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 the site has generated, and how I achieved both.

I’m starting to really enjoy writing these reports because it forces me to step back and look at the big picture again. It makes it easy to see what’s working and what isn’t. From there I can determine what kinds of things I should (or shouldn’t) be doing. I hope these reports are as helpful to you as they have been to me.

What did I do in January?

The month of January was all about a site redesign (theme redesign really). Back in October things started to click for me when I finally started earning money from my website. I knew I needed more traffic in order to make more money but I was scared and embarrassed of my site. So while December was focused on creating core content (see the December report), in January I focused on making the site look pretty and presentable.

Here’s a before and after of the themes I was using. Note: these images are from the theme demos, not my actual site.

Before

This is the theme I started out with. The Sparsely Green theme. This free theme worked fine but it just felt too amateurish to me. I wanted something more professional and less bloggy looking.

After

I ended up with the Product Afiliator V2 theme. I didn’t like the buy button and “price” shown at the bottom of every post though. I was able to get rid of those by setting up the theme to present useful information in the content area instead of featuring products. Other than that the site is pretty similar to what you see below. I have the Featured product slider at the top and the sidebar is pretty similar too.

That’s just about all I did in the month of January. I planned to have the theme updated in 1 week. But that didn’t happen. I did all the work myself so I had to learn a bunch of stuff.

How to create a local wordpress site for testing.
How to make changes to a theme
How to import and export databases
How to create my own graphics
How to design a logo
Much, much more

This was a very intensive and slow going process. I knew nothing to start with and I didn’t want to spend any money on outsourcing or software. But, I got it done and found some great resources in the process. By the way, as I’m thinking of those resources, I’m jotting them down right now for future blog posts.

I almost forgot to mention the one thing I did to the live site this month. I found an Ebook on my subject that was being sold through E-junkie. I signed up for the affiliate program and slapped a banner on the sidebar. This probably took about a half an hour to do and it generated a sale for me this month!

I’m finding that what I like about the internet marketing industry is its passive nature. I made almost no changes to the site at all this month, but it still generated revenue!

Income Sources

Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $51.15 [up from $50.72 last month]
Ebook Affiliate Earning: $5.98 [New income stream]
Adsense: Earinings: $4.20 [down from $5.06 last month]
Total For November 2011: $61.33 [ up from $55.78 last month]

With Christmas season over and next to no work done on the site, somehow my income still managed to increase. I racked my brain trying to figure out how this was possible and I came up with 2 probable cases.

People received money for Christmas and used that to purchase equipment that they found through my site.
People received equipment for Christmas, found my site and purchased upgrades I recommended.

I may sound silly for getting excited over 61 bucks but its my first experience of making money for nothing (no free chicks yet though). Plus I know that I can expand the website to make more money and then create more sites like it. Very cool.

Adsense earnings did go down a bit. I’m guessing that’s due to advertisers pulling out after the Christmas season and the fact that my traffic is less than last month.

Traffic

Speaking of traffic, lets take a look the details for traffic this month.

Page Views: 8,964 [down from 10,184 last month]
Absolute Unique Visitors: 3,277 [down from 3,562 last month]
Number of Keywords: 1,712 [up from 884 last month]

Traffic is down since the huge spike I had on Christmas day. It dropped dramatically at the end of December and has been slowly leveling out this month at just under 100 visitors per day. Based on the graph above it looks like I’ve finally reached an equilibrium. I’m still getting much more traffic than I was before the Christmas spike which is great. Now I’ll have to keep creating content to keep that traffic growing.

Have a look at the traffic sources for December.

Thanks for checking out the January Progress Report. This month I learned first hand that passive income is real and I’m stoked about it. Now I just need to add some more