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.
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.
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-
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.
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 – stay tuned for updates!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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
- 48HoursLogo – $30.00 (case study)
- 99CentArticles – $51.13
- AfterOffers – $183.50
- Ahrefs – $183.62 (my Ahrefs review)
- AuthorHreview – $65.67 (review)
- Aweber – $42.90 (tutorial)
- Blog Advertising – $1,696.44 (Advertise)
- BuyProxies – $131.50
- BuzzBundle – $268.65 (review)
- ChimpRewriter – $7.60
- CodeCanyon – $29.10
- Drip Revolution – $36.91 (discount coupon)
- GetResponse – $103.21 (review)
- GSA Captcha Breaker – $52.42 (review / discount coupon)
- GSA Search Engine Ranker – $459.59 (review / discount coupon)
- Inspyder Backlink Monitor – $103.92
- JustHost – $80.00 (start a blog / discount coupon)
- Kontent Machine – $1,816.45 (review)
- LeadPages – $258.36
- Link Assistant – $56.14 (tutorial)
- LinkEmperor – $717.15 (review)
- List Builders Academy – $68.00 (case study)
- LongTailPro – $15.12 (my Long Tail Pro review / discount coupon)
- Magic Submitter – $1.79
- Max CDN – $208.00 (case study)
- MTTB – $1,088.20
- OneHourIndexing – $158.73 (case study)
- OptimizePress – $38.80
- PowerupHosting – $66.00 (discount coupon)
- Rank Tracker – $56.14
- RankCracker – $1,219.00
- Rank WYZ – $34.52
- Raven Tools – $0.25 (best backlink checker case study)
- ScrapeBrokers – $49.95
- SEMRush – $27.98 (my SEMRush review)
- SENuke – $88.20 (tutorial)
- SEO Powersuite – $580.85 (see my SEO Powersuite review)
- SEO SpyGlass – $56.14 (best backlink checker case study)
- SERP Book – $2.48
- SESlingShot – $150.00 (review)
- SimpleVideoPro – $47.52 (case study)
- Social SEO Booster – $52.72
- SociSynd – $39.50
- Social Lead Freak – $48.50
- SpinnerChief – $36.30
- TheBestSpinner – $931.00 (The Best Spinner review / discount coupon)
- Traffic Planet Hosting (now called WPX Hosting) – $679.85 (Case Study / WPX Hosting review)
- TubeAssist – $16.75 (tutorial)
- Ultimate Demon – $448.45 (review / discount coupon)
- WordAI – $37.96
Expenses
- Traffic Planet Hosting (now called WPX Hosting) – $49.99 (Case Study / WPX Hosting review)
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!
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.
81 Responses
This is Great Post.I like it. I have some tip here
Thank you for sharing and keep your work.
Can I share it on my facebook?
I would be happy for you to share it anywhere :)
cool!!
Well done it is all about your patience and work. Keep it up
Thanks :)
Congratulations! This keeps me motivated :)
No problem Miller :)
Hey Matt,
How’s your Spanish going so far?
First thanks for your inspirational work. Hopefully I’ll make it to the blog roundup soon :-)
Just wanted to ask you how much time do you (or recommend to) spend working on different/innovative projects, maybe related to your main activity but maybe not, rather than *just* creating great content, etc. and building and improving your blog.
I guess it depends on every person and his/her strategy, I’m just curious because you seem to like trying out new things a lot and it’s almost axiomatic that those little innovations produce the biggest benefits over time.
Love your work.
Saludos!
Hola,
Como estas? Hablo un poco espanol pero es muy dificil para mi!
I only ever have 1 ‘growth’ project on the go at a time to establish it before setting up something new.
Hi, I love you blog :)
Thanks :)
Yeah it will be an interesting case study and im going to do things with a little twist as always ;)
That is a very big post you have written. This is my first visit on your website matt, and trut me, M here to stay. Awesome detailed information given by you regarding your income. You have a lot of patience to write so much. Cheers.
Thanks Neha glad you liked it!
Hey Matt,
These are great numbers. Congrats.
How are you promoting MTTB if you don’t mind me asking. (:
I’ll have a more detailed post tomorrow :)
Added this and a couple of other links mentioned here in my Pocket. Keep it up!
Awesome thank you
Hi Matt, may I know how you keep track on your social shares number?
With SocialSEOBooster
Well done it is all about your patience and work. Keep it up
Always be consistent :)
I wouldn’t say simple, but worth it :)
Hi Ryan,
Thanks :)
Yeah I’m all the way out here it’s a great place!
I’ve never tried Triberr properly – think its worth the crack?
Awesome income report Matt. Congratulations on your continued growth as an internet marketer! I’m amazed that your “not provided” keyword traffic in Google Analytics was close to 95%,what’s that about?
Thanks :) That’s because Google moved to SSL search/increasing profits
Great. Thanks for your sharing !
Thanks for reading :)
Great Going Matt,
This income report is great. And congrats for your new car buddy….. ;)
Thanks Nikhil!!
Another awesome month for you. Congratulations Matthew Woodward.
