Monthly Income, Growth & Traffic Report – January 2015

This is the 28th 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 January

January was a very strange month as it happened across 4 countries which gave me plenty of time to reflect on the past year & future of my businesses.

This time of year is generally a quiet one in the internet world so it was the perfect time to put my thinking cap on for the year ahead.

I’m expecting that to have a big impact on the blog’s earnings this month but it certainly paves the way for some record breaking months to come.

Content Creation

I published a total of 7 posts this month which is 1 less than last month but it feels like I hardly posted at all!

We started the years by looking at the top 10 posts of 2014 based on 3.6 million pageviews!

Then 44 experts shared their link building strategies which was closely followed by tutorial to create your own expert roundups.

Next I showed you how I increased email optin conversion by 469% in less than 24 hours.

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

Announcing My SEO Agency

I soft launched my SEO agency to the wider public in June which has seen steady growth since as we found our feet.

We have focused on building custom SEO strategies around businesses needs, goals & budget which has seen great success so far in some very competitive niches.

There are 14 active clients at the moment & we have spent the last couple of months working hard to build out our infrastructure for a full launch.

So with that said let me introduce my specialist SEO agency to you.

We specialise purely in ranking sites in search engines. Nothing more, nothing less. There are 5 core services-

• Google keyword ranking
• E-Commerce SEO
• Casino & Gambling SEO
• Private blog network building
• Penatly removal & recovery

We also have a few client case studies available for you to check out-

• Diet & Weight Loss Recovery – This client was penalised by Penguin 2.1 & now has over 4,000 1st page rankings brining over 500,000 organic visitors per month.
• Pet Store Ecommerce – We have more than doubled search traffic for this client by ranking for core commercial terms.
• Video Streaming Site Recovery – This client was hit by a manual penalty losing rankings for terms like ‘online movies’ – we removed the penalty & they now enjoy 114 #1 spots with 980 other top 10 listings.

If you want your SEO handled by a specialist team, let us know. Custom strategies start from $1,000 per month.

We can only manage so many clients at once so it’s first come, first serve.

Spoke At Affiliate Summit

I flew out to Vegas from Costa Rica to attend Affiliate Summit West 2015 at the Paris Hotel.

While I was there I was part of an hour long panel with John Chow, John Rampton & Zac Johnson talking about how we built successful blogs.

Thanks to Coralie for the photo below that got retweeted a bunch of times.

As always with Affiliate Summit they had some crazy partys & events on but I took an early exit and moved my flight forward a day to get back to focusing on this years goals.

If you haven’t been to Affiliate Summit Las Vegas or Affiliate Summit New York before you are missing out. I will have a full follow up from the last event soon.

Planning For The Year Ahead

As I was travelling a lot in January I had plenty of time to think about everything in 2014 and plan forward for 2015.

I made a list for each of my core businesses and wrote down the goals I would like to achieve with them in 2015 and broke those into smaller quarter by quarter goals.

Then for all of the goals that needed to be achieved in Q1 2015 I broke down a list of tasks and assigned deadline dates against each of those tasks.

This includes general business items like updating my accounting process so I spend less time dealing with that each month or things like this-

MW Stage 3 – Bring Blog To Modern Standards – 13th February 2015

• Theme Development
• Deploy new responsive theme developed with HTML5 & CSS3
• Integrate LeadPages 404 template > Optin

• Full Onsite Audit
• Perform full on site SEO audit
• Fix all problems found

• Content Audit
• Tag posts for better navigational structure
• Update errors/broken social lockers/resources
• Headline optimisation
• Create social sharing images that work across all networks

• Analytics
• Migrate to universal Analytics
• Automate report creation

It sounds like a lot of work but it only took a couple of hours to put together and gives me a solid plan of action to work through & stay focused.

This includes some major changes for the blog that include some big changes in direction.

I’m not going to say more than that at the moment but it’s going to make for an exciting first 3 months of 2015.

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

This month I managed to stay above my 50,000 visitor threshold with 54,827 (1,768/day) visitors which is a drop from last months 60,634 (1,956/day).

But as long as it stays above 50,000 I’m happy for it to grow slowly & steadily.

Most Popular Content

The most popular post this month were these awesome link building tips closely followed by the how to start a blog and make money tutorial.

People are still paying close attention to the new Google ranking factors which I will have a follow up on soon.

Top Traffic Sources

Last month I ran a bunch of Facebook campaigns but didn’t bother this month as I was taking some time off and I like to watch them closely.

Traffic is made up from a variety of sources with direct traffic & Google organic traffic remaining dominant.

Search Engine Traffic

Organic traffic from Google has held steady again at 37,245 (1,201/day) compared to 36,887 (1,190/day) last month.

The top keywords we can actually see are dominated by brand and direct URL searches for my tutorials!

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 exploded due to a certain video which has began to settle again this month.

Views have dropped from 28,877 to 23,115 which is still a very good view rate!

