Wow! I’ve been posting reports on my internet marketing progress for over a year. Actually I started a little late and then played catch up, but the reports go all the way back to October of last year. 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 October.

You can see a slight increase in revenue since last month. I’ll get into those details later.

I can’t believe it’s november already. It’s getting close to winter here in Canada. The temperature is hovering around the freezing mark but we haven’t had any snow yet.

Even though October flew by so quick, it was actually a pretty productive month for me. I got a lot done and I’m looking forward to sharing that progress with you.

What I Did in October

I’ve continued to build backlinks to a few pages that I’ve been trying to rank for for a while now. I mentioned last month that I had a goal for October to be able to stream line this process and I’m happy to say that I have done that. My backlinking strategy consists primarily of three functions.

Function 1 -  Writing Articles

I produced a bunch of articles for the purpose of backlinking a couple of months ago so this one is out of the way already.

Function 2 – Spinning Those Articles

Function 2 is spinning those articles. That means I rewrite them to make them unique. This allows me to leverage the articles I write in order to multiply my backlinking efforts. I was using some free software I found that was working great. The problem is that although it saved me a lot of time, it was still taking longer than I wanted. So, I turned to fiverr.com where I found someone willing to spin these articles for me (2 at a time  for $5). There are many people offering this service on fiverr but most use automated software that spits out junk (trust me, I tried them). The person I found is taking the time to manually operate the spinning software to produce excellent results. What I receive back is in a format called spintax. Using this format I can instantly generate hundreds, even thousands of unique articles instantly. Unlike those other fiverr jobs that have a turn-around time of 1-2 days this service has a 10 day turn-around time because of the effort required. Since I have all my articles written already I have spun articles coming back sooner than I can use them so 10 days isn’t a problem. What was taking me a few hours per article is now getting done with virtually none of my time for just $2.50 per article. Since my site is making over $100/month these days, this is working out great. I should mention that after I get the articles back, I put them into my software to check everything and add some additional spinning including spinning the anchor text in my links.

 Function 3 – Submitting Articles

The third function is submitting articles to directories. This is the part that consumed a lot of my time in September. I thought about purchasing some software (for $100) to automate this process but I didn’t for a few reasons

• It would tie me down to one method of building backlinks
• I would have to spend time to learn the software
• There is a lot of initial setup required
• It would tie up my couputer resources while it submitted

Since I was having success with fiverr already, I tried it again. I found people that owned the same software I was thinking of buying that would accept a spintax formatted article, plug it into the software and send you back a report of a few hundred live backlinks in a day or so. This has been working awesome for me.Plus I can vary my links up a bit by using other similar services. I’ve been submitting these articles on a weekly basis all month.

Fiverr has been a great introduction to outsourcing for me. Back in September I spent most of the month spinning articles and submitting them to directories. With the help of fiverr I only have to spend about 20-30 minutes of my own time on each article (per week) which frees up the rest of my time for more important tasks.

I did make one major mistake that I wanted to share with you. After submitting one of my articles for backlinking on Fiverr, I was checking the resulting articles but links back to my site weren’t working. It turns out that I had a typo in the original article that listed the link url with ttp instead of http. Huge mistake! Now I have hundreds of articles out there with a broken link to my site. I proofread this article multiple times and I’m guessing something happened when I copied and pasted the urls to make sure they worked. The good thing is that there were at least 2 links in that article so I still got one good backlink out of each of those submissions. Please don’t let this happen to you!

So how are my google rankings doing?

Keyword 1: Position 12 ( from 14 last month)

Keyword 2: Postion 14 (from 14 last month)

Keyword 3: Position 8 (from position 10 last month)

Some slight improvements. I wish things would move a bit more quickly, but this is how these things go and  I’ll take what I can get.

What else did I accomplish?

With all of the extra time I had on my hands, here’s what else I was able to accomplish besides backlinking…

I Started a Poll

The most popular page on my site is where I offer a download of a manual for a certain product. For some reason this product often ships without the manual so I get lots of people to my site who want to download the manual. The problem is that the manual sucks. Another interesting point is that my second most popular post is a how to article about that same product, in-fact I have a few of these that do really well. I’ve been thinking for a while that if I were to create a supplemental manual that was actually good, I could sell it and make some money on the manual download page. I found a polling plugin and set it up to ask people if they’d be willing to pay for such a thing. I know I should have used an opt-in box instead, but I don’t have a mailing list at this time. There’s a specific reason why that is (right or wrong) but I’ll save that for another post. I’ll let you know the results of the poll once I have enough data to be relevant.

I Created Some Pop-Ups

I received an email this month from one of my favorite IM Software developers that he is now offering a free version of a popup manager that I’ve been looking at. The free version only allows sliding banners from the top or bottom, but I kind of like these better because they are not so obtrusive. I created 3 of these as ads to direct people to 3 different places. First was to the poll I mentioned above. Second was to a review of an ebook that I’m an affiliate for which has been doing pretty well. Third was for a product selection page for newbies that I’m trying to funnel all traffic to the site to. I’m seeing a bunch of purchases through this page so anything I can do to get people there is a good thing. I placed these pop-ups on relavent pages throughout the site. Almost evry page has one of the three unless the page has a specific objective that I don’t want to distract from.

