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.

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.

This week I’m going to talk about my results from March 2011. But before I get into the numbers, lets talk about what activity there was in the month of March.

What I did in March

March was the start of a slump for me in my internet business ventures. I can’t recall the reason for my lack of motivation, but my wife and I were at the end of our P90X exercise program which may have had something to do with it.  I was tired and working on internet stuff very late in the night.

Anyway, all I seem to have accomplished in March was posting 2 new posts.  These two new posts were not based on keyword research. Some changes in the niche industry were going on so I wrote posts to cover those stories.

The first was a new product announcement from a well known manufacturer. The niche for my hobby site is a sub-niche of a larger industry. There is a very popular brand in the industry that has never gotten into the little niche my website operates in. Finally they announced that they were going to release a new product that would fit nicely in my niche. So I created a blog post to cover that news.

The second post was also about some industry news.  Over the previous couple of months some new technology began to emerge which created a new class of equipment within my niche. I have previously talked about the skill levels that I defined for my niche (beginner, novice, intermediate etc). With this new class of equipment coming out it created the need for a new skill level. So in this post I defined the “Expert” skill level. I explained the requirements and prerequisites to operating in this skill level and discussed the new technology and equipment that would be used.

That’s about all I did in the month of March. I didn’t do anything to increase revenue to the site this month. Luckily this is Internet Business where past work continues to make money month over month. Lets see how my past work fared this month in terms of revenue income.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $16.99 [down from $37.81 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $15.94 [up from $11.96 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $3.03 [down from $6.53 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $35.96 [down from $56.30 last month]

Ouch! Looks like my income is down about 36% from last month. You can see that the biggest hit was on physical product affiliate earnings which dropped by more than half. Fortunately ebook earnings are up.  Adsense is a low earner anyway but it was down by about half too.

I need to step things up! I should be doing things to increase my earnings, not sit back and watch them fall.

As I look at these earnings results, one of the things that I’m thinking about is Adsense. I only made $3 this month. That $3 was produced from one single Adsense block pushed way down below the fold on my sidebar. I’m not getting a lot of clicks and I could probably increase that income stream pretty easily by playing around with some additional Adsense placements. If I decide to go down that path I will need to be careful that I’m not directing visitors off my site who would have otherwise stuck around to click on my affiliate offers. Something I’ll have to think about in the future.

Lets take a look at traffic. Maybe these numbers will shed some light on the decrease in income.

Traffic

• Page Views: 5,130 [down from 6,041 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,033 [down from 1,994 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,033 [down from 1,038 last month]

I keep saying that traffic seems to have leveled off since the Christmas spikes but each month the traffic stats drop. I guess graphs can be deceiving. Especially shortly after a big swing up or down which messes up the scaling on the graph. Hopefully things don’t fall any further, but the only way to ensure they don’t is to keep creating content and drive new traffic to the site.

One thing I’ve realized recently is that my niche is somewhat seasonal. It’s not totally obvious but it makes sense to me that there would be more interest in it during the winter months. It doesn’t really matter though, I’ll just have to keep working on the site and hope that things pick up in the fall.

Take a look at the traffic sources for March.

And that’s it for the March report. Things are slowly falling and I need to pick them up if I want this site to reach its full potential. There’s a lot of things I’m doing right now (in June 2011) to reach that potential. There’s a couple months of reports before I catch up to present day. Stay tuned to get caught up and see how and if I am able to pull some real income from this site.

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