Made First AdSense Payout

After such a dismal weekend just 5 days ago, when I had miserable levels of traffic and my first zero earnings day since August, this week has been just the opposite. Traffic levels are back up to what I would like to see as a baseline. Plus, I had a day when I earned $7.05, one at $6.25, and yesterday, the $3.55 I earned pushed me over the AdSense minimum of $100! Not to mention the fact that I ended up on first page of Google!


What a roller coaster ride. I think I am OK now and have had enough positive things happen that I can make it through another few weeks of writing online. Even though I don't need the money for supporting my family, it is nice to see some results from my efforts.


Now that I have earned the first AdSense check, it is time to begin thinking about the second. It took five months to get to $100 the first time. I would like to decrease that time to three months for the next one. I could possibly hit it in two months, but I don't want to feel any undo pressure. Although, given the amount that I have earned this month, I could be on pace if November and December perform as well. We will just have to see.

An Article a Day


For anyone just starting out, I would encourage you to keep going. It will take several months to get up and running. If you are devoting lots of time each day to pursuing your online income opportunities, then you can achieve reasonable income levels sooner. I would treat it as a job and take the weekend off. But, if you work full time, like I do, then try to write an article each day. It takes an hour or two, but if you ignore the television, it can be done fairly easily.


Here I am now, five months into it, and I should have 150 articles based upon the one per day rule. I have 103 Hubs, 41 eHows, 20 Xombytes, and 6 InfoBarrels. The total is 170 articles. Plus I have 40 posts on this blog and 9 posts on the Real Asset blog. That is another 49 income earning opportunities. Ultimately, I would suspect that I could earn $0.50 per article. Based upon that, I could quit now and expect to earn about $100 per month on a fairly consistent basis.

But why should I quit? At the end of my first year writing, I should be near $250 per month and getting an AdSense check each month. Now we're talking. At two hours each day for my time, $250 in a month breaks down to about $8 per day or $4 per hour if I even have to spend 2 hours writing. That may not sound like a lot, but you can extrapolate a few more years into the future and start getting into serious money.

My goal is to hit $1000 monthly within 3 years. Then by doing the same things for the next 6 years, I know that I can be making $3000 per month which will help pay for college expenses and be a nice supplemental income in retirement. So, I need to keep up with it and not get discouraged. That is why it was cool to have such a good week after a rotten weekend. That is also why I am sharing with everyone this online income journey (warts and all), to encourage anyone else who may be attempting this as well.