I’ve been posting reports on my internet marketing progress for several months now. 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 September.

This is the second month of  displaying my the earnings graph above. I used to post graphs of the traffic but I think it’s more interesting to look at earnings rather than traffic.

Right off the bat you can see that my earnings are down from last month, but we’ll get into that later.

For now, lets get on with the report.

What I did in September

My goal for September was to continue my back-linking campaign to try and get my site ranking for some particular keywords I want to rank for. I was able to create quite a few articles to use for back-linking and I submitted several of them to article directories and blogs.

I’m following Pat Flynn’s Backlinking Strategy that Works. I have successfully created an anchor layer and am now focusing on my indirect layer.

Last month I indicated that the process was taking way too long. It really does take a lot of effort to write unique articles, sign up with directories and post the articles to those directories. So another goal I had set for September was to come up with an inexpensive way to automate this process. I’m happy to report that I’ve found some great tools to do just that.

In Pat’s post he discusses spinning articles to create additional content to submit to article directories. The tool he recommends costs $77 per year which I’m not prepared to spend at this point. After a ton of research I think I’ve found the next best thing. Spinner Chief is a free piece of software that does pretty much the same thing. It’s really easy to use and works great.

The other tool Pat demonstrates is Unique Article Wizard. This is used for submitting articles to directories. Unfortunately that service requires a recurring monthly fee which I’m not ready to take on. I wasn’t able to find a good free alternative but I did find some software for under $100 that does the same job plus a bit more for just a 1 time fee. I almost purchased this software until I discovered that many people who own it already have gigs set up on fiverr.com to use their software to submit your articles. I’m thinking about using this service to test out the software.

I also posted 2 articles to my site that I had written previously and were sitting as drafts in wordpress. One was related to the target keywords that I’m trying to promote and the other was just generic filler content with an affiliate link to an interesting product.

Here’s a quick update on my Keyword rankings as they sit today.

Keyword 1: Position 14

Keyword 2: Postion 14

Keyword 3: Position 10

Keyword rankings are an interesting beast. As you work to improve them they bounce around like crazy. Keyword 1 was at position 11 at one point and keyword 3 was at position 7. I’m confident that if I keep working on it, these rankings will continue to rise. It’s a little frustrating not to see quicker results though.

I’m reasonably satisfied with the work I completed in September. October will be spent Spinning the remainder of my new articles and submitting them to directories to complete my indirect back-link layer.  I plan to use fiverr and possibly purchase some automatic submission software and/or other services to help me do this. I hope to have this mostly automated before the end of the month.

Beyond that, there are a few articles that I want to publish well before Christmas. I want to be in a position to take advantage of Christmas shoppers visiting my site. I’ve pretty well got all of the core content that I want up on the site already. The only thing left that I want to do is play with adsense and the site layout a bit to try and squeeze the best conversions I can out of the site.

I’ve learned a lot from my little niche site in the last year and a half and I’m just about ready to move on with another project. I’ll talk about that more later, but for now, lets get to the numbers.

Income Sources

• Physical Product Affiliate Earnings: $59.82 [down from $97.93 last month]
• Ebook Affiliate Earning: $37.34 [up from $31.38 last month]
• Adsense: Earinings: $6.03 [up from $5.15 last month]
• Total For November 2011: $103.19 [Down from $134.89 last month]

I’m very happy with the results this month dispite the fact that overall earnings are down by about $30. I still made nearly double what I earned in July. Also, notice that every category except physical affiliate sales is up this month.

I have three physical product vendors that I promote. One of those three is up 100% since last month. Unfortunately the other two are down significantly which pulled the total earnings down as well. It’s a good thing I have several income sources to balance things out. It just goes to show the importance of diversification.

How about traffic?

Traffic

• Page Views: 8,061 [up from 7,654 last month]
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 2,922 [up from 2,829 last month]
• Number of Keywords: 1,668 [up from 1,574 last month]

Traffic growth has slowed down a little from last month but it is still rising (a 5% increase from last month). Even though I only published 2 new articles last month. Perhaps my back-linking campaign is providing some of the additional traffic either directly from people clicking through or as a result of improved search rankings.

Here are the traffic sources for September.

I have a new referral source this month! This time it’s the popular forum in my niche. I’m very pleased to see traffic coming from here because it means that people in the niche are beginning to take notice of my site and discuss it in the forums. This is the type of back-link that is truly invaluable because they come naturally from real users of the web.

This month I will continue to promote my target keywords to try and improve traffic. Hopefully I’ll be able to make this a little more automated so that I can free some time for some new projects.

I have two projects in mind that I am really anxious to get moving on. One is a new niche that I’ll talk more about when I’m ready to get started. And the other is actually this site. I’ve been running this site on and off since 2009. Even so the site is really only useful to me. This month it has received a total of 16 visitors. I have some great ideas to make this site more useful to a lot of people and I’m excited to get started. I’ll keep you posted.

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