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.

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