Woohoo! 2012 has arrived! I’m shifting gears in a major way this year, but before I get into that, lets look at December’s Progress.

Each month I post a report of my internet marketing progress. I’ve been posting these reports since October 2010 when I first started making money. Actually I started a little late and then played a bit of catch up. Each report documents the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated and how I achieved both. Today I’ll be reporting on the progress I made in December.

Last month I boasted about doubling my earnings from October. Well check out this month. I more than doubled my earnings from November. I’ll dig more into the numbers later. For now, lets look at what took place in December.

What I Did in December

I decided to start ramping down my effort towards my niche site in December. I feel that I’ve reached a point where I’m not going to see much return on investment for any additional work I put into it. Over the past year I identified the opportunities for revenue generation and built out content to capitalize on those opportunities. Then, over the past few months I’ve been working to build backlinks to that content in an effort to increase my google rankings.

So how are those google rankings doing?

Keyword 1: Position 2 ( from 7 last month)

Keyword 2: Postion 4 (from 7 last month)

Keyword 3: Position 5 (from position 5 last month)

I’ve been able to take these 3 primary keywords (as well as a handful of others) from not being indexed at all, to page 3, to the top 5 in google in a couple of months.

And here’s the thing, I did absolutely nothing in the month of December. No backlinking, no new content, no nothing. Okay, I guess I did have to moderate and respond to a few comments that were left on the site. But that’s it.

Despite not doing any work on the site in December, it was still a record month… by a long shot! This is the beauty of building websites. They are an excellent passive income opportunity. Once you build them, they can keep on earning money month after month without any additional effort.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything in December. In fact, December was a very busy month for me. Like I mentioned last month, I’m starting a new project with better revenue potential. I’m hoping to build something with the potential for job replacing revenue this time.

I’m still in the early stages. December was focused on market research and defining my niche. There was a lot of digging and a ton of notes. At this point, I’m pretty confident that I’ve identified my target niche and a pain point that I can address. That’s what I’ll be focusing on in 2012.

I’ll discuss my plans for 2012 in a bit more detail below. First, lets look at the numbers for December.

Income Sources

•  Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $381.29 [Up from $112.19 last month]
•  Ebook Affiliate Earning: $119.17 [Up from $94.92 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $24.15 [Up from $11.82 last month]
•  Total For November 2011: $524.61 [Up from $218.93 last month]

Wow! December was a huge month. I wish I could say it was because I did so awesome this month, but I didn’t do anything at all with the site besides approving and responding to the odd comment. The increase in revenue is due to the better keyword rankings and a ton of extra traffic. The extra traffic came as a result of the Christmas holiday season.

Not only did I receive a bunch of extra traffic due to the Christmas season, but that traffic was more focused on buying than usual.  That’s simply because at Christmas time, people are looking to buy gifts for their friends and family. Even the days following Christmas, people are looking to spend cash and gift cards.

I certainly can’t complain about a $500+ dollar month. Especially since I only broke the $100 dollar mark a few months ago. I just hope I can sustain this for a little while before things drop back down to a normal level.

Traffic

• Page Views: 29,672 [up from 12,743 last month]
•  Absolute Unique Visitors: 11,630 [up from 4,840 last month]
•  Number of Keywords: ? [from 2,501 last month] – I haven’t figured out how to determine this from the new Google Analytics interface yet.
  

An outstanding month for traffic (thanks to the Christmas season). The trend here resembles what I saw at Christmas last year (you can go back to the progress report from December 2010 to see for yourself). Just like last year, there was a huge spike on Christmas day that is slowly decaying. I believe this is due to people looking online for information and manuals to go with newly received Christmas gifts. Fortunately, I was much better equipped to capitalize on that traffic this year.

Traffic sources for December

As usual, the number 1 traffic source is google by a long shot. In fact, much more so than usual even. It is a little concerning to be so dependent on a single source of traffic. However, that’s where people are searching from, so what can you do?

Coming up in 2012

Last year I didn’t really place any goals on my online projects. I was still feeling things out and not sure whether I was really ready to commit to anything. This year is different however. I’m confident that there is money to be made and that I have the capability to get my hands on some of it. So, I’ve devised a plan to set myself up with the best possible chance of going big in 2012.

My goal for 2012 is to launch a web application business with 100 users each paying $50 per month by the end of the year.

This simple and solitary goal is designed to encourage me to focus on 1 thing in 2012.  The numbers are there as a measuring stick. They may be too ambitious but I have no way of knowing at this point. At least it gives me something to shoot for.  I don’t really care particularly about the exact number of users or cost of service, but $50 seems to be a good price point for keeping a web app affordable yet profitable without needing a billion users. I chose 100 users simply because at $50/month, that puts gross revenue at $5K/month which should be enough to support my family.

Actually, to be honest, this goal is not a result of the new year. I’ve just reached a point that I’m ready for the next level. I was thinking about starting another niche site but have decided against that. If you look back at the archives of this blog, you would see that I continually hold myself back by setting my sights to short. I’m not making that mistake this time. I’ve already invested a few years into my online projects and now it’s make or break time. I need to take what I’ve learned and give myself the best chance of success that I can. It just so happens to be the beginning of a new year,  so why not turn it into a new years resolution.

The Project

Based on my observations of other successful companies and individuals over the last couple of years, I’ve come up with a list of criteria that I believe will contribute to a profitable project.

1. Utilize a recurring revenue monetization model
2. Target small businesses
3. Focus on a  “Vertical”, “Niche” market
4. Leverage existing interests, strengths and experience
5. Make sure to address burning need or desire
6. Verify that the market is viable
7. Confirm there is existing competition
8. Confirm that the market is not saturated
9. Define a unique selling proposition
10. Make sure your target market is accessible

Once I freed myself from my niche website, I began my research to scope out a product or service to meet all of the above criteria. I spent the latter part of November and all of December flushing it out. For the first couple of weeks I was lost. I couldn’t find anything viable. I was getting very frustrated.

To start with I was identifying broad market solutions and looking for vertical markets to niche down to. For example, I thought about online appointment booking and tried to niche it down to very obscure niches. No matter how hard I tried though, each niche was completely saturated between the broad market solutions and other small micropreneurs with extremely niche products. Plus, I wasn’t passionate about the niches I was looking into.

Eventually I took a step back and approached from a different angle. I tried to start with my passion, knowledge and experience. Each of which happen to be on unrelated topics. In the past, I’ve been unsuccessful at coming up with a monetization model for my passions. I’ve always failed because as a hobby for consumers, no one is willing to pay for information, training or tools. This time though, the criteria above forced me to focus on an offshoot of my passion. In particular, the small business requirement lead me to a service oriented industry that serves the people who share my passion.