I Wrote Some New Articles

Finally I created a few new articles. Two were for iPhone/Android apps that are coming out to interact with equipment in my niche. In both cases, to use these apps you would have to buy some interfacing hardware in order for it to work. I have affiliate links to those of course. The third article is about the best christmas gifts to buy someone in my niche. I’ve categorized all kinds of gifts for different people and budgets and provided affiliate links for the best prices. I hope to see some good results from this site in November and December. Finally I created a best of 2011 post to highlight the best product that was released this year. I did this at the end of 2010 and it has been really successful so I decided to do it again. I think having the year in there helps google to establish relevance. With my 2010 post I was able to rank #1 for “the best ___”. And that’s a keyword that you definately want to rank for.

What’s Planned for November?

More Backlinks

I’ll continue to consistently build backlinks with my fiverr strategy. Since I now have a system in place for this I won’t have to spend much time on this.

Enable Blog Post Re-ordering

I downloaded a plugin to allow me to reorder the posts on my main blog loop. I don’t post to the site very often and I’ve noticed that I make more money the closer to the top certain posts are. I plan to implement this plugin so that I can place the most relavent posts close to the top of the home page which will hopefully increase earnings as well.

Create Unique Sidebars Throughout the Site

I also found a plugin to allow you to customize sidebar content for each page/post on your blog. I intend to set this up to laser target readers with relevent links to my money pages.

Ramp Up Google Adsense

Finally I think I’m going to play with adsense ads on non money posts/pages. Right now I only have adsense below the fold on the sidebar. This could be a good  thing or it could cause people to leave the site and result in reduced affiliate earnings. Only one way to find out right.

And that’s about it. By the end of this month I’ll be in good shape going into the Christmas season and I think I’ll be pretty much done with this site. I’m looking forward to starting on a new project where I’ll try to create something with some better earning potential.

Wow. That was a big update. Lets get on to the earnings shall we?

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $71.70 [ from $59.82 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $33.11 [Down from $37.34 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $4.88 [down from $6.03 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $109.69 [Up from $103.19 last month]

Once again another $100+ month. I must say I’m liking these. It’s not a huge amount, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that there isn’t a huge revenue potential for this site for various reasons. Even so, I’m still excited about the revenue I am earning. If I can maintain this level of income, it is plenty of money to fund some other projects. It already pays for hosting and backlinking campaigns, plus I can use it for an auto responder and who knows what else. I should be able to stretch $100 pretty far.

The money that is coming in continues to be pretty well diversified. I’m relatively happy with these numbers but once I get my target keywords ranking a little better I know I will start to see more traffic and certainly more sales. Hopefully I’ll see some positive results from my upcoming Adsense experiment as well.

Traffic

• Page Views: 8,932 [up from 8,061 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 3,245 [up from 2,922 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,832 [up from 1,688 last month]

Traffic continues to grow, this month seeing about 11% growth over last month. From the graph above you can see the continuing uptrend. I’m happy to point out that I didn’t have a single day with less than 100 visitors this month.

Here are the traffic sources for October.

Traffic sources continues to be dominated by google again. The page I created a couple of months ago that wound up in the # 1 google position for an unexpected keyword continues to bring in new traffic. Since I created a more targeted article for that keyword I am now ranking #1, #2 and #3 with a dropdown list under #3 that lists even more pages from my site. These pages along with some other new content are showing up in more places in google and resulting in even more links. I’ve also noticed that some of my article submissions are starting to drive traffic directly through click throughs. I’m happy with the 11% rise in traffic this month and I hope my backlinking strategy will enable this trend to continue. I plan to post even less over the coming months so we’ll see how that affects the traffic. If I start to loose traffic I will have to go back to posting at least monthly or so. Outsourcing posts is another option that I may consider if it comes down to that.

Well, all in all another great month. I’m super excited to see what happens between now and February. Last year these were very profitable times for me, especially the days just following Christmas. I have a lot better presence in google now and many more offers on my site so I hope and expect things to be even better this year. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I’ve been going back and forth about what will be my next project. I’m trying to force myself to think big. Historically I’ve chosen small projects with small potential as you can see if you look through the archives of this blog. The problem with this is small results are inevitable. I’ve learned a lot over the past couple years that I’ve been studying online business so I’m trying to incorporate those lessons. Ideally I’d like to create something with the potential for job replacement type income. This would allow me to free up an extra 8-10 hours a day which would allow me to really do some damage. Anyway, just dreams for now, but I realize the importance of selecting the right project. It will force me to step outside of my comfort zone but it will be exciting. I’ll let you know when I have my idea selected. Have a great November!

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