So I find myself at the end of month two of my 8 months niche blog challenge, where I have set myself a goal of creating a $1,000/month passive income stream from new niche blogs by the end of July, 2011.

First of all let me say that this month has been HECTIC!

I had gone from basically working at home 80% of my time to barely getting an hour or two to work on my niche blogs each day this last month – because work (building houses) has been super busy.

That being said, I am incredibly happy with this months results, so let’s dig a little into how I went.

November Niche Site Income

I’ll start off with the money side, because we all know that is what everyone wants to see. I spent the majority of my time working on my survey website – and that shows in the results (so let’s start with that one).

Surveys Niche Site

Total: $51.12

Campers Niche Site

  • $8.36 – Adsense
  • $26.10 – Ebay

Total: $34.46

Greenhouse Niche Site

  • $20.72 – Adsense
  • $3.21 – Ebay

Total: $23.93

$109.51 – November Niche Site Income!

Now I know that these are not massive numbers and are quite small compared to the rest of my online income – BUT, it is giving me the confidence that I CAN achieve my goal by July.

PLUS… It is almost 100% increase on last month.

Successes, Failures & Thoughts From November

I learnt a lot in this last month, so I thought I would give you a quite overview of what I did, what worked (and what didn’t) and then we will take a look at my plan for December.

  1. Passive Income Is Gold!

    Because I was working so hard at my day job, I am starting to realise the value in having income that continues to come in when I am not working on it. While I always knew the benefits of passive income, it was not until I wasn’t able to work on my online business that I started to put extreme value on it.

  2. Focus Your Effort

    After another month of Google dumping on my camper trailers site, I decided to give it a break and focus on my Survey site which was starting to show promising signs.

    So for the month of November, 90% of my niche site effort was towards the revamp and improvement of my survey site – and I think the focused effort was well worth it (as it improved the sites monthly income by over 700%!)

    A lot of people have been asking me how I am able to handle running multiple niche blogs – but the truth is that once they are up and running, they do not need me to be constantly working on them. So I can focus on one site at a time, yet still have money coming in from all of them.

  3. Sometimes You Just Have To Roll With The Punches

    After another month of my site being a yo-yo with it’s Google rankings, I have decided to give my Camper site another month or two to mature and settle before I do another intensive focus on it. It is still earning, but it is still way to volatile for my liking. I plan on writing a couple of posts and doing a little bit of link building this month – but nothing major.

  4. No New Niche Sites This Month

    I originally planned to add a new niche site to my portfolio as soon as the previous one was making about a dollar a day, with my current work situation I thought it would be better to focus on building my three current niche sites – before adding another into the mix.

    That being said, I plan on doing some niche market research for my next domain – but if I do purchase one, I will just put a basic page up and let Google get to know it before I start working on it in the new year.

My Plans For December

Well it seems that things are moving along nicely this month already – but I am worried about the limited time I will get to work on my niche sites.

So once again this month I am going to focus on one site specifically and just do minor things to the others – and this months lucky site is my walk in greenhouse site, and I have a lot planned to try and double it’s earnings this month!

My Plans For My Greenhouse Site

This site is a conversion machine! The fact that it made almost $25 this month from just 233 visitors is a great result – but I want to aim higher and have a few things planned this month.

  1. A Blog Makeover

    Just like the niche blog makeover I did last month, I am planning a complete overhaul of the current design to build on credibility and also to fit in the next change!

  2. A Product

    I am excited about this one, because I have mainly been focusing on Adsense for income with this site as there was a very limited selection of Clickbank products in this niche (and an even smaller selection that had a quality sales page and advertising material). So I am planning on adding a new product to the site and as time is tight at the moment -I have worked out a way to get 100% of the income that it produces from sales – without even creating the product (so I will be sharing this method in an upcoming blog post).

  3. Increase In Traffic

    And the final thing I plan on working on this month is increasing the amount of traffic that this blog receives. This will be a mixture of keyword optimised blog posts (keywords found through Market Samurai) and link building (found a cool way to find unlimited places to get links to your site – that I will share this month).

My Plans For My Survey Site

I am excited to see that in the first couple of days of December that this site has already made over $10!

So this month I will just continue to focus increasing my search rankings for my major ‘page keywords’ as my mystery shopper jobs page is already at 35 and my home page is ranking on the 3rd page for my other two keywords. So I will be focusing on getting the individual pages onto the first page for their respective keywords this month.

I have also been setting out the structure for a 7 day e-course for this site (that will be for list building) – but might put this off for another month.

My Plans For My Camper Site

After another up and down month, I think that I will just write a couple of posts and get a few links and leave it at that for this month.

I will have my hands full with my ‘focus’ blog this month and with the extra link building for my survey site, I should be pretty busy.

Income Goal For December

After seeing almost 100% growth last month, I would love to see my niche blog income increase to $200 for the month of December – but I think that could be a bit of a stretch.

So conservatively speaking, I am aiming to increase to $150 this month and then smash it out in January when I should have some time off work to focus on my niche blogs.

That is where I am at currently! Not sure how the holiday period will affect my income – but it will be interesting to see.