Once I identified the industry, it didn’t take long to figure out what the pain points were. There are a handful of old school software companies with solutions but the internet is littered with criticism about those options. I’ve found many potential customers venting about the existing solutions and their shortcomings. This will make it relatively easy for me to swoop in with an alternate that addresses all of those shortcomings.  As I mentioned, I already have a passion for the subject matter. As far as the business side of things, I have about 12 years of industry experience that is related to the solution these people are after.  I believe this niche meets every one of the above criteria to a tee.

Best of all, there are many existing solutions that have been developed in other markets. None of those solutions are directly applicable to this niche. However, I have many examples from other niches that I can study and use as inspiration for my new product.

Well, that’s my attempt at a short update of what I’m working on. I’ve defined the scope of the project fairly well I think. My next step for January is to create a website and online presence and start interacting with people in this niche. I need to start building an email list of potential customers and getting real feedback about what they want most in an ideal solution. I hope to have some good progress to report in early February.

Here’s to a great year in 2012!

Each month I post a report of my internet marketing progress. I’ve been posting these reports since October 2010 when I first started making money. Actually I started a little late and then played a bit of catch up. Each report documents the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated and how I achieved both. Today I’ll be reporting on the progress I made in November.

Check out that graph! I basically doubled my income from last month. More on that later but first lets have a look at what transpired in November.

What I Did in November

Here’s a quick run down on what went down in November. It was a good month and I accomplished everything I set out to do.

Backlinking

In last month’s report I talked about my backlinking strategy. If you missed it, you can check out that report here. The rankings for my target keyword have slowly been improving throughout the month of November. Until the 30th. On that day all three of these keywords (and a few others I’m tracking too) shot up several spots. This is great news, especially as we enter the Christmas season!

So how are my google rankings doing?

Keyword 1: Position 7 ( from 12 last month)

Keyword 2: Postion 7 (from 14 last month)

Keyword 3: Position 5 (from position 8 last month)

Last month I said that I wish things would move a bit more quickly and it looks like I got my wish. All 3 pages are now on the first page of google so I should start to see some more traffic coming in. Even when it was on page 2 I was seeing about 350 clickthroughs per month on keyword 2 so I’m hoping for good things. Especially since that is also a pretty high converting page.

Enabled Blog Post Re-ordering

Last month I mentioned that I downloaded a blog post re-ordering plugin for WordPress called Post Types order . There is both a paid and a free version but I’m just using the free version.  This month I was able to get it set up and I have been using it quite a bit. I love this plugin. It allows me to change the order that posts are displayed on my homepage. This is great for 2 reasons.

1. It allows me to place time relevant content on my homepage which significantly increases page views. For example, I can bring last years Christmas posts back up to the top. This way I have Christmas content on my homepage without having to write anything new.
2. It allows me to rotate posts on the home page just to keep it fresh and interesting to visitors. Again, without requiring me to add any new content. Bonus!

Create Unique Sidebars Throughout the Site

I mentioned this last month too. I found a plugin called Custom Sidebars. This plugin allows me to create multiple sidebars that become available in the widget area for me to customize. I can then assign each sidebar to certain posts individually, to all posts of a category, or to all posts with a certain tag. Many modern themes will do this for you but this is a great plugin to use with themes that don’t offer this functionality, like the one I’m using. Using this plugin I have been able to create very targeted offers in the sidebar that relate specifically to the content in the post that the visitor is reading. I can already see that this is having a big impact on directing people towards my money pages.

Ramp Up Google Adsense

Finally I played with google adsense a bit. I tried a few ad manager plugins but none of them really worked the way I wanted. So for now I’m just doing this manually. Playing with adsense is a bit dangerous right before Christmas. People are looking to spend money on gifts and such and the last thing I want to do is to send people away from my site for a few cents per click. Especially if they would have otherwise purchased through one of my affiliate links. So for now, I’m placing ad units on pages that have high bounce rates anyway and also at the end of posts. Once sales start to die off after the Christmas season I’ll consider getting a little bit more agressive with the ads. Then I’ll split test between ads/no ads and varous combinations to try and maximize revenue.

Poll Results

Last month I mentioned that I set up a poll to gauge the interest in a paid product that I was considering creating. This was a complete disaster. Only 1 person said they would be willing to buy and tons of other people said no way. I know it’s only been a month, but the results are so overwhelming that I have decided to scrap the idea and I have shut down the poll. On the bright side, at least I didn’t spend time and energy creating a product that nobody wanted.

New Graphics

My site has a custom slider at the top where I showcase some of my money pages and affiliate offers. I only had 2 images on this slider that went back and forth and neither of them were very attractive. So I spent some time creating a bunch of new graphics to display in the slider. I think there are 4 or 5 in there now and they all look pretty good. This was a bit of a vanity project because I don’t really expect to get a ton of clicks from these images. I’ll be honest and tell you that this was more about procrastination than anything else. I’m pretty much done with optimizing this site and it was just easier to work on these graphics than to think about starting a new project. This is a dangerous trap that many of us fall into. Fortunately for me, I recognized it and allowed myself a small period of time (I think it was a week), to get it out of my system. I’m now ready to move on.

What’s up for December

I’m on to bigger and better things. I’ve been working on my little niche site for about 18 months and although it is generating money every month, it is no where near enough to sustain myself let alone my whole family. I have learned a ton in the process though and the site will continue to earn money whether I work on it or not. So I’ve decided to move on to a new project with potential with better earning potential.

I could continue to crank out more sites that are similar to this last one. But it takes significant effort to do so and I only have a few hours a week since I’m busy with my 9-5 job and my family. Instead, my plan is to take all of the knowledge I’ve gathered over the last few years and come up with a project with enough earning potential to sustain my family. Once I achieve that I will be able to free up an additional 8-10 hours a day which should allow me to exponentially grow my business.

So the plan for December is to completely focus on identifying a project to work on that has the potential to meet those goals as well as a bunch of other criteria.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $112.19 [Up from $71.70 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $94.92 [Up from $33.11 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $11.82 [Up from $4.88 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $218.93 [Up from $109.67 last month]

As I mentioned earlier, about double what the site earned last month. The really interesting thing is ebook sales which have nearly trippled since last month. A big reason for this is because of my new custom sidebars. I now have a link in the sidebar to my review of one of the ebooks. That sidebar is used on every article that talks about the product that the ebook is about. For example, if the ebook was “10 ways to get the most out of your Dell netbook” (it’s not) then I’d put a link to a review of that ebook on every post that talks about Dell netbooks. In addition to that sidebar, there’s also a slider that slides up from the bottom of the page after about 10 seconds or so.

Anyway, I’m certainly happy about the revenue this month. And although I think some of my tactics like the one above helped to contribute, traffic also played a big role. More traffic = more money.

