Home > Blogging > Income Reports > August 2014

Monthly Income, Growth & Traffic Report – August 2014

Updated on Jul 21, 2020

This is the 23rd income report as part of the zero backlink experiment.

Every month I will publish a post like this one that shows you how this blog is progressing and everything I have done across the month to get it there.

These reports will help me track my own progress while teaching you what to do and more importantly what not to do.

How to start a successful blog in 7 days

What I Have Done In August

August has been a very interesting month on a number of fronts with work, travel and more!

It marks the first time I have ever spoken at an event in front of a crowd and the first time I’ve ever bought a car.

On top of that I’ve been pushing lots of things forward while preparing for the arrival of a friend this weekend.

Content Creation

I published a total of 5 posts last month but have increased that to 7 month which is nearly 2 a week give or take.

We kicked the month off with this YouTube hacking guest post along with The Best Spinner competition.

Then I recaped all of the trouble and regrets of Wikipedia backlinks.

Last but not least was my dirty little secret to use a social locker for WordPress to unlock social media shares.

Other than those posts we just had the regular best of internet marketing & income report roundup posts.

Blog Features

I was named one of the 50 online marketing influencers of 2014 and had the blog featured on a post by CrazyEgg.

I was also featured over at Human Proof Designs and Web Traffic Geek.

Affiliate Summit Presentation

At the start of August I went to Affiliate Summit to give my first presentation on stage.

Instead of rehearsing it I decided to just speak from the heart and go with flow – I wasn’t sure how it went until this feedback arrived in my inbox.

session feedback

It was a relief to see that feedback and if you want to see the full live presentation for yourself you can get a virtual pass still.

Otherwise you can just check out my slides below although you’ll miss the exclusive tip I dropped for the audience.

Anyway if you want to check out all of the trouble, pranks and regrets of Affiliate Summit East 2014 read my full post here.

MTTB Experiment Update

Last month I wrote about my MTTB experiment so far.

This months MTTB earnings have grown from a total of $3,437.00 to $4,201.60 which is a nice increase to see.

Now I have a bit more experience with the system and it has generated good income the past couple of months I’m going to step it up a gear.

I want to create a new experiment to see what happens if I combine out sourced writing with automation marketing using bots/software.

This will form part of a new live case study on the blog and I’ll be posting regular updates about progress and what I have done.

Look out for my more detailed post about it all this week where I will reveal the full strategy and approach I’m going to use.

Twitter Experiment

Some of you may have noticed an increase in Twitter activity from me the past few weeks.

I’ve been running a few experiments to see if its possible to increase traffic and engagement from Twitter without really doing anything.

So far this has tripled the amount of retweets and nearly doubled my overall reach from 1,271,179 to 2,373,983.

This graph pretty much says it all though-

twitter experiment

I’m going to try a few more things over the next couple of weeks but I’ll be publishing all the juicy details this month!

Email Conversion Tweaks

I’ve also been experimenting with trying to increase the email optin rate of the blog.

The overall blog had a conversion rate of 2.98% which I’m trying to increase to 5% if possible.

So far all I have done is use OptinMonster to add a lightbox popup, a footer bar and a corner popup slider.

Each of those both have split tests running on them to improve the conversion of each position although I do think it looks very busy at the moment.

optinmonster

As you can see the split test is already showing 3 clear winners however there is an awful lot more I can do to increase the optin conversion rate.

I’m going to keep experimenting with OptinMonster and also try tweaking some elements of the layout – in the mean time you can check out my full Optinmonster review.

Crunching The Numbers

So let’s get our hands dirty and take a look at what my hard work has done for me this month.

Visitor Statistics

Last month traffic was set at 46,656 (1,505/day) which has seen a slight drop off to 44,565 (1,437/day) this month.

I’m putting that down to the summer season when the web is generally less busy as people are out and about having fun in the sun!

Would still love to hit the 50,000 uniques in a month milestone though.

Visitor Statistics

Most Popular Content

This month my Wikipedia link building tutorial claimed the top spot with the spam ranking case study not far behind.

My review for The Best Spinner also jumped into the top 10 and so did my tools of the trade.

