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!

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