Traffic

• Page Views: 12,743 [up from 8,932 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 4,840 [up from 3,245 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 2,501 [up from 1,832 last month]

A great month in terms of traffic.  I wish I could take credit for all of the traffic but I attribute a lot of it to the Christmas season. I think some of the visitors are people looking to buy Christmas presents. My site has a bunch of buying and selection guide which  are pretty popular right now. I even created a holiday gift guide that is getting a bunch of visitors. The peak you see in the graph above is on the Sunday following US Thanksgiving. So there might have been some deal seekers that stumbled onto my site over the weekend as well.

Here are the traffic sources for November.

As usual, the number 1 traffic source is google by a long shot. As long as people continue to use google I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I’m looking forward to seeing what December brings. This will be especially interesting because I don’t plan to do any work to the site at all this month. Even so I am expecting a record month this month. Given Novembers success that might be a hard target to beat but we’ll see what happens. Last year my biggest days were Christmas day and the days just following. I believe that was due to people getting gifts for Christmas and then coming to my site to download manuals and research upgrades and accessories. We’ll see if the same happens this year.

That’s it for this months report. Time to dive back into my research for my 2012 project. I’m excited and nervous at the same time. I’ll report back next month with my progress. Have a great December!

Wow! I’ve been posting reports on my internet marketing progress for over a year. Actually I started a little late and then played catch up, but the reports go all the way back to October of last year. Each report documents the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated and how I achieved both. Today I’ll be reporting on the progress I made in October.

You can see a slight increase in revenue since last month. I’ll get into those details later.

I can’t believe it’s november already. It’s getting close to winter here in Canada. The temperature is hovering around the freezing mark but we haven’t had any snow yet.

Even though October flew by so quick, it was actually a pretty productive month for me. I got a lot done and I’m looking forward to sharing that progress with you.

What I Did in October

I’ve continued to build backlinks to a few pages that I’ve been trying to rank for for a while now. I mentioned last month that I had a goal for October to be able to stream line this process and I’m happy to say that I have done that. My backlinking strategy consists primarily of three functions.

Function 1 -  Writing Articles

I produced a bunch of articles for the purpose of backlinking a couple of months ago so this one is out of the way already.

Function 2 – Spinning Those Articles

Function 2 is spinning those articles. That means I rewrite them to make them unique. This allows me to leverage the articles I write in order to multiply my backlinking efforts. I was using some free software I found that was working great. The problem is that although it saved me a lot of time, it was still taking longer than I wanted. So, I turned to fiverr.com where I found someone willing to spin these articles for me (2 at a time  for $5). There are many people offering this service on fiverr but most use automated software that spits out junk (trust me, I tried them). The person I found is taking the time to manually operate the spinning software to produce excellent results. What I receive back is in a format called spintax. Using this format I can instantly generate hundreds, even thousands of unique articles instantly. Unlike those other fiverr jobs that have a turn-around time of 1-2 days this service has a 10 day turn-around time because of the effort required. Since I have all my articles written already I have spun articles coming back sooner than I can use them so 10 days isn’t a problem. What was taking me a few hours per article is now getting done with virtually none of my time for just $2.50 per article. Since my site is making over $100/month these days, this is working out great. I should mention that after I get the articles back, I put them into my software to check everything and add some additional spinning including spinning the anchor text in my links.

 Function 3 – Submitting Articles

The third function is submitting articles to directories. This is the part that consumed a lot of my time in September. I thought about purchasing some software (for $100) to automate this process but I didn’t for a few reasons

• It would tie me down to one method of building backlinks
• I would have to spend time to learn the software
• There is a lot of initial setup required
• It would tie up my couputer resources while it submitted

Since I was having success with fiverr already, I tried it again. I found people that owned the same software I was thinking of buying that would accept a spintax formatted article, plug it into the software and send you back a report of a few hundred live backlinks in a day or so. This has been working awesome for me.Plus I can vary my links up a bit by using other similar services. I’ve been submitting these articles on a weekly basis all month.

Fiverr has been a great introduction to outsourcing for me. Back in September I spent most of the month spinning articles and submitting them to directories. With the help of fiverr I only have to spend about 20-30 minutes of my own time on each article (per week) which frees up the rest of my time for more important tasks.

I did make one major mistake that I wanted to share with you. After submitting one of my articles for backlinking on Fiverr, I was checking the resulting articles but links back to my site weren’t working. It turns out that I had a typo in the original article that listed the link url with ttp instead of http. Huge mistake! Now I have hundreds of articles out there with a broken link to my site. I proofread this article multiple times and I’m guessing something happened when I copied and pasted the urls to make sure they worked. The good thing is that there were at least 2 links in that article so I still got one good backlink out of each of those submissions. Please don’t let this happen to you!

So how are my google rankings doing?

Keyword 1: Position 12 ( from 14 last month)

Keyword 2: Postion 14 (from 14 last month)

Keyword 3: Position 8 (from position 10 last month)

Some slight improvements. I wish things would move a bit more quickly, but this is how these things go and  I’ll take what I can get.

What else did I accomplish?

With all of the extra time I had on my hands, here’s what else I was able to accomplish besides backlinking…

I Started a Poll

The most popular page on my site is where I offer a download of a manual for a certain product. For some reason this product often ships without the manual so I get lots of people to my site who want to download the manual. The problem is that the manual sucks. Another interesting point is that my second most popular post is a how to article about that same product, in-fact I have a few of these that do really well. I’ve been thinking for a while that if I were to create a supplemental manual that was actually good, I could sell it and make some money on the manual download page. I found a polling plugin and set it up to ask people if they’d be willing to pay for such a thing. I know I should have used an opt-in box instead, but I don’t have a mailing list at this time. There’s a specific reason why that is (right or wrong) but I’ll save that for another post. I’ll let you know the results of the poll once I have enough data to be relevant.

I Created Some Pop-Ups

I received an email this month from one of my favorite IM Software developers that he is now offering a free version of a popup manager that I’ve been looking at. The free version only allows sliding banners from the top or bottom, but I kind of like these better because they are not so obtrusive. I created 3 of these as ads to direct people to 3 different places. First was to the poll I mentioned above. Second was to a review of an ebook that I’m an affiliate for which has been doing pretty well. Third was for a product selection page for newbies that I’m trying to funnel all traffic to the site to. I’m seeing a bunch of purchases through this page so anything I can do to get people there is a good thing. I placed these pop-ups on relavent pages throughout the site. Almost evry page has one of the three unless the page has a specific objective that I don’t want to distract from.

I Wrote Some New Articles

Finally I created a few new articles. Two were for iPhone/Android apps that are coming out to interact with equipment in my niche. In both cases, to use these apps you would have to buy some interfacing hardware in order for it to work. I have affiliate links to those of course. The third article is about the best christmas gifts to buy someone in my niche. I’ve categorized all kinds of gifts for different people and budgets and provided affiliate links for the best prices. I hope to see some good results from this site in November and December. Finally I created a best of 2011 post to highlight the best product that was released this year. I did this at the end of 2010 and it has been really successful so I decided to do it again. I think having the year in there helps google to establish relevance. With my 2010 post I was able to rank #1 for “the best ___”. And that’s a keyword that you definately want to rank for.

