Welcome to my very first progress report. Well, kind of.  I’m not counting the Monthly Income Updates I did way back in 2009. Before we get into it let me give you a little update about what’s been going on.

It’s been pretty quiet around here since I wrote my I’m back post way back in August 2010. In that post I explained that I was returning from a little internet marketing hiatus. I also layed out the kind of content that I wanted to showcase on this site. Since then I wrote a very detailed post about how I handle information overload and the systems I use to organize incoming information. And that’s the only activity around here since last August.

But I haven’t been out of the picture. I have been focusing on another website. It’s a niche website that I started as  part of the 30 day challenge back in April 2010. I guess that means the site has been up for a year. I’m really trying to build that site up to be profitable and I’m happy to report that it is at this point. I will continue to focus on maximizing the profitability of that site. Once I’m satisfied with its profitability I will move on to another project and so on.

In the mean time, I want to provide monthly progress reports here on this site. I hope this will be of interest to you and it will also force me to be accountable. Since this site isn’t an income earner for me it has been easy to neglect up to this point. I’m going to try not to let that happen anymore by reserving one day per week to work on it. At the very least I will try to post a progress report each month. If possible I’ll try to also post another article about something I’ve learned or implemented that month.

Well lets get on with it shall we?

I’ve got a backlog of progress reports to write but I figured I’d start with October since that’s the first month that the site actually made money!

Income sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $7.75

That’s it. Haha, short list I know. But it’s a start right? It took me 7 months to get the site to this point.  Lets look at how I got the income.

In April I followed the 30 day challenge (currently known simply as The Challenge) but at the end of it I wasn’t happy with the results. There were a couple of problems…

1. It had only been a month.
2. I was blindly following the mechanics of the course so I didn’t have a vision of what the site would be or how it would make money

Then I figured I just needed content so I started writing articles that were of interest to me. These articles were good but not focused on keywords that would attract traffic.  And they were not terribly useful to anyone either.  Just interesting.

By June I re-focused and started producing reviews of and comparisons between popular products in the niche.  By August I started dropping affiliate links in my reviews and comparisons. Slowly the traffic started to come up (mostly from very long tail keywords I was ranking for by fluke). Eventually the traffic and the content connected and in October I made two affiliate sales. One for $6 and one for about $150. I earned 5% of each of those. I must say that it was a bit of a fluke though that one of my first sales was for a relatively high dollar amount but it felt good and got me pumped up!

Traffic

Lets take a quick look at traffic too. For October 2010 I received 512 unique visitors. here’s a graph of my traffic from April through October.

As you can see it took a couple months to see any traffic at all. It’s important to be patient at the beginning when you’re just starting out.

Here’s a look at where the traffic came from.

I hope you enjoyed the first progress report. It will give us a basis to monitor progress going forward. There was a lot of background to go over here but the November report should be a little more focused. I’m glad to have you on the journey with me and I’m going to try to get the November report up next week.

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