Each month I post a report of my internet marketing progress. I’ve been posting these reports since October 2010 when I first started making money. Actually I started a little late and then played a bit of catch up. Each report documents the income and the traffic that my niche site has generated and how I achieved both. Today I’ll be reporting on the progress I made in November.

Check out that graph! I basically doubled my income from last month. More on that later but first lets have a look at what transpired in November.

What I Did in November

Here’s a quick run down on what went down in November. It was a good month and I accomplished everything I set out to do.

Backlinking

In last month’s report I talked about my backlinking strategy. If you missed it, you can check out that report here. The rankings for my target keyword have slowly been improving throughout the month of November. Until the 30th. On that day all three of these keywords (and a few others I’m tracking too) shot up several spots. This is great news, especially as we enter the Christmas season!

So how are my google rankings doing?

Keyword 1: Position 7 ( from 12 last month)

Keyword 2: Postion 7 (from 14 last month)

Keyword 3: Position 5 (from position 8 last month)

Last month I said that I wish things would move a bit more quickly and it looks like I got my wish. All 3 pages are now on the first page of google so I should start to see some more traffic coming in. Even when it was on page 2 I was seeing about 350 clickthroughs per month on keyword 2 so I’m hoping for good things. Especially since that is also a pretty high converting page.

Enabled Blog Post Re-ordering

Last month I mentioned that I downloaded a blog post re-ordering plugin for WordPress called Post Types order . There is both a paid and a free version but I’m just using the free version.  This month I was able to get it set up and I have been using it quite a bit. I love this plugin. It allows me to change the order that posts are displayed on my homepage. This is great for 2 reasons.

1. It allows me to place time relevant content on my homepage which significantly increases page views. For example, I can bring last years Christmas posts back up to the top. This way I have Christmas content on my homepage without having to write anything new.
2. It allows me to rotate posts on the home page just to keep it fresh and interesting to visitors. Again, without requiring me to add any new content. Bonus!

Create Unique Sidebars Throughout the Site

I mentioned this last month too. I found a plugin called Custom Sidebars. This plugin allows me to create multiple sidebars that become available in the widget area for me to customize. I can then assign each sidebar to certain posts individually, to all posts of a category, or to all posts with a certain tag. Many modern themes will do this for you but this is a great plugin to use with themes that don’t offer this functionality, like the one I’m using. Using this plugin I have been able to create very targeted offers in the sidebar that relate specifically to the content in the post that the visitor is reading. I can already see that this is having a big impact on directing people towards my money pages.

Ramp Up Google Adsense

Finally I played with google adsense a bit. I tried a few ad manager plugins but none of them really worked the way I wanted. So for now I’m just doing this manually. Playing with adsense is a bit dangerous right before Christmas. People are looking to spend money on gifts and such and the last thing I want to do is to send people away from my site for a few cents per click. Especially if they would have otherwise purchased through one of my affiliate links. So for now, I’m placing ad units on pages that have high bounce rates anyway and also at the end of posts. Once sales start to die off after the Christmas season I’ll consider getting a little bit more agressive with the ads. Then I’ll split test between ads/no ads and varous combinations to try and maximize revenue.

Poll Results

Last month I mentioned that I set up a poll to gauge the interest in a paid product that I was considering creating. This was a complete disaster. Only 1 person said they would be willing to buy and tons of other people said no way. I know it’s only been a month, but the results are so overwhelming that I have decided to scrap the idea and I have shut down the poll. On the bright side, at least I didn’t spend time and energy creating a product that nobody wanted.

New Graphics

My site has a custom slider at the top where I showcase some of my money pages and affiliate offers. I only had 2 images on this slider that went back and forth and neither of them were very attractive. So I spent some time creating a bunch of new graphics to display in the slider. I think there are 4 or 5 in there now and they all look pretty good. This was a bit of a vanity project because I don’t really expect to get a ton of clicks from these images. I’ll be honest and tell you that this was more about procrastination than anything else. I’m pretty much done with optimizing this site and it was just easier to work on these graphics than to think about starting a new project. This is a dangerous trap that many of us fall into. Fortunately for me, I recognized it and allowed myself a small period of time (I think it was a week), to get it out of my system. I’m now ready to move on.

What’s up for December

I’m on to bigger and better things. I’ve been working on my little niche site for about 18 months and although it is generating money every month, it is no where near enough to sustain myself let alone my whole family. I have learned a ton in the process though and the site will continue to earn money whether I work on it or not. So I’ve decided to move on to a new project with potential with better earning potential.

I could continue to crank out more sites that are similar to this last one. But it takes significant effort to do so and I only have a few hours a week since I’m busy with my 9-5 job and my family. Instead, my plan is to take all of the knowledge I’ve gathered over the last few years and come up with a project with enough earning potential to sustain my family. Once I achieve that I will be able to free up an additional 8-10 hours a day which should allow me to exponentially grow my business.

So the plan for December is to completely focus on identifying a project to work on that has the potential to meet those goals as well as a bunch of other criteria.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $112.19 [Up from $71.70 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $94.92 [Up from $33.11 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $11.82 [Up from $4.88 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $218.93 [Up from $109.67 last month]

As I mentioned earlier, about double what the site earned last month. The really interesting thing is ebook sales which have nearly trippled since last month. A big reason for this is because of my new custom sidebars. I now have a link in the sidebar to my review of one of the ebooks. That sidebar is used on every article that talks about the product that the ebook is about. For example, if the ebook was “10 ways to get the most out of your Dell netbook” (it’s not) then I’d put a link to a review of that ebook on every post that talks about Dell netbooks. In addition to that sidebar, there’s also a slider that slides up from the bottom of the page after about 10 seconds or so.

Anyway, I’m certainly happy about the revenue this month. And although I think some of my tactics like the one above helped to contribute, traffic also played a big role. More traffic = more money.

Traffic

• Page Views: 12,743 [up from 8,932 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 4,840 [up from 3,245 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 2,501 [up from 1,832 last month]

A great month in terms of traffic.  I wish I could take credit for all of the traffic but I attribute a lot of it to the Christmas season. I think some of the visitors are people looking to buy Christmas presents. My site has a bunch of buying and selection guide which  are pretty popular right now. I even created a holiday gift guide that is getting a bunch of visitors. The peak you see in the graph above is on the Sunday following US Thanksgiving. So there might have been some deal seekers that stumbled onto my site over the weekend as well.

Here are the traffic sources for November.

As usual, the number 1 traffic source is google by a long shot. As long as people continue to use google I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I’m looking forward to seeing what December brings. This will be especially interesting because I don’t plan to do any work to the site at all this month. Even so I am expecting a record month this month. Given Novembers success that might be a hard target to beat but we’ll see what happens. Last year my biggest days were Christmas day and the days just following. I believe that was due to people getting gifts for Christmas and then coming to my site to download manuals and research upgrades and accessories. We’ll see if the same happens this year.

That’s it for this months report. Time to dive back into my research for my 2012 project. I’m excited and nervous at the same time. I’ll report back next month with my progress. Have a great December!

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