What’s Planned for November?

More Backlinks

I’ll continue to consistently build backlinks with my fiverr strategy. Since I now have a system in place for this I won’t have to spend much time on this.

Enable Blog Post Re-ordering

I downloaded a plugin to allow me to reorder the posts on my main blog loop. I don’t post to the site very often and I’ve noticed that I make more money the closer to the top certain posts are. I plan to implement this plugin so that I can place the most relavent posts close to the top of the home page which will hopefully increase earnings as well.

Create Unique Sidebars Throughout the Site

I also found a plugin to allow you to customize sidebar content for each page/post on your blog. I intend to set this up to laser target readers with relevent links to my money pages.

Ramp Up Google Adsense

Finally I think I’m going to play with adsense ads on non money posts/pages. Right now I only have adsense below the fold on the sidebar. This could be a good  thing or it could cause people to leave the site and result in reduced affiliate earnings. Only one way to find out right.

And that’s about it. By the end of this month I’ll be in good shape going into the Christmas season and I think I’ll be pretty much done with this site. I’m looking forward to starting on a new project where I’ll try to create something with some better earning potential.

Wow. That was a big update. Lets get on to the earnings shall we?

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $71.70 [ from $59.82 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $33.11 [Down from $37.34 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $4.88 [down from $6.03 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $109.69 [Up from $103.19 last month]

Once again another $100+ month. I must say I’m liking these. It’s not a huge amount, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that there isn’t a huge revenue potential for this site for various reasons. Even so, I’m still excited about the revenue I am earning. If I can maintain this level of income, it is plenty of money to fund some other projects. It already pays for hosting and backlinking campaigns, plus I can use it for an auto responder and who knows what else. I should be able to stretch $100 pretty far.

The money that is coming in continues to be pretty well diversified. I’m relatively happy with these numbers but once I get my target keywords ranking a little better I know I will start to see more traffic and certainly more sales. Hopefully I’ll see some positive results from my upcoming Adsense experiment as well.

Traffic

• Page Views: 8,932 [up from 8,061 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 3,245 [up from 2,922 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,832 [up from 1,688 last month]

Traffic continues to grow, this month seeing about 11% growth over last month. From the graph above you can see the continuing uptrend. I’m happy to point out that I didn’t have a single day with less than 100 visitors this month.

Here are the traffic sources for October.

Traffic sources continues to be dominated by google again. The page I created a couple of months ago that wound up in the # 1 google position for an unexpected keyword continues to bring in new traffic. Since I created a more targeted article for that keyword I am now ranking #1, #2 and #3 with a dropdown list under #3 that lists even more pages from my site. These pages along with some other new content are showing up in more places in google and resulting in even more links. I’ve also noticed that some of my article submissions are starting to drive traffic directly through click throughs. I’m happy with the 11% rise in traffic this month and I hope my backlinking strategy will enable this trend to continue. I plan to post even less over the coming months so we’ll see how that affects the traffic. If I start to loose traffic I will have to go back to posting at least monthly or so. Outsourcing posts is another option that I may consider if it comes down to that.

Well, all in all another great month. I’m super excited to see what happens between now and February. Last year these were very profitable times for me, especially the days just following Christmas. I have a lot better presence in google now and many more offers on my site so I hope and expect things to be even better this year. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I’ve been going back and forth about what will be my next project. I’m trying to force myself to think big. Historically I’ve chosen small projects with small potential as you can see if you look through the archives of this blog. The problem with this is small results are inevitable. I’ve learned a lot over the past couple years that I’ve been studying online business so I’m trying to incorporate those lessons. Ideally I’d like to create something with the potential for job replacement type income. This would allow me to free up an extra 8-10 hours a day which would allow me to really do some damage. Anyway, just dreams for now, but I realize the importance of selecting the right project. It will force me to step outside of my comfort zone but it will be exciting. I’ll let you know when I have my idea selected. Have a great November!

I’ve been posting reports on my internet marketing progress for several months now. Each report documents the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated and how I achieved both. Today I’ll be reporting on the progress I made in September.

This is the second month of  displaying my the earnings graph above. I used to post graphs of the traffic but I think it’s more interesting to look at earnings rather than traffic.

Right off the bat you can see that my earnings are down from last month, but we’ll get into that later.

For now, lets get on with the report.

What I did in September

My goal for September was to continue my back-linking campaign to try and get my site ranking for some particular keywords I want to rank for. I was able to create quite a few articles to use for back-linking and I submitted several of them to article directories and blogs.

I’m following Pat Flynn’s Backlinking Strategy that Works. I have successfully created an anchor layer and am now focusing on my indirect layer.

Last month I indicated that the process was taking way too long. It really does take a lot of effort to write unique articles, sign up with directories and post the articles to those directories. So another goal I had set for September was to come up with an inexpensive way to automate this process. I’m happy to report that I’ve found some great tools to do just that.

In Pat’s post he discusses spinning articles to create additional content to submit to article directories. The tool he recommends costs $77 per year which I’m not prepared to spend at this point. After a ton of research I think I’ve found the next best thing. Spinner Chief is a free piece of software that does pretty much the same thing. It’s really easy to use and works great.

The other tool Pat demonstrates is Unique Article Wizard. This is used for submitting articles to directories. Unfortunately that service requires a recurring monthly fee which I’m not ready to take on. I wasn’t able to find a good free alternative but I did find some software for under $100 that does the same job plus a bit more for just a 1 time fee. I almost purchased this software until I discovered that many people who own it already have gigs set up on fiverr.com to use their software to submit your articles. I’m thinking about using this service to test out the software.

I also posted 2 articles to my site that I had written previously and were sitting as drafts in wordpress. One was related to the target keywords that I’m trying to promote and the other was just generic filler content with an affiliate link to an interesting product.

Here’s a quick update on my Keyword rankings as they sit today.

Keyword 1: Position 14

Keyword 2: Postion 14

Keyword 3: Position 10

Keyword rankings are an interesting beast. As you work to improve them they bounce around like crazy. Keyword 1 was at position 11 at one point and keyword 3 was at position 7. I’m confident that if I keep working on it, these rankings will continue to rise. It’s a little frustrating not to see quicker results though.

I’m reasonably satisfied with the work I completed in September. October will be spent Spinning the remainder of my new articles and submitting them to directories to complete my indirect back-link layer.  I plan to use fiverr and possibly purchase some automatic submission software and/or other services to help me do this. I hope to have this mostly automated before the end of the month.

Beyond that, there are a few articles that I want to publish well before Christmas. I want to be in a position to take advantage of Christmas shoppers visiting my site. I’ve pretty well got all of the core content that I want up on the site already. The only thing left that I want to do is play with adsense and the site layout a bit to try and squeeze the best conversions I can out of the site.

