Monthly Income, Growth & Traffic Report

This is the 33rd 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 June

Immediately after publishing last months income report, I moved house.

A house that I was told had an active internet connection – unfortunately that wasn’t the case and 1 month on I’m still without broadband internet access playing the waiting game for a line to be installed.

So for the past month and foreseeable future I’m relying purely on mobile data using an old Android phone as a Wifi Router.

It has certainly being a challenging month to say the least!

Content Creation

This month I published a total of 9 posts which is 2 more than last month. However this does mark the start of when I am going to dial that down to around 1 per week to see how that changes things.

We opened June up with how to find keywords which was shortly followed by my how to monetise your blog tutorial.

I then showed you how to publish on LinkedIn Pulse to generate traffic & showed you how to get free content for websites.

Then 42 experts shared their marketing tools and techniques which led nicely into 30 digital marketing certifications.

Other than those posts we just had the regular income report roundup post but I wasn’t able to publish the best of internet marketing roundup this month.

$2,844 SEO Giveaway

At the start of the week I launched a giveaway to win $2,844 worth of SEO tools.

You only have until Monday to enter so don’t miss out!

This is one of the best prizes I have ever offered on the blog. You can learn more about SERPED here.

Tweaking Conversion Rates

I have being trying to improve conversion rates on the blog for a while now.

This month I made a few tweaks to try and help with that-

Content Specific Sidebar Related Posts

I always felt the sidebar wasn’t very optimised, not from a conversion standpoint or a visitor standpoint.

So I decided to make a few changes on the 14th of June to try and improve things a little.

The first thing I did was use the super post widget in combination with the new Thrive clever widgets plugin.

That allowed me to create sidebar widgets that show related posts using the featured image based on tags-

I’m hoping that by serving relevant content via attractive imagery it will improve engagement rates across the blog.

The Thrive clever widgets plugin is super powerful because it allows you to laser target the display of the widget based on whatever criteria you want-

I am going to tweak and improve on this over the next month to see what happens.

What are your thoughts on this specific change?

Content Specific Sidebar Optins

When I went through this process to improve conversion rates I didn’t really target the sidebar much from an email optin perspective.

Last month I told you that I had switched from OptinMonster to ThriveLeads for a number of reasons.

So this month I spent more time setting things up and introduced sidebar specific optins to every blog post via tag targeting-

I’m testing different designs and imagery right now to see which gets the most attention.

But some tests are already showing clear winners-

I am going to carry on tweaking this over the next month to see what happens.

Welcome vs Exit vs 40% Scroll Popup

Finding the right balance with full screen popups is difficult. So the very first test I setup across all of my popups was to work out which is the best trigger.

I decided to test welcome popups vs exit popups vs popups that display at 40% of the post reading.

The data from this has been very conclusive, by far the best performing trigger is the welcome popup-

Across 9 different tests it was always the highest performing method without fail.

But heck it’s annoying right?

So my next mission is to find the trigger that performs as close to the welcome trigger as possible, but without annoying everyone – including me.

I am open to your suggestions :)

Crunching The Numbers

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

Visitor Statistics

This month saw a steady increase from 52,912 (1,706/day) unique visitors to 58,387 (1,946/day).

Just shy of the 2,000 per day mark and my ideal goal of a consistent 60,000 per month.

Most Popular Content

The how to find keywords tutorial stole the show this month.

Although the overlooked traffic generation case study wasn’t far behind.

That left the rest of the top 10 pretty close but it was good to see the PandaBot Google search ranking case study hold its own!

Top Traffic Sources

Traffic sources have changed a fair amount this month.

I spent some money to help promote some posts on Facebook and also picked up a front page mention on GrowthHackers.

Social traffic looks to have remained steady overall.

Search Engine Traffic

Traffic from Google grew gently this month at 40,614 (1,353/day) compared with 38,785 (1,251/day) last month.

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 dropped slightly this month but that is because they are a couple of days behind with the data this month.

I published a new video at the end of June which is missing but with that said views dropped from 20,043 to 19,060.

This also meant that minutes watched took a hit from 110,908 to 103,865 =/

Social Shares

I have temporarily removed this section while I find a better solution to collect the data

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 3,100 new subscribers which is a nice bump up from last months 2,417 as I try to grow things.

There are now a total of 114,736 subscribers across all of the various channels!

E-mail – 1,982 (1,737 last month) / Total: 61,789
Twitter – 363 (292 last month) / Total: 9,093
YouTube – 240 (253 last month) / Total: 8,200
Facebook – 467 (114 last month) / Total: 17,487
Google+ – 32 (26 last month) / Total: 17,801
RSS – 16 (-5 last month) / Total: 366

Unable to post graphs at the moment – will update asap

Income Report

Here are the numbers you really want to see-

Affiliate Earnings

48HoursLogo – $75.00 (case study)
99CentArticles – $34.80
ActiveCampaign – $0.90
Ahrefs – $491.37 (my Ahrefs review)
Aweber – $128.30 (my Aweber review)
Blog Advertising – $827.81 (Advertise)
BlueHost – $200.00 (discount coupon)
BuyProxies – $25.50
BuzzStream – $6.70
Cheap Windows VPS – $8.50
Drip Revolution – $147.63 (discount coupon)
FCS Networker – $181.82
GSA Captcha Breaker – $649.83 (review / discount coupon)
GSA Search Engine Ranker – $511.45 (case study)
Indexification – $3.59 (case study)
Inspyder Backlink Monitor – $25.98
JustHost – $80.00 (start a blog)
Kontent Machine – $529.81 (review)
LeadPages – $276.00
LinkEmperor – $218.33 (review)
LongTailPro – $81.45 (my Long Tail Pro review / discount coupon)
Magic Submitter – $1.79
Marketing Inc – $273.50
Market Samurai – $257.76 (tutorial)
OIO Publisher – $23.50 (case study)
OneHourIndexing – $418.83 (case study)
OptinLinks – $40.27
PandaBot – $326.40 (case study)
PowerupHosting – $25.80
Private Internet Access – $6.00
ProxyHub – $1.66
Rank WYZ – $2.60
Raven Tools – $0.42 (best backlink checker case study)
s2Member – $139.00 (case study / discount coupon)
SEMRush – $200.87 (my SEMRush review)
SEO Content Machine – $17.63
SEO Dominators Club – $346.90
SEO Powersuite – $783.90 (see my SEO Powersuite review)
SERP Book – $9.96
SERPed – $207.88 (review)
Social Locker Pro – $47.70
SociSynd – $32.50
SpinRewriter – $121.43
TheBestSpinner – $126.00 (The Best Spinner review)
ThriveