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 July 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.

Let’s just jump right into it and have a look at what happened in May.

What I did in May

In April’s Progress Report, I explained that I did absolutely nothing to the site during that entire month. Well, May is when I decided it was time to kick my internet marketing efforts up a notch. There was still not a lot of activity on the site in may, but instead I did a lot of strategic planning. Not only for my niche site, but also for my internet marketing efforts in general. I have been internet marketing “aware” for nearly 2.5 years now, and purchased my first domain name 2 full years ago. My niche site revenue had been dwindling each month since January and was currently sitting near the $30 mark. I decided it was time to make some hard decisions.

Should I continue with my niche site or can the whole project and start over from scratch in a new niche? I have learned a lot since I started the site, and knowing what I know now, I probably would not have entered it in the first place.

• The topic is too broad and I don’t know that much about it. This means there is a lot of content to cover and creating it takes takes a lot of effort to research and create posts.
• Most people are searching for free information
• The products that I can market in the niche are very inexpensive and the standard affiliate commission is only 5%.
• There isn’t as much traffic for the originally targeted keyword as I had thought.

But there are some reasons to stick with the niche too.

• I already have an established domain and website
• New posts are ranking relatively quickly now (it took 6-8 months for this to happen)
• I have a decent amount of traffic (despite the fact that my originally targeted keyword gets almost none)
• Even though the site isn’t making much money, it is profitable.

I keep thinking back to what one of my favorite internet marketers, Lynn Terry says on her blog all the time. I’m paraphrasing, but she says “work on one site at a time and take it from start to max profit potential”. The truth is that there is a lot that I can still learn from developing this site out. It will take many months to get to the point of even trying these things if I was to start a new site from scratch. So I have decided to focus on taking my site to max profit potential and I’m going to try to get there as fast as I can so that I can call it complete and move on to a new project. Here’s how I plan to do that.

• Find out where the buying traffic is in this niche and identify the top keywords for that traffic
• Create several pages to target that buying traffic and convert it to sales on an appropriate offer
• Promote the articles above for #1 google rankings to maximize search traffic
• Possibly start a mailing list with an autoresponder
• Possibly create my own product
• Finally, do some split testing and tweaking to maximize conversion rates

Since I already have an established site and rankings are coming relatively easy, I should be able to accomplish these things fairly quickly. Whether I succeed or fail, I will certainly learn a lot by going through these steps.

So May was the month that I made these decisions and started on the first point above. I went back to my keyword research and identified the most significant products and keywords in the niche and identified a handful of related keywords that have the best buying potential and the most traffic. I was very thorough and searched every corner of my niche. I ended up with a huge mind map with tons of keywords and from there it was super easy to categorize them and figure out which were the best keywords to attack.

By the end of May I had completed my research, and written and published the first of a series of new posts to target the keywords above. I also updated one of my pages that already gets significant traffic for a keyword phrase including the words “where to buy”. I revamped this page to be more helpful to people looking to buy this product and gave a few different recommendations based on geographical location.

You might have noticed that it was May when I started posting back to this site again in the form of these progress reports. Now this kind of goes against what Lynn Terry says (focus on one site at a time). But when I started looking at what I wanted to be doing in internet marketing I decided that my experiences at this stage of the game are very valuable and I wanted to share them. Personally my favorite internet marketing content is from people who are just beginning to see success. I want to document this for myself as well as others.

The second reason why I decided to revive this blog is to force me to stay on top of my progress with my sites and to hold me accountable.  This has worked out amazing so far. Every time I start to loose motivation or my focus drifts, writing these reports reminds me of where I am and where I need to go to become a successful internet marketer.

The final reason for getting back to this website is that I have a lot of ideas about how to make a great internet marketing blog. I follow a bunch of them and I’m really excited to see how they will be received when I implement them. Hopefully what I learn from doing this can be transferred to future projects as well. For now I’m just trying to get some base content in place by documenting my journey to date. I have set aside 1 day per week to do this without becoming too distracted from my niche site. It seems to be working.

Well enough about that, lets talk about the income for May.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $28.38 [up from $19.73 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $0.00 [down from $8.93 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $1.21 [down from $3.41 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $29.59 [down from $32.07 last month]

Once again my income is down this month. On the plus side, physical product affiliate earnings are up significantly. Looks like updating that ”where to buy” page was worth while. I don’t include a breakdown of those sales but I did make sales from each offer in that post.

Last month my ebook sales had dropped from the previous month and this month I didn’t sell any ebooks at all. Each ebook sale has a significant impact on my earnings in either direction so I’m going to have to focus on improving ebook conversions in the future.

Adsense earnings are down this month. I only have one ad in the sidebar. This is something else I’ll be playing with in the future. Possibly placing ads in the body of some posts.

May was the month that I identified to myself that I need to get my butt in gear and make some improvements to my earnings. I’m excited because I’m looking at the big picture now and I’m looking forward to seeing what I can achieve. I think I’m on the right track.

So how about traffic?

Traffic

• Page Views: 4,077 [down from 4,993 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,618 [down from 1,822 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 896 [down from 1,008 last month]

So much for the upward trend I thought I saw last week. There is a lot of variability from day to day basically between 40 and 80 visits per day. Keywords are down quite a bit which is interesting. Obviously I haven’t been removing content from the site so either people are searching less or my google rankings are on the decline. Producing more content should remedy this.

Here are the traffic sources for May.

Once again traffic and income was disappointing this month, but lets be honest, I haven’t done anything to make it otherwise. May is the month that I became self aware and with my new commitment and strategy in place, I fully expect to see numbers improve over the coming months. Even this month I can already see that the changes I have made are having some impact. By the end of the summer I hope to see some improved numbers for both traffic and income.

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