I’ve learned a lot from my little niche site in the last year and a half and I’m just about ready to move on with another project. I’ll talk about that more later, but for now, lets get to the numbers.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $59.82 [down from $97.93 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $37.34 [up from $31.38 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $6.03 [up from $5.15 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $103.19 [Down from $134.89 last month]

I’m very happy with the results this month dispite the fact that overall earnings are down by about $30. I still made nearly double what I earned in July. Also, notice that every category except physical affiliate sales is up this month.

I have three physical product vendors that I promote. One of those three is up 100% since last month. Unfortunately the other two are down significantly which pulled the total earnings down as well. It’s a good thing I have several income sources to balance things out. It just goes to show the importance of diversification.

How about traffic?

Traffic

• Page Views: 8,061 [up from 7,654 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 2,922 [up from 2,829 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,668 [up from 1,574 last month]

Traffic growth has slowed down a little from last month but it is still rising (a 5% increase from last month). Even though I only published 2 new articles last month. Perhaps my back-linking campaign is providing some of the additional traffic either directly from people clicking through or as a result of improved search rankings.

Here are the traffic sources for September.

I have a new referral source this month! This time it’s the popular forum in my niche. I’m very pleased to see traffic coming from here because it means that people in the niche are beginning to take notice of my site and discuss it in the forums. This is the type of back-link that is truly invaluable because they come naturally from real users of the web.

This month I will continue to promote my target keywords to try and improve traffic. Hopefully I’ll be able to make this a little more automated so that I can free some time for some new projects.

I have two projects in mind that I am really anxious to get moving on. One is a new niche that I’ll talk more about when I’m ready to get started. And the other is actually this site. I’ve been running this site on and off since 2009. Even so the site is really only useful to me. This month it has received a total of 16 visitors. I have some great ideas to make this site more useful to a lot of people and I’m excited to get started. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve been posting reports on my internet marketing progress for several months now. Each report documents the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated and how I achieved both. This is the first month that I didn’t have to do any “catch up” reports.  This left more time for me to work on my niche site. Read on to find out if I actually took advantage of that extra time. Today I get to report on the progress I made last month in August.

Normally I post an image of the traffic stats since I purchased the domain, but I think I’m going to start posting earnings to date instead. Its a more interesting metric and I think people will like it better.

Lets get to the meat and potatoes and show you what I’ve been working on over the past month.

What I did in August

The plan for August was to concentrate on back-linking to get my site ranking for some relatively high traffic keywords. I have created posts on each of these topics that I think have the potential to convert to significant sales. In-fact, I have already seen that they are capable of earning some cash. When I first created these posts and they sat at the top of the blog homepage, I did see a bunch of sales and a conversion rate of >10%.

Unfortunately life got in the way a little. The daycare that my 3 kids go to decided to take a bunch of time off for vacationing this month. That forced my wife and I to take turns staying home with the kids. It’s really hard to get any work done while simultaneously watching a 1, 3, and 5 year old.

We also took a week off for a vacation to the West Edmonton Mall. I know a mall might sound like an odd place for a vacation, but this is an exceptional mall, check it out. Anyway, I did bring my laptop so I could work while the family slept, and I did knock off some articles to use for back-linking. But, when we got home there was an incident that ended up with my laptop sitting in a pool of water, sizzling and crackling away. I unplugged it, popped out the battery and put it away to dry. After a few days it works, but the hard drive is pooched so I can’t load the operating system or get my articles off. This resulted in a few days of researching and installing a linux operating system that can boot from a USB thumb drive. At least the laptop is usable again.

And Finally, my main computer got a virus that I had to spend time researching and removing.

But to be completely honest, none of the above is any excuse for not taking appropriate action on my niche website. There is no such thing as “not enough time”. It all boils down to priorities. Of-course my family is priority number one, but there are other things I could have sacrificed to make sure I spent more time working on back-linking. Things like sleep, watching movies and fixing my laptop. All of these are things I did in August that should have been lower priority than back-linking.

The truth is that writing multiple articles and creating back-links is not something I enjoy. That’s just the way our mind works. We have to do something we don’t want to do so we procrastinate and find reasons excuses for not getting started. And that is exactly what happened to me this month.

It wasn’t all bad though. I did manage to get several articles written and a few published to article marketing directories. I also did a bunch of research into back-linking strategies and tools. There are a few tools that I plan to implement in September to help accelerate my back-linking. It just takes too long to write unique articles, find directories, create accounts, submit the articles etc.

The best part is that I had a record breaking month in terms of sales. By a long shot actually. It seems that the strategies I’m implementing are working. This blog plays a big part into that success too because it keeps me accountable and on track.

Here’s a quick update on Keyword rankings. Slightly up since last month

Keyword 1: Position 13

Keyword 2: Position 16

Keyword 3: Position 8

But lets get to the good stuff shall we?

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $97.93 [up from $39.70 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $31.38 [up from $12.09 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $5.15 [up from $2.50 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $134.89 [up from $54.29 last month]

This is a record month! More than double what I earned in January which was previously my highest earning month. And I still have significantly less traffic than I did in December and January. If you look at the graph at the beginning of this post you will also see that the sources of income are much less weighted to one vendor. Diversifying income i’s something I’ve been working on.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens at Christmas time since my earnings per visitor are increasing dramatically. In the mean time though, I’ve still got a lot of work to do in terms of achieving the rankings I’m after.

Lets move on to traffic.

Traffic

• Page Views: 7,654 [up from 6,381 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 2,829 [up from 2,367 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,574 [up from 1,285 last month]

Traffic is continuing to rise and the earnings are increasing with the traffic increases. I seem to have finally crossed that 100 visitor per day threshold. Now I need to continue focusing on improving rankings on my target keywords because I already know that there is significant search volume for those keywords and I am seeing traffic gains every time my rankings improve. Two of those keywords are still sitting on page 2 so I expect good things to happen to traffic whenI reach that point.

Here are the traffic sources for August.

Google continues to dominate and is really starting to swamp out the other traffic sources. At some point I should probably look at increasing traffic from alternate sources. It would really suck if google all of a sudden decided not to display my site in their SERPs

As I’ve already said in this report, I need to work hard at improving rankings for my targeted keywords. That is my primary goal for September. I’ll continue building back-links for sure and I also plan to implement some tools to help me do that. If things go well I’ll try and add an extra blog post or 2 to discuss the tools I end up using.

For the past few months I’ve been posting reports on my internet marketing progress. Each report documents the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated and how I achieved both. I’m finally caught up all the way back to October 2010 which is when I first started making money with my little hobby niche site. Today I get to report on the progress I made last month in July.

In the image above, you can see the traffic to the site since I bought the domain way back in April 2010. Note the big spike at Christmas time.

Lets just jump in and get you up to date with what I’ve been working on over the past month.

