November was a good month with significant growth over the previous month. In-fact, the revenue almost quadrupled over last month! I guess that’s easy to do when the numbers are still small, but its still very encouraging to see.

Early in November I did a little keyword research and noticed that people were searching for a manual for a product in my niche. Luckily, I had recently purchased that product which happened to come with a manual. Since the manufacturer didn’t have the manual online, I scanned it in myself. I wrote a keyword optimized post for it and included a download link to the manual using a wordpress plugin called WordPress Download Monitor. This plugin allows me to track the amount of downloads I get. I turned the scanned images into a PDF file, zipped it and put it directly on my site. I figured the traffic was small enough that it wouldn’t cause any bandwidth problems.

At some point in November (can’t remember when exactly) I also added an Adsense banner in the sidebar. Basically just plunked one up there to see what would happen.

In mid November I started to re-focus my attention on creating some solid base content for the site. I realized that the site wasn’t very useful (other than the new downloadable manual). Early posts that I created during the 30 Day Challenge were keyword stuffed junk, and the more recent posts were just random stuff I was thinking about. I wanted to make sure that there was some worthwhile content on the site before I started focusing on bringing in traffic.

I started thinking about who my target audience was and what did they want to know. It’s a hobby site, so I went on the forums to see what questions were most commonly being asked. It turns out that people want advice on what equipment to buy when they are just getting started in the hobby. The also want to know the same thing each time they progressed to the next skill level and outgrew their old equipment.  So I started creating comparisons for the top few products for each skill level. Each comparison was a new post with a title such as “Top 3 Beginner XXX” (XXX is a place holder for the product name, get your mind out of the gutter). I only got a couple of these posts out in the second half of November.

Oh yeah, I guess I should mention that each of the comparison posts included an affiliate link to each of the products. I used the excellent free PrettyLink plugin to drop those links. I’ll save the details on that plugin for another day.

Lets get to the Numbers…

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $29.83 [up from $7.75 last month]
• Adsense
  • Clicks: 8
  • Earinings: $0.97 [up from $0.00 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $30.80 [ up from $7.75 last month]

Not bad! Things are just starting to take off but I’m very pleased with the results so far. My costs so far are $8.33 per month for hosting (I used hostgator baby plan with a coupon) plus $0.75 a month for the domain name. And that’s it for my costs. At a total cost of $9.08/month to run this site, it’s already turning a profit. True I’ve got several months of carrying costs to make up for, but that shouldn’t be difficult. I’ve already earned enough to cover 3 months in November alone!

Traffic

Okay, Lets Look at traffic. There are so many stats that I could post here it’s hard to narrow it down to just a few. I guess I’ll just pick a couple and we can tweak them as we go. Let me know if there’s something else you’d like to see.

• Page Views: 4,389
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 1,696
• Number of Keywords: 527

You can see that the site has had a nice little uptick since the beginning of November. There’s a little dip on the last day in the month but I’m not worried about that. To be honest I was going to change the date range to end on November 29th just to filter out that point, but I want to be completely transparent here. You can see that over the course of the month there were several down days, but the overall trend is positive.

Here’s a view of where the traffic is coming from

That’s it for this Novembers Progress Report. I hope you enjoyed it. I know I liked looking back and seeing the progress that I made during the month and what impact it had to the bottom line. I think writing these reports are going to be an eye opening experience for me. They will force me to look at the project as a whole and what I am doing (or not doing) to improve the site and it’s earnings. I’ll be back with the December report next week.

Be Sociable, Share!

•