I believe the income will keep on increasing. Because your blog provide useful in-depth content that help thousands of people (including me) consistently.
Love it.
Thank you Aqif
Amazing results Matt,now i can for sure say that you understand Google better than Matt Cutts…
Haha I don’t think I’m quite there yet :P
But if Matt Cutts could make 18k per month from blogging he wouldn’t be working for Google. He would make 4 posts a month and travel the world the rest of the time like Matt W. does :)
Hahaha I guess he earns more than that!
Great results. I am greatly inspired by you and your blog.
After reading your blog, I have started my blog and working on it.
Thanks!
:)
That is great to hear – good luck :)
Matt,
Your other income, what does it consist of?
Read the post :)
Hey Matt, great going ahead. Would love to know what that other income is. Plus, when is your $100 business coming out? Thanks for the mention
I’m still working on it but its taken a lot longer than planned
Still trying to catch up on all of the content. Loving it so far, keep it coming!
Thanks Ashley!
Hi Matthew, what is the tracking tool do you used?
For what?
So great! Thanks for sharing,Bro! ;)
Thank you for reading Duy!
Matt,
Thank you! I have been watching your video’s until my eyes exploded..
I think i may have made up for a dozen hours watching your videos! I did notice that Kontent Machine has many more options than detailed in your vid’s. It maybe helpful to create another video…
Your the best!
Thanks Allen :) Yeah they release updates all the time its hard to keep up
Cool… Congrats…
Thanks :)
Hello Mathew.
I created a blog a few months ago. I applied for Google adsense that has been approved. I’ve been also doing SEO of my blog. I created T1 links as well using SEnuke but I’ve no traffic at all on my blog even after creating hundreds of links.
I am very worried about this. Kindly help me. Give me some suggestions.
Many thanks.
Shan
Hi,
You could copy this blogs traffic strategy https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/traffic/target-audience/
keep Rocking..Keep Motivating MaTT
Thanks Suman :)
It’s always exciting to read your income reports on the 1st of every month. Congrats on your new car. I so badly wanna buy a SUV.
Happy labor Day Weekend.
Cheers !
Thanks =D I’ll have another one for you next month
Good job on the income this month! I’m so jealous of your affiliate earnings. I hope to be at your level some day.
Congrats on the car as well!
Ahhh you’ll be there before you know it by the look of things =D
Hi Matt,
Congrats on the purchase of your new car!
August was another awesome month for you.
I just launched a new blog today @ http://letescape.com in order to document my entrepreneurial journey.
Very soon i will start to document my income reports just like you are doing so that i will be able to track the progress of my blog.
Thank you for the inspiration.
Thanks Oloyede :)
Once you have 3 income reports ready let me know ;) Good luck sir!
Pretty nice! I wish to earn like this! Where do I start please? :) x
Here you go https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/how-to-start-blog-and-make-money/
Thank you for your great sharing. This post sums up best things of the month. Keep up great work!!
Thanks Scott!
Just congratulated you a few months ago on breaking the $10,000 barrier! Looks like the $20,000 mark is not that far off!
This goes to show how things can improve so dramatically with a little bit of effort and hard work!
Well done Matt! Keep up the good work!
Yeah maybe it will happen this month if I work hard enough :)
Thanks Munir!
Matt, congrats on breaking your income ceiling again!
Also wanted to express a big piece of respect about you modesty in consumerism (talking about your car).
Besides, it’ll be interesting to read about your new ‘unrevealed’ project in the future!
Thanks :) I wrote a bit more about that here https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/income-reports/december-2013/
Another great report, Matt.
Btw, that car… how is it kept in that condition being “my age”? Really shocking. They either have really nice roads there or people are really into preserving everything, hah.
Anyway, August looked like a great month.
Hahahaha I wondered that as well, the car is nearly as old as me and the roads are VERY punishing here – I got stuck up a mountain the other night lol
Whaaaat happened to you? Did you at least have Wi-fi? (blogger’s joke). :D
Welcome back, though. Talking about cars, I went home in the North of the country, 8hours drive, had back pains for like 3 days, I was nearly crying each time I sat down. Romanian roads + Volvo + rough suspensions = baaaad.
hahaha no we didn’t but had full HSDPA so it was all good =D
I think some of the roads here are the same as Romania lol
Oh the great things we share in common: devices, industries and roads, hahaha.
Don’t worry, the main roads ( in Bucharest) are good, you won’t get to experience any adventures here. The only adventure is with the taxi (cab) drivers. ^^
hahaha well that is true all over the world =D
Thanks for sharing Matt, congrats on all the success. Your tuts are 2nd to none.
Thanks Simon =D
WoW amazing….keep it up …. ur blog is really informative and full treasures, i will must follow ur strategy im newin seo n blogging if u dnt mind will u help me please ? 2 times i sent u an email but u didnt reply my questions…. kindly reply me i need ur help n guide me little bit i will b really thankful 2 u …..
Hey,
I’m a bit behind email at the moment and you only sent it last night so I’ll get to it soon :)
Great. Keeping rocking bro.
Thanks Prateek!