What I did in July

In the May and June reports I talked about how I re-focused on making my site profitable. I did this by going back to keyword research and determining the most profitable keywords that I should be chasing. I came up with a list of keywords that I wanted to target.

In July I finished creating the last of the articles that are specifically targeting those keywords. One of those posts was an in depth review of an ebook that I have had moderate success promoting. I purchased the ebook and then spent close to 2 weeks reviewing it and creating a review post.

Each keyword was selected to be profitable so the articles contain affiliate links which is how I intend to increase my earnings. I’ve still only published a few of these articles to prevent making them appear unnatural. Over the next little while I’ll be posting them sporadically amongst some other random posts.

There is significant search volume for these keywords so the next step will be to promote them and get them ranking in the search engines so that I can capitalize on them. In-fact, I was supposed to do that during July but I have a problem. It seems that every time I plan to drive traffic to the site, I find something else that “needs” to be tweaked first before the new visitors arrive. Really though, the site is just fine as it is. I keep putting off promotion even though I know it is necessary to take my site to the next level.

I created several new product pages that I can feature in the animated slider I have at the top of my site. The idea is that new visitors to the homepage will be enticed to click on the featured images and be brought to the product pages that will hopefully drive some sales while being helpful to the visitor at the same time. I also started creating some new images to place in the slider. Some of these I actually outsourced to fiverr.com.

I re-did the navigation to make it easier for visitors to find the information that they are likely looking for while at the same time pointing them to specific pages that I want them to view.

Finally I created a new post to answer the most common question that most people have when they visit my site. That question is about which piece of equipment newcomers to the hobby should purchase. I did my best to be as helpful as possible and linked to 3 distinct products that I think are the best value for most of these people.

I still want to improve the sidebar a bit and provide some more relevant links and possibly an email opt-in, but I decided to leave that as is for now. That’s because I realized I was procrastinating about the next step, driving traffic.

So the last week of July I finally started into link building to drive traffic to the site. I did some back link analysis of the top ranking sites for my chosen keywords and tried to duplicate the links. This proved to be more difficult than I suspected. Remember, to this point I still haven’t made any real back linking efforts. I got stuck and decided to spend the last week of the month researching back linking strategies, methods and tools. I now have a back linking stragegy that I plan to execute on in the month of August.

Just for fun, lets establish a baseline for tracking my progress in the search engines. There are a few keywords that I’m going to be working on specifically. Here they are along with my current ranking in google.

Keyword 1: Position 14

Keyword 2: Position 17

Keyword 3: Position 10

The plan for August is to focus on back linking and push my website as close to #1 for each of the above keywords. Wish me luck!

In the mean time. Lets have a look at income sources for July

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $39.70 [up from $34.29 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $12.09 [up from $8.06 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $2.50 [up from $2.43 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $54.29 [up from $44.78 last month]

Up nearly $10 since last month. The changes I made a couple of months ago seem to be doing well and converting better. The primary affiliate program that I promote has dropped significantly since I started offering a few alternatives. Now Amazon is converting the best and has become the top earner with about 50% of the revenue.

I noticed that one affiliate program has only seen 1 sale since I set it up back in December. That is despite sending significant traffic to it each month. The rest of my offers are all converting at about  10%, so I decided to point my links to a different affliate program. Low and behold, I made a few sales of that product this month. Just goes to show how important it is to track and test.

The new money posts that I have posted so far are already contributing significantly to earnings. That is despite the fact that I’m only ranking on page 2 for the targeted keywords. Hopefully by the end of August I’ll be seeing increased search traffic to those pages and a corresponding increase in earnings. We’ll see.

Traffic

• Page Views: 6,381 [up from 4,916 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 2,367 [up from 1,779 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,285 [up from 1,186 last month]

For the second month in a row, traffic continues to rise. I’d like to say that that’s because of my mad traffic skills, but to be honest I haven’t done anything specifically to target traffic yet. All I’ve done is create a few new blog posts which has generated some new long tail search phrases that I am ranking well for. I can see some significant search volume for my newly targeted keywords. This is great news because it validates my keyword research. If I’m already seeing traffic while I’m on page 2 of google, just wait til I hit position one!

Here are the traffic sources for July.

Last month I noted that a competitors referral had overtaken Yahoo. This month Yahoo is up slightly while Bing has fallen below the competitor. Not really that significant I guess but I thought it was interesting.

I’m stoked that things are starting to pick up. A little bit of planning goes a long way and the July results are really encouraging since things are progressing according to plan. I’m looking forward to the August report. Depending on how well my back linking efforts go this month, I’m expecting some big gains.

I’ve been posting progress reports for each month dating back to October 2010. That’s when I first started making money with my little hobby niche site. It’s now July 2011 and I’m still playing catch up by writing a new report each week. These reports document the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated, and how I achieved both.

In the image above, you can see the traffic to the site since I bought the domain in April 2010. Note the big spike at Christmas time.

This will be my last catch-up report. After this I will be reporting on July 2011 which is the current month. I’m pretty excited to fill you in on what I’m currently working on, but in the meantime, lets look at last month’s (June’s) progress.

What I did in June

In the last report I talked about how I re-focused on making my site profitable. I did this by going back to keyword research and determined the most profitable keywords that I should be chasing. I came up with a list of keywords that I wanted to target.

In June I picked up where I left off and finished creating most of the articles to target the previously identified keywords. I published a couple of these articles but saved most as drafts because I didn’t want to publish them one after another. The keywords are all related and it would seem unnatural.

The articles provide advice on several things including products for upgrading equipment. These keywords are searched by people who are looking to purchase products, so I have included affiliate links throughout.

There is significant search volume for these keywords so the next step will be to promote them and get them ranking in the search engines so that I can capitalize on them.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $34.29 [up from $28.38 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $8.06 [up from $0.00 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $2.43 [up from $1.21 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $44.78 [up from $29.59 last month]

Yes! I’ve still got a long way to go but I’m finally starting to see some progress again. The tweaks I made to the sites main money pages last month have really paid off. What the numbers above don’t show is the new diversification in my physical product affiliate earnings. Most of my income used to come from a single source but since I started recommending different options, my income has grown and spread out across different vendors.

The new posts that I published (see above) are already generating sales that have contributed to the earnings above. Traffic to those posts is from people clicking through from the blog homepage. This is very promising because I know that the keywords for these posts get significant search traffic. Once I get the posts ranking #1 I’m sure they will perform very well.  So far, without any promotion they are sitting on the 2nd and 3rd page of google. I’m not seeing any search traffic yet though.

Traffic

• Page Views: 4,916 [up from 4,077 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,779 [up from 1,618 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,186 [up from 896 last month]

Traffic is finally up again too. I’d like to say that that’s because of my mad traffic skills, but to be honest I haven’t done anything specifically to target traffic yet. All I’ve done is create a few new blog posts which has generated some new long tail search phrases that I am ranking well for. This shows how important it is to just write regularly. New content will automatically result in more traffic.

