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.

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