Total minutes watched also took a knock from from 204,669 to 127,157! That still means there nearly 3 people were watching one of my videos every minute of every day!

Social Shares

I’m pretty sure the numbers reflected below are not accurate. The plugin I use to collect these stats was pulled from sale over a year ago & I think it finally broke.

But either way here are the numbers it is reporting at the moment – I’ll get it fixed up this month! If you know a good plugin to grab social share stats for every post let me know.

Total social shares across Facebook, Twitter and Google+ increased from 60,206 to 60,231 which I know for 100% sure isn’t true.

• Google+ – 16,182 (16,346 last month)
• Twitter – 25,979 (25,903 last month)
• Facebook – 18,070 (17,957 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 3,441 new subscribers across various channels which is a bit of a drop off from last months 5,318.

I suspect this is because I removed a lot of links to my social channels to increase focus on optin conversion.

There are now a total of 97,589 subscribers across all of the different channels.

• E-mail – 2,549 (3,507 last month) / Total: 51,116
• Twitter – 201 (228 last month) / Total: 6,777
• YouTube – 318 (270 last month) / Total: 6,998
• Facebook – 176 (1,294 last month) / Total: 14,903
• Google+ – 101 (147 last month) / Total: 17,432
• RSS – 66 (-128 last month) / Total: 363

Income Report

Here are the numbers you really want to see-

Affiliate Earnings

• 99CentArticles – $5.31
• Affiliate Summit – $70.96 (review)
• AfterOffers – $394.50
• Ahrefs – $306.08 (my Ahrefs review)
• Aweber – $66.60 (tutorial)
• Blog Advertising – $1,672.51 (Advertise)
• BlueHost – $65.00 (discount coupon)
• BuyProxies – $53.00
• BuzzBundle – $871.21 (review)
• CheapWindowsVPS – $1.10 (discount coupon)
• Drip Revolution – $138.66 (discount coupon)
• FCS Networker – $27.90 (discount coupon)
• GSA Captcha Breaker – $55.86 (review / discount coupon)
• GSA Search Engine Ranker – $304.96 (review / discount coupon)
• HostGator – $100.00
• Indexification – $2.75 (case study)
• Inspyder Backlink Monitor – $51.96
• JustHost – $320.00 (start a blog / discount coupon)
• Kontent Machine – $1,379.51 (review)
• LeadPages – $292.20
• LinkEmperor – $449.18 (review)
• List Builders Academy – $27.00 (case study)
• LongTailPro – $133.48 (my Long Tail Pro review / discount coupon)
• Magazine3 – $8.85
• Magic Submitter – $30.33
• Market Samurai – $46.56 (tutorial)
• MTTB – $1,088.20
• OneHourIndexing – $240.21 (case study)
• OptinLinks – $54.69 (discount coupon)
• PlugMatter – $114.00 (discount coupon)
• PowerupHosting – $20.70 (discount coupon)
• Private Internet Access – $6.00
• ProxyHub – $0.80 (discount coupon)
• RankCracker – $69.36
• Rank WYZ – $7.80
• Raven Tools – $0.20 (best backlink checker case study)
• SEMRush – $59.98 (my SEMRush review)
• SEO Dominators Club – $2,689.39 (discount coupon)
• SEO Powersuite – $112.50 (see my SEO Powersuite review)
• SERP Book – $7.48
• SESlingShot – $150.00 (review)
• SocialLeadGold – $50.38
• Social Locker Pro – $56.80
• SociSynd – $218.78
• Source Phoenix – $530.00
• Spin Rewriter – $263.67
• TheBestSpinner – $258.50 (The Best Spinner review / discount coupon)
• Thirsty Affiliates – $11.42 (discount coupon)
• Traffic Planet Hosting (now called WPX Hosting) – $672.37 (Case Study / WPX Hosting review)
• Tweet Attacks Pro – $111.48 (discount coupon)
• Ultimate Demon – $724.64 (review / discount coupon)
• VideoMakerFX – $13.50 (how to make money on Fiverr case study)
• WordAI – $47.95

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 $6,412.00 which is on par with last months $6,403.70.

Earnings Total

• Affiliate Income – $14,601.72
• Consultation Income – $00.00
• Other Income – $6,412.00
• Expenses – $49.99

Grand Total: $20,963.73 / £13,914.14 ($20,371.91 / £13,076.94 last month)

As I was writing the report today I was anticipating a big drop off in income, so I was surprised to see it remained steady!

January is always a pretty rough month for blogs but for one reason or another I managed to weather the storm as we move into 2015.

Hopefully that provides a stable foundation to build on.

Signing Off

With all of the relaxing out of the way it’s time to fix up and kick 2015 off with a bang.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be moving into an office and deploying a brand new theme on the blog which isn’t actually brand new at all.

You’ll see what I mean soon :)

So with that said, it is Sunday and I worked all week as it is – it’s time to sign off.

Thank you to everyone that has helped me reach my goals – I couldn’t do it without you, the reader!