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.
Loving this panel at #asw15 with @johnrampton @JohnChow @zacjohnson @MattWoodwardUK. Learning so much! pic.twitter.com/pfjqfC3OkZ
— Coralie Seright (Lovebugs and Postcards) (@CoralieSeright) January 18, 2015
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 / Ahrefs vs Semrush)
- Aweber – $66.60 (my Aweber review)
- Blog Advertising – $1,672.51 (Advertise)
- BlueHost – $65.00 (discount coupon / Siteground vs Bluehost)
- BuyProxies – $53.00 (SEO proxies / residential proxies)
- BuzzBundle – $871.21 (review)
- CheapWindowsVPS – $1.10
- Drip Revolution – $138.66 (discount coupon)
- FCS Networker – $27.90
- 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)
- 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
- PlugMatter – $114.00
- PowerupHosting – $20.70
- Private Internet Access – $6.00
- ProxyHub – $0.80
- 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
- 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)
- 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!
51 Responses
Hi Mathew
I really appreciate to you that you have shared your Internet Marketing Income, It will be a great moment to stumble upon on your website.
No problem Mathew!
Hi Matthew. This one in which we are commenting and communicating in.
This is just default Wordpress comments
It is so great to see a website where a real success story shares the how to achieve similar success. Thanks Matthew for sharing your results and how you achieved that success.
No problem Robert, I am glad you enjoy it :)
Yes I am keen to follow your site very interested to know about this comments plugin as i think is really good and would like to use similar on my sites
Which comments plugin are you referring to?
Why do you think Janauary is always rough month for blogs? I don’t understand this section.
Because straight after Christmas people rarely have money to splash about
I just stumbled onto your website and I must say I am amazed!! I will be lurking around to learn and apply some of these techniques for my own website. I am a newbie and at this moment in time can only hope to reach your level of success some day. Great site you have here.
No such as hope Michael, just hard work and determination
Hey why dont you deduct aweber in your expences have you switched and if you are using simple $19/month package but your suscriber list is now huge above 50k so how much it costs.And since you are using TP Hosting $49.99 package so just curious that is your bandwidth less than 100GB even with this much traffic?
The Aweber expense is absorbed by one of my authority sites each month and I’ve never crossed the bandwidth line
Is the source of your “DIRECT” traffic from emails or something else?
Been subscribed and going through your BAD ASS content for a month now, you FREAKING ROCK!! Thanks so much for being an OPEN book!! Honesty is much APPRECIATED in this profession. You are one AWESOME inspiration!!
It is indeedy :) Thanks
Wow! I want to earn that from my blog. I’m spending hours reading blogs and books as I’m new to Seo and blogging. Came across your site today and subscribing. Nice work bro!!
Well everyone wants to earn from their blog, but not many are willing to put the gruelling hours in to get it there =/
Hey Matt, I have a quick question/comment about your email optin numbers. I read over the “How To Increase Your Sites Email Optin Rate By 469% In Less Than 24 Hours” which I found super interesting. Just bought OptinMonster (for $250 CAD!) so I’m hoping for good results too.
Just an observation about your email optin rate. On the ‘subscribers’ graph on this income report page, it shows a big jump in email subscribers in Dec 2014, but it looks to me that in January the rate of increase of email subscribers went back to the rate of increase before the big jump. That would hint to me that the extra optins just converted a lot of lookie-loo’s that continuously read your blog, but had never subscribed, as opposed to increasing the rate of optins long term. I’ll be really interested to see if your subscriber rate increase is sustained. If it did, I would expect the line representing the number of email subscribers to be steeper after the optin changes than before it. Just my 2 cents!
The numbers in the income report aren’t 100% accurate because I just do a very quick top down look rather than going into detail and cleansing the data
Really inspiring stuff Matt! I like your online business model. Give the “how” away for free then turn around and sell the “what”. The “what” being the tools and systems people will need to get the job done. Have a good one!
Really it inspired me a lot …..so I want to start my own blog so plz guide me it is ok if I start my blog with free theme ? will I have to face any problem regarding Google ad sense?
Yes no problem at all
you are my favorite blogger,. I really enjoyed reading your monthly income, I wanna became like this soon.. :-)
I have to work hardy,
Thank you For Inspiring me, Matthew..
Success For you
Thanks – good luck with your journey!
Totally dynamic, Matthew..
Best wishes for the future :)
Thank you Drew much appreciated
I’m impressed :) nice income :) I see few start in your affiliate programs.
Thanks Albert :)
Encouraging stuff and great to see total transparency with the numbers. Interesting to see how so many tools / services combine to make up the total affiliate earnings. There also appears to be a correlation between tutorials and higher affiliate earnings?
Hi Scott,
Good observation that is very true indeed, it creates a much closer relationship and adds more value to the reader when shown how to use something properly.
Hey Matt,
As usual you really deserve more than that.
I am motivated whenever i read your monthly reports.
Thanks for sharing.
John
Thanks :) Well as long as it makes $10k per month I’m happy with that level anything else is a bonus!
Hey Matthew,
That’s awesome results… Correct me if I’m wrong , but those figures are for only this blog? I think from memory you have other sties e.t.c but don’t include them ?
That is correct!
Dear Matthew,
You are recommending JustHost as hosting provider. Recently I experienced very bad service from them.
Account closed without warning, servers are not secure and do not have any antivirus or malware software, Long wait for live chat to solve problem, no reply from support email.
I’ll request to check other hosting and share your experience where servers are secure and atleast we can expect reply from support email and a bit fast live chat.
Regards
Yes they are a great starting host I build all my new sites there while getting them prepared for the spot light.
Shared hosting is shared hosting, you get what you pay for. It doesn’t matter how secure a server is if it’s shared – any single client could upload a plugin/theme that has a vulnerability. Happens all the time with Wordpress the latest one was SliderRevolution
Hi Matthew,
All goes to show the importance of tracking your visitors and actually studying the metrics the tracking produces.
I wonder how many of us sign up with Google and Bing Web Tools and then never visit them. I know the results may be a bit basic, but there’s enough there to at least get started on seeing where your best traffic comes from.
Interesting as well that you show the incomes from each source as well. These certainly engender a huge level of faith and trust in you and your methods, which is great for newbies looking for a mentor.
Keep up the great work.
Regards,
Steven Lucas
Well I hope it helps people see what goes in and what comes out of a business like this.
Hey Matthew,
Great when see you opened the SEO agency. Will you add the revenue of your agency to next income report?
And I think you must check the link of https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/get/seodominatorsclub/
Fixed thanks :)
Mathew!
This is real fruit for the hard work you did to build your audience. That time is close when you will be counted in top class bloggers!
I hope I can achieve your level too ;)
Cheers,
Hamza
Thanks – Good luck with your ventures!
Hi,
Could you please explain what this statistic referes to:
Facebook – 176 (1,294 last month) / Total: 14,903
Is it people following your facebook page?
http://www.facebook.com/MatthewWoodward.co.uk
Thanks,
Steve
It is indeed :)
I love that your blog maintains over 2000 visits per day.
Is this blog on a VPS, dedicated or shared ? I’m wondering if share hosting can handle this level of traffic
Now about Affiliate submit, I have that in my plans. It may not be easy to attend from Cameroon but that doesn’t make it impossible.
I’ll one day grab a seat
Thanks for the details again Matt
Thanks :)
It is hosted on TrafficPlanetHosting you can read more here https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/reviews/wp-engine/
Oh yeah I remember I read this post about your disappointing experience with wpengine.
I’m taking a closer look TrafficPlanetHosting
You can’t go wrong with them :)
First comment again – two post in a row ???
You got it!