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I took a few minutes this morning to think about my many “failures” online.

One failure is an audio mp3 series, based on the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education. It is designed to help eliminate back pain. I initially envisioned it as a $97 download that would sell dozens of times per month and create several thousand dollars per month in passive income.

It didn’t sell any copies at $97. In fact, it didn’t sell at $77 or $67. It didn’t sell in any appreciable volume until I had it a $27. Even then, it only sold 5-6 times per month, only making me about $150 per month. A failure, right?

I also used Snaps X Pro to create some video tutorials on how to use E-Junkie. My e-junkie video tutorials, at $19.95 only sell 4-5 times per month, for about $95 per month in sales. However, my e-junkie videos have the added benefit of bringing in a small amount of consulting income. People hire me to help set-up their e-junkie shopping carts and products. Currently, I make about $500 per month from this product and related sales. Another failure?

I put google adsense (advertising) on one of my websites last year. It started bringing in a few dollars here and there. I was intrigued by the idea, so I created 3 new websites specifically for the purposes of putting google adsense on them and gaining a new revenue stream. It took me 3 weeks of consistent work to get the websites up and running. My hope was that each website would produce $5 - $10 per day in advertising revenue and create a revenue stream of $500 - $600 per month. I figured that once it worked, I could start creating new websites, until I created the passive income stream that I wanted.

I overestimated the income. Each website only produced 50¢ to $1 per day in revenue. With the income from my other adsense sites, I get about $125 per month from google in adsense revenue. Failed yet again.

For now, I will skip the details of my other failures - the Amazon affiliate account that only brings in about $10 per month, the E-Junkie affiliate payments that are only $10 - $15 per month. There are others of course, the $7.00 Feldenkrais Breathing sessions that only make me $70 per month. The teleconference calls that I recorded and sell with Bill O’Hanlon…

Overall, my failures bring me aprox. $600 per month of passive income and an additional $2000 per month in consulting income. This does not include my individual coaching client’s and the money I make teaching at the University of Utah.

If I keep failing at my current rate, I will have $1500 per month in passive income by the end of this year. Unless, of course, I screw up my failures and one of them becomes a hit.

How about you? How much passive income are you making from your internet failures, so far?

Given that the “Boss Whisperer” was the inspiration for the “Web Whisperers” moniker, I thought I would take a moment and promote Dr. Crawshaw’s new book, Taming the Abrasive Manager: How to End Unnecessary Roughness in the Workplace. National Boss Day is coming up on October 16th and you can bet that you will be hearing many interviews with Laura on various radio and T.V. shows.

And since I was involved in the implementation of Dr. Crawshaw’s new website, it seems appropriate to give it a little “nudge”* in the search engines and help the new website get quickly indexed by Google. So here you go: The Boss Whisperer.

*People sometimes wonder what benefits accrue from having a blog (like this one) either as a stand-alone website or attached to another “static” website. One advantage is that blogs can have many “RSS” feeds and “Pinging” services attached to them. What that means in non-geek speak is that there are dozons of services that actively search for and index content from blogs. When I publish a new post, nearly a dozen different services are sent a short message (a ping) that lets them know to come and check out my new content. In this case, the content has outgoing links - as in the links about to Laura’s website and the Amazon page where her book can be bought. Those webpages will be indexed as well.

Rather than waiting for google to stop by and index your site a few hours or days after you put up your new content, you can “blog and ping” and get indexed (or re-indexed) in just a few minutes.

That’s my story and I am sticking to it.

cheers - Ryan

While looking through my google adsense and analytics results last month I made passing notice that one of my niche websites (a blog) had a clickthrough ratio that was over 7%. Meaning that for every 100 people who visited my site at least 7 clicked on a google adsense ad. That’s a damn high click-through ratio.

But just a few minutes ago, I looked at the stats again. So far this month, the site has a click through ratio of over 12%. I am somewhat stunned. I am used to my sites only having a 1 - 4% click-through rate.

Why has the click-through rate increased so dramatically?

The website has not changed in many months. I have not re-designed it nor changed the ad-formatting. Neither is it getting more traffic. So why the increase in clicks?

Looking at which specific posts are getting the traffic and clicks, I realized that the clicks are coming from a “sub-topic” within the niche. The niche is about a specific resort town in the intermountain west. Recently the town added a concert hall and I began writing about the venue and the artists visiting it. When people search for the concert venue on google (and yahoo and other search engines) they end up finding my website before they find the website about the concert hall. And the concert hall uses google adsense to place ads on my website. The ads are highly-targeted and highly relevant to what the people are looking for so they click the ads.

There is another factor to consider. My content on the blog gives people important information about the concert hall, but it does not give them everything that they need to know. They can find out about the concert hall, who is playing there, and when, but if they want to buy tickets, they have to click on the google ad that will take them to the concert hall website to buy tickets. I believe that is what accounts for the high clickthrough rate.

I didn’t intend it to turn out that way, it just did. Now, I am wondering if I have found a way to increase google clicks for a variety of topics.