Here are the traffic sources for June.

Hmm… Interesting to note that Yahoo organic traffic has been overtaken by referrals from a competitor in the niche. Anyway, it feels like things are finally back on track. I feel good that I have a plan to turn this into a real money generating site. Now that have articles for most of my targeted keywords, I just have to finish those articles and start posting and promoting them.

I’m pleased to say that I am now caught up on my progress reports. The next report will be for July.  I’m making a bunch of changes to the site in July too but I’ll talk more about that in the next progress report which will be coming up in early August.

I’ve been posting progress reports for each month dating back to October 2010. That’s when I first started making money with my little hobby niche site. It’s now July 2011 and I’m still playing catch up by writing a new report each week. These reports document the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated, and how I achieved both.

In the image above, you can see the traffic to the site since I bought the domain in April 2010. Note the big spike at Christmas time.

Let’s just jump right into it and have a look at what happened in May.

What I did in May

In April’s Progress Report, I explained that I did absolutely nothing to the site during that entire month. Well, May is when I decided it was time to kick my internet marketing efforts up a notch. There was still not a lot of activity on the site in may, but instead I did a lot of strategic planning. Not only for my niche site, but also for my internet marketing efforts in general. I have been internet marketing “aware” for nearly 2.5 years now, and purchased my first domain name 2 full years ago. My niche site revenue had been dwindling each month since January and was currently sitting near the $30 mark. I decided it was time to make some hard decisions.

Should I continue with my niche site or can the whole project and start over from scratch in a new niche? I have learned a lot since I started the site, and knowing what I know now, I probably would not have entered it in the first place.

• The topic is too broad and I don’t know that much about it. This means there is a lot of content to cover and creating it takes takes a lot of effort to research and create posts.
• Most people are searching for free information
• The products that I can market in the niche are very inexpensive and the standard affiliate commission is only 5%.
• There isn’t as much traffic for the originally targeted keyword as I had thought.

But there are some reasons to stick with the niche too.

• I already have an established domain and website
• New posts are ranking relatively quickly now (it took 6-8 months for this to happen)
• I have a decent amount of traffic (despite the fact that my originally targeted keyword gets almost none)
• Even though the site isn’t making much money, it is profitable.

I keep thinking back to what one of my favorite internet marketers, Lynn Terry says on her blog all the time. I’m paraphrasing, but she says “work on one site at a time and take it from start to max profit potential”. The truth is that there is a lot that I can still learn from developing this site out. It will take many months to get to the point of even trying these things if I was to start a new site from scratch. So I have decided to focus on taking my site to max profit potential and I’m going to try to get there as fast as I can so that I can call it complete and move on to a new project. Here’s how I plan to do that.

• Find out where the buying traffic is in this niche and identify the top keywords for that traffic
• Create several pages to target that buying traffic and convert it to sales on an appropriate offer
• Promote the articles above for #1 google rankings to maximize search traffic
• Possibly start a mailing list with an autoresponder
• Possibly create my own product
• Finally, do some split testing and tweaking to maximize conversion rates

Since I already have an established site and rankings are coming relatively easy, I should be able to accomplish these things fairly quickly. Whether I succeed or fail, I will certainly learn a lot by going through these steps.

So May was the month that I made these decisions and started on the first point above. I went back to my keyword research and identified the most significant products and keywords in the niche and identified a handful of related keywords that have the best buying potential and the most traffic. I was very thorough and searched every corner of my niche. I ended up with a huge mind map with tons of keywords and from there it was super easy to categorize them and figure out which were the best keywords to attack.

By the end of May I had completed my research, and written and published the first of a series of new posts to target the keywords above. I also updated one of my pages that already gets significant traffic for a keyword phrase including the words “where to buy”. I revamped this page to be more helpful to people looking to buy this product and gave a few different recommendations based on geographical location.

You might have noticed that it was May when I started posting back to this site again in the form of these progress reports. Now this kind of goes against what Lynn Terry says (focus on one site at a time). But when I started looking at what I wanted to be doing in internet marketing I decided that my experiences at this stage of the game are very valuable and I wanted to share them. Personally my favorite internet marketing content is from people who are just beginning to see success. I want to document this for myself as well as others.

The second reason why I decided to revive this blog is to force me to stay on top of my progress with my sites and to hold me accountable.  This has worked out amazing so far. Every time I start to loose motivation or my focus drifts, writing these reports reminds me of where I am and where I need to go to become a successful internet marketer.

The final reason for getting back to this website is that I have a lot of ideas about how to make a great internet marketing blog. I follow a bunch of them and I’m really excited to see how they will be received when I implement them. Hopefully what I learn from doing this can be transferred to future projects as well. For now I’m just trying to get some base content in place by documenting my journey to date. I have set aside 1 day per week to do this without becoming too distracted from my niche site. It seems to be working.

Well enough about that, lets talk about the income for May.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $28.38 [up from $19.73 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $0.00 [down from $8.93 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $1.21 [down from $3.41 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $29.59 [down from $32.07 last month]

Once again my income is down this month. On the plus side, physical product affiliate earnings are up significantly. Looks like updating that ”where to buy” page was worth while. I don’t include a breakdown of those sales but I did make sales from each offer in that post.

Last month my ebook sales had dropped from the previous month and this month I didn’t sell any ebooks at all. Each ebook sale has a significant impact on my earnings in either direction so I’m going to have to focus on improving ebook conversions in the future.

Adsense earnings are down this month. I only have one ad in the sidebar. This is something else I’ll be playing with in the future. Possibly placing ads in the body of some posts.

May was the month that I identified to myself that I need to get my butt in gear and make some improvements to my earnings. I’m excited because I’m looking at the big picture now and I’m looking forward to seeing what I can achieve. I think I’m on the right track.

So how about traffic?

Traffic

• Page Views: 4,077 [down from 4,993 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,618 [down from 1,822 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 896 [down from 1,008 last month]

So much for the upward trend I thought I saw last week. There is a lot of variability from day to day basically between 40 and 80 visits per day. Keywords are down quite a bit which is interesting. Obviously I haven’t been removing content from the site so either people are searching less or my google rankings are on the decline. Producing more content should remedy this.

Here are the traffic sources for May.

Once again traffic and income was disappointing this month, but lets be honest, I haven’t done anything to make it otherwise. May is the month that I became self aware and with my new commitment and strategy in place, I fully expect to see numbers improve over the coming months. Even this month I can already see that the changes I have made are having some impact. By the end of the summer I hope to see some improved numbers for both traffic and income.

I’ve been posting progress reports for each month dating back to October 2010. That’s when I first started making money with my little hobby niche site. It’s now July 2011 and I’m still playing catch up by writing a new report each week. These reports document the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated, and how I achieved both.

In the image above you can see the traffic to the site since I bought the domain in April 2010. Note the big spike at Christmas time.

