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.

This week I’m going to talk about my results from February 2011.

What did I do in February?

Before I get into income numbers, lets take a look at what I did in February.

The first half of February was spent working on my theme redesign. I saw some decent traffic starting in late 2010 but wasn’t happy with the content or look of the site. So, in December 2010 I created a bunch of core content that I wanted to be available to new visitors. Then in January I started on an overhaul to the theme. This was supposed to be finished in a week but ended up stretching well into February.

I had to create a bunch of graphics to go with my new theme which was something I had never done before. Most people use Photoshop for graphics editing but that is really expensive. I tried gimp instead, which is the popular free alternative to Photoshop.  I found it too difficult to use. So I ended up using a program called paint.net. It’s free too, but way easier to use.

Eventually I got the theme merged with all my latest content and up onto the live site. This happened around the middle of the month.

After I was done with updating the theme, I began looking at what articles were the most popular on the site. There were 2.

1. A post I created that featured a downloadable PDF of a manual for a particular product in my niche.
2. A detailed post, full of pictures, for upgrading/repairing a particular product in my niche.

I decided to try and reproduce my own success by duplicating what I had done before. So, in the second half of February I wrote two posts similar to the ones above.

1. I created a post featuring a link to the downloadable PDF of an even more popular product in my niche. This manual was already available for download but I complimented the page by also including a link to a quickstart guide and an ebook. The ebook link is an affiliate link to a paid guide that expands on the manual and provides a bunch of advanced tips.
2. I created a second upgrade/repair post. This post  was for a different issue, but the same product as last time.

The manual post should be interesting. My original manual post had no direct income potential. It attracted clicks from google but there was nothing for visitors to buy. Hopefully people liked what they saw on my site and stuck around. We’ll have to wait and see what happens with both of these new posts. Will they be as popular as the originals?

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $37.81 [down from $51.15 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $11.96 [up from $5.98 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $6.53 [up from $4.20 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $56.30 [down from $61.33 last month]

I’m down about 5 bucks from last month. Not too bad considering that the Christmas traffic has all died off as you will see in the traffic report below. Phisical product sales are down, but the odd Ebook sale is helping to pick up that slack.  I have no explanation for how my adsense earnings are up despite the the traffic numbers below.

Traffic

• Page Views: 6,041 [down from 8,964 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,994 [down from 3,277 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,038 [up from 1,712 last month]

Traffic is down considerably now that the Christmas traffic has all dried up. You can see from the graph that things have definitely leveled off now. There is obviously less searching going on. Even the number of keywords is down by about 700.

Have a look at the traffic sources for February.

I’m pleased with my income for February but I’ve got a lot of work to do in order to bring the numbers up to something respectable. My traffic is back to normal now after the Christmas spike.  Now I need more traffic and more content with the opportunity to generate revenue.  That’s what it will take to bring my site to the next level and these are the things I should be focusing on.

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