I’m still surprised the email marketing tutorial hasn’t broke the top 10 – that is key to this blogs success.

analytics-content

Top Traffic Sources

Traffic sources are looking pretty much the same as last month.

The only difference is you will see some traffic from a campaign called TwiExp which is from my Twitter experiment above.

Good to see the direct traffic is still high which means you all keep coming back for more :) Thank you!

analytics-trafficsrc

Search Engine Traffic

Google search traffic has remained at similar levels this month at 37,746 (1,217 per day) compared to 38,020 (1,226 per day) last month.

Still hoping to break through the 40,000 barrier again which should happen as we move into September.

analtics-keywords

YouTube Views

I lost all of my historical YouTube views because of changes I made to the branding – so I keep track of them separately.

Last month YouTube brought in 23,027 views which has seen another small but nice increase to 23,363 this month.

Although views were up total minutes watched dropped from 131,006 to 124,008 which isn’t bad considering there is only 43,829 minutes in a month!

youtube-stats

Social Shares

The blog has seen a total of 50,734 shares across Facebook, Twitter and Google+ this month compared to 48,186 last month.

  • Google+ – 14,178 (13,105 last month)
  • Twitter – 22,056 (21,138 last month)
  • Facebook – 14,500 (13,943 last month)

My Forum Statistics

The forum is still getting hit with spam pretty hard although cleaning it up really isn’t a problem and I deleted another 2,000 users this month.

Much less than the 5,000 spam users of last month though!

Despite that there were 58 new topics & 27 replies made on the forum in total.

  • Users: 8,008 (10,224 last month)
  • Topics: 1,228 (1,170 last month)
  • Posts: 3,779 (3,752 last month)

Subscribers

The most important metric on the entire blog – earning a subscription from someone is the ultimate form of commitment and conversion.

This month brought 5,848 new subscribers across various channels which is a drop when compared to last month’s total of 7,071.

There are now a total of 72,642 subscribers across all of the different channels.

  • E-mail – 2,446 (2,038 last month) / Total: 32,696
  • Twitter – 446 (815 last month) / Total: 5,093
  • YouTube – 301 (328 last month) / Total: 5,657
  • Facebook – 575 (636 last month) / Total: 11,806
  • Google+ – 2,119 (3,071 last month) / Total: 16,640
  • RSS – -39 (183 last month) / Total: 750

Income Report

Here are the numbers you really want to see-

Affiliate Earnings

Expenses

Consultation Earnings

I separate out my SEO consultant earnings from the affiliate earnings. The blog drives affiliate sales directly and whilst it does generate SEO consultation leads these are separate projects in their own right.

I didn’t take on any consultation work this month which results in zero consultation earnings.

Other Income

I’m working on another project right now that is part of the blog but not something I’m ready to talk about publicly yet or maybe ever.

I will declare the income here though as it wouldn’t be possible without the blog and ‘technically’ it is affiliate income.

This earned a total of $6,663.12 up from last months $3,015.89.

I’m expecting this to grow at a similar rate next month if all goes to plan!

Earnings Total

  • Affiliate Income – $12,622.96
  • Consultation Income – $00.00
  • Other Income – $6,663.12
  • Expenses – $49.99

Grand Total: $19,236.09 / £11,582.56 ($18,424.90 / £10,947.20 last month)

Another month and another record breaking month beating last month by $811.19!

Would love to break the $20,000 barrier next month – we’ll see what happens!

How to start a successful blog in 7 days

Signing Off

It has been a great month all round launching a number of new experiments while trying to improve on what I already have.

Even though I spent the first week or so of August travelling I managed to keep the posts flowing and most importantly the income.

Next month is going to see some interesting stuff as I start to publish the results of my experiments and give you all the juicy details of my live MTTB case study.

I’m also going to be setting something up to drive the ‘other income’ forward – perhaps in the future I will reveal what that is but right now I’m keeping it under wraps.

Now we have got August out of the way we should start seeing overall web traffic starting to increase again, we’ll see what that does for next months report!

I would like to personally thank each and every one of you for joining me on this journey.

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