I didn’t post a progress report last week. I tried updating WordPress (the software this blog runs on) which wound up being a complete disaster. It turns out my free host decided to add a bunch of restrictions to the free accounts that made it impossible to complete my upgrade. As a result I had to find a new host.

I do have a paid hosting account but I want to keep this blog on a free account because I think it’s important for me to understand the free offerings so that I can make recommendations to the readers of this blog. It takes time to start a blog or website and get any significant traffic or income. I think it makes sense for people who can’t afford paid hosting to start with a free host until the site can support itself financially.

Once I found a suitable host and pointed the domain at it, my domain registrar choked and long story short, it took about 4 days  to get the domain pointing to the new host. Anyway, I digress. This is a topic for another post.

This week I’m going to talk about my results from April 2011. But before I get into the numbers, lets talk about what activity there was in the month of April.

What I did in April

Wow! I have a feeling this is going to be the shortest update yet! I honestly can’t figure out what I did in April. I know my wife and I went on a vacation to Las Vegas. I know we celebrated my daughter’s first birthday. But I can’t figure out what I did with my niche site. I can see that I didn’t create a single new post during the month. I thought maybe April was when I did a bunch of revamping to old pages but WordPress is telling me that I didn’t touch those in April either. Hmm… I guess I didn’t do anything. Oh well, lets see how my the site did in April on it’s own without any help from me.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $19.73 [up from $16.99 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $8.93 [down from $15.94 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $3.41 [up from $3.03 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $32.07 [down from $35.96 last month]

Slightly down again this month, but hey, I didn’t do any work. Even so I made my first sale on a new affiliate network that I added a few months prior which accounted for just under $8 of the physical product earnings.

Ebook earnings are down by 50% but really that’s just a difference of 1 vs 2 ebook sales.

Adsense earnings is basically unchanged from last month.

Like I said last month, I need to step things up! I should be doing things to increase my earnings, not sitting back and watching them fall.

Looking at these progress reports makes things very clear. I have pages that are getting traffic and converting to sales. To get more money, I need more traffic, more offers and better conversions. Pretty simple really. To make this happen I need more content designed to bring in more traffic and this content should include more offers. Once I have that in place I can tweak things to improve conversion. I’ve been saying the same thing for the last few progress reports but real time is a few months ahead of these reports so it will take a few weeks to catch up to where I currently am.

While you wait for the progress reports to catch up, lets take a look at traffic.

Traffic

• Page Views: 4,943 [down from 5,130 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,822 [up from 1,033 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,008 [down from 1,033 last month]

Although the total number of page views and keywords are down slightly, the graph seems to indicate a slight upward trend throughout the month. Hopefully that trend continues and it’s not just my eyes playing tricks on me.

Take a look at the traffic sources for April.

Organic search traffic continues to be the primary source of traffic for my niche site. That’s by design because I’m not really interested in making this site an authority site. I’m trying to set it up to target search traffic. Once that traffic arrives I want my posts and pages to answer the searchers questions and hopefully send them along through one of my affiliate links.

Well that’s it for the March report. Hopefully I don’t have any more site issues so I can post the May report next week. Just a couple of weeks and I’ll be all caught up!

I’ve been posting progress reports for each month dating back to October 2010. That’s when I first started making money with my little hobby niche site. It’s now June 2011 and I’m still playing catch up by writing a new report each week. These reports document the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated, and how I achieved both.

In the image above you can see the traffic to the site since I bought the domain in April 2010. Note the big spike at Christmas time.

This week I’m going to talk about my results from March 2011. But before I get into the numbers, lets talk about what activity there was in the month of March.

What I did in March

March was the start of a slump for me in my internet business ventures. I can’t recall the reason for my lack of motivation, but my wife and I were at the end of our P90X exercise program which may have had something to do with it.  I was tired and working on internet stuff very late in the night.

Anyway, all I seem to have accomplished in March was posting 2 new posts.  These two new posts were not based on keyword research. Some changes in the niche industry were going on so I wrote posts to cover those stories.

The first was a new product announcement from a well known manufacturer. The niche for my hobby site is a sub-niche of a larger industry. There is a very popular brand in the industry that has never gotten into the little niche my website operates in. Finally they announced that they were going to release a new product that would fit nicely in my niche. So I created a blog post to cover that news.

The second post was also about some industry news.  Over the previous couple of months some new technology began to emerge which created a new class of equipment within my niche. I have previously talked about the skill levels that I defined for my niche (beginner, novice, intermediate etc). With this new class of equipment coming out it created the need for a new skill level. So in this post I defined the “Expert” skill level. I explained the requirements and prerequisites to operating in this skill level and discussed the new technology and equipment that would be used.

That’s about all I did in the month of March. I didn’t do anything to increase revenue to the site this month. Luckily this is Internet Business where past work continues to make money month over month. Lets see how my past work fared this month in terms of revenue income.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $16.99 [down from $37.81 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $15.94 [up from $11.96 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $3.03 [down from $6.53 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $35.96 [down from $56.30 last month]

Ouch! Looks like my income is down about 36% from last month. You can see that the biggest hit was on physical product affiliate earnings which dropped by more than half. Fortunately ebook earnings are up.  Adsense is a low earner anyway but it was down by about half too.

I need to step things up! I should be doing things to increase my earnings, not sit back and watch them fall.

As I look at these earnings results, one of the things that I’m thinking about is Adsense. I only made $3 this month. That $3 was produced from one single Adsense block pushed way down below the fold on my sidebar. I’m not getting a lot of clicks and I could probably increase that income stream pretty easily by playing around with some additional Adsense placements. If I decide to go down that path I will need to be careful that I’m not directing visitors off my site who would have otherwise stuck around to click on my affiliate offers. Something I’ll have to think about in the future.

Lets take a look at traffic. Maybe these numbers will shed some light on the decrease in income.

Traffic

• Page Views: 5,130 [down from 6,041 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,033 [down from 1,994 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,033 [down from 1,038 last month]

I keep saying that traffic seems to have leveled off since the Christmas spikes but each month the traffic stats drop. I guess graphs can be deceiving. Especially shortly after a big swing up or down which messes up the scaling on the graph. Hopefully things don’t fall any further, but the only way to ensure they don’t is to keep creating content and drive new traffic to the site.

One thing I’ve realized recently is that my niche is somewhat seasonal. It’s not totally obvious but it makes sense to me that there would be more interest in it during the winter months. It doesn’t really matter though, I’ll just have to keep working on the site and hope that things pick up in the fall.

Take a look at the traffic sources for March.

And that’s it for the March report. Things are slowly falling and I need to pick them up if I want this site to reach its full potential. There’s a lot of things I’m doing right now (in June 2011) to reach that potential. There’s a couple months of reports before I catch up to present day. Stay tuned to get caught up and see how and if I am able to pull some real income from this site.