Monthly Income, Growth & Traffic Report

This is the 62nd income report as part of the zero backlink experiment.

This will also be the final income report I ever publish on the blog

What I Have Done In December

Last month I started planning and preparing for 2018 and December marked the start of executing that.

That includes making changes to the look and feel of the blog and experimenting with some new content formats.

But I’ll also be killing income reports moving forward…

Why I Am Terminating Income Reports

When I first started the blog, it was nothing but an SEO experiment which got out of control.

The income reports were there to help track the progress of that experiment and to help other people see behind the scenes of what is actually going on.

Over the years I have recieved thousands of emails thanking me for sharing my knowledge in these reports.

I have chronicled the entire journey of the blog from zero to well over a million dollars and I have thoroughly enjoyed doing it.

But at this point, the income reports no longer serve their purpose.

On top of that they take a huge amount of resources to put together every month and have a very short life span when I look at the performance of all income reports historically.

All of that time and resource could be invested in producing a much higher level of content across the board and that is the direction I have decided to go.

So while this will be the last income report I publish on the blog, it opens the doors for some incredible things in 2018.

Thank you to every body that has joined me on the journey and offered support over the past years, it’s been wild to say the last.

But now – it’s time to take it to the next level. I owe it to you all.

Key Focuses For 2018

So what is the “next level” you ask?

Well that is going to come in a variety of different flavors-

Easier To Digest Content

One of the biggest problems with the blog is content is very fractioned and theres no easy way to go from SEO beginner to SEO pro in any logical order.

I want to consolidate and organise that experience so you can get the answers you need no matter what stage of the SEO journey your at.

To do that I need to create a structure set of pages that help connect the dots in a way that makes sense.

That is going to take around 140,000 words of new content along with all of the other content enhancers like videos, graphics and downloads.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Last month I told you that I upgrade my computer to an Intel Core i9 7920x, with 128GB RAM and a Nvidia GTX 1080Ti.

I also bought a new camera body, lenses, tripod, teleprompter, bags, cases and all the accessories you can think of.

All of that is to help produce high quality video throughout 2018.

Right now I am still waiting for some essential parts of kit to arrive – but I had a quick play with my how to start a blog video last month.

Develop The Team

Better quality content is going to demand more resources. So I am going to start developing the team as a primary focus.

I have already started doing that by handing graphic design over to Kapa99 which you may have seen with the new featured images across the blog.

That is also going to grow to include more key people so I can accelerate the rate that I deliver high end content to you.

I’m will also invest in a community manager that is dedicated to answering all of your SEO questions and nothing else – this person is proving hard to find.

Blow Your Mind

And most importantly, my mission is to blow your mind with the user experience here end to end which is very fractioned at the moment.

By bringing it all together that will help to accelerate your success.

Because who knows?

Maybe you’ll become one of the many readers that have seen incredible results from the tutorials here.

From not knowing anything to becoming a major influencer

I honestly did not know much about SEO. I thought guys in fiverr can rank you number 1 but I soon learned through experience not to do so. My wife and I started a waist training company and I was in charge of the business side of things. I spent multiple days reading articles, most of which being Matt's articles and putting the knowledge to work. In about 4 months the company started making thousands per month. January being the sixth month was the most successful and we are now getting closer and closer to making 5 figures a month. Thanks Matt.

Brian Nguah
Royal Lioness

I was able to double organic traffic

Hi Matt, Your online tutorials are quite easy to follow and replicate. I was able to double the organic traffic in many of my clients’ websites relatively easy in very short time. Keep up the good work.

George Papatheodorou
Digital Bang

Matthew helped us make hundreds of thousands of dollars

Matthew Woodward's advice and insight is always spot on. My business has literally made hundreds of thousands of dollars (and our clients have as well!) thanks to his advice. Our company has greatly benefited from his blog and we look forward to each post. Keep up the great work!

Andrew Stickel
Social Firestarter

Your tutorials helped me to rank a number of sites

Matt, I love your down to earth approach, your actionable content and your enthusiasm. Your tutorials have helped me to rank a number of niche based sites... Great job!

John Taylor
Snoop Marketing

I reach 50k uniques a month following your advice, Matt !!

There have been very few people in the SEO industry whose influence on me did so much to change my approach to SEO, affiliate marketing and creating great content. One of those special people is Matthew Woodward. His tutorials are easy to follow and replicate. I was able to get workouttrends.com from zero to 50,000 uniques per month within 7 months of launching after following his advice. Thank you for the blog. I learned a lot from him over the years.

Anant Mendiratta
Workout Trends

Those stories are the only success metric that matters in the end because your success, is my success.

Took A Break

I also spent the last couple of weeks taking a break in Nicaragua visiting just about every place you can think of border to border.

It was great to get lost in a totally different world and fully rely on Spanish for the duration.

It’s taking a while to “change my chip” back to the real world as I am putting the final plan of attack together – but there’s no rush.

Content Creation

Like last month I only published 2 posts this month, including the income report.

But one of those posts was me getting my feet wet with 4k video while I wait for the rest of the equipment to arrive.

So far the all new how to start a blog tutorial has done pretty well with traffic and I am using this as a test base to decide on future change to the blog.

