a paid post.
- The affiliate program pays well.

Cons
- Difficult to get into the premium market where the proper money is.
- Unless you get into the premium market place there are few offers.
- Their affiliate program only pays if you attract advertisers to sign up.