Crunching The Numbers

So let’s get our hands dirty and see how the blog has actually performed this month.

Visitor Statistics

Traffic increased from 55,657 (1,855/day) to 60558 (1,953) per day which is pretty good for the Christmas period in this niche.

That also brings traffic above my desired 60k per month marker.

Most Popular Content

The all new start a blog tutorial stole the show this month by a significant margin.

As usual the how to make money on Fiverr tutorial stayed strong and the Successful vs Unsuccessful people post saw a big jump.

Top Traffic Sources

One of the biggest changes in traffic this month comes from Pinterest.

This is because I had the Kapa99 team design some custom images for this tutorial that are doing really well on Pinterest.

Other than that not much has changed in terms of the top traffic sources which are made up from organic search and social.

Not much has changed in traffic sources with a good mix of traffic coming from Google organic and social sources.

Search Engine Traffic

Last month search increased to 45,662 (1,522/day). which has slumped a little this month to 41,414 (1,336/day)

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.

YouTube views jumped from 12,344 to 29,524 this month which is largerly down to the release of my new video.

Total minutes watched jumped from 52,900 to 110,272 respectively.

Social Shares

At this time I can only track social shares for Facebook. It seems the plugin I am using isn’t working properly at the moment.

Facebook – 69,675 (66,141 last month)

Subscribers

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

There are now a total of 149,631 subscribers across all of the various channels compared to last months 131,550!

E-mail – 1,122 (1,965 last month) / Total: 66,675
Twitter – 128 (120 last month) / Total: 17,261
YouTube – 125 (115 last month) / Total: 15,380
Facebook – 308 (482 last month) / Total: 32,021
Google+ – 5 (41 last month) / Total: 17,823
RSS – -52 (-24 last month) / Total: 471

Unable to post graphs at the moment – will update asap

Income Report

Here are the numbers you really want to see-

Affiliate Earnings

A2Hosting – $85.00 (my A2 Hosting review)
ActiveCampaign – $9.20
Ahrefs – $273.29 (my Ahrefs review)
Aweber – $133.70 (my Aweber review)
Blog Advertising – $461.84 (Advertise)
Blue Chip Backlinks – $200.00
BlueHost – $65.00
Brightspark – $8.40
BuyProxies – $22.50
BuzzBundle – $269.10
CMS Commander – $38.70
ConvertKit – $8.70
Domain Hunter Gatherer – $979.00 (expired domains tutorial & Domain Hunter Gatherer review)
Drip – $59.10
Drip Revolution – $191.22 (discount coupon)
EasyBlogNetworks – $145.57
EasyExpiredDomains – $15.12
FCS Networker – $102.64 (discount coupon)
FreshDrop – $17.70
GetResponse – $21.12 (review)
GSA Captcha Breaker – $245.05 (review / discount coupon)
GSA Search Engine Ranker – $378.04 (review / discount coupon)
Hostgator – $100.00
HPBacklinks – $7.20
iPage – $1,920.00
IPVanish – $128.52 (my IPVanish review)
JustHost – $160.00
KDPRocket – $140.50
Kinsta – $80.00
Kontent Machine – $290.05 (review)
LinkEmperor – $90.82
Loganix – $0.70 (my link building services post)
LongTailPro – $471.50 (my Long Tail Pro review / discount coupon)
MintVine – $19.27
MyThemeShop – $132.30
NinjaOutreach – $666.68
OneHourIndexing – $256.38 (case study)
PandaBot – $143.70 (case study)
PrivateInternetAccess – $18.00
PrizeRebel – $116.18
ProductLaunchFormula – $2,952.80
ProxyHub – $1.46
RankTracker – $56.14
Raven Tools – $10.14 (best backlink checker case study)
SEMRush – $1,216.84 (my SEMRush review)
SEO Content Machine – $34.88 (discount coupon)
SEO Powersuite – $798.30 (see my SEO Powersuite review)
SEO Clerks – $14.50
SEO eStore – $0.30
SEO Monitor – $303.11
SERanking – $65.87
SERP Book – $11.41
SERPed – $1,436.02 (review)
SociSynd – $0.32
SumoMe – $7.92
SwagBucks – $5.00
TBSolutions – $5.00
TheBestSpinner – $119.26 (The Best Spinner review / discount coupon)
TrafficPlanetHosting – $200.00
TweetAttacksPro – $76.40 (discount coupon)
URLProfiler – $39.21 (my URL Profiler review)
Website Auditor – $134.89
Whitespark – $281.40
WordAI – $29.97
WPMatic – $189.60
WPProfitBuilder – $13.50

Expenses

Kinsta Hosting – $100.00 (See my Kinsta review)
Drip – $400.50
Kapa99 – $399.00
Facebook Advertising – $1,812.07 (Case Study)

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.

This month I didn’t taken on any consultation work so made a grand total of nothing!

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.

Last month this dropped to $12,212.79 but has dropped off further to $12,019.69 this month.

Earnings Total

Affiliate Income – $16,410.16
Consultation Income – $00.00
Other Income – $12,019.69
Expenses – $2,711.57

Grand Total: $25,718.28 / £19,035.89 ($28,340.31 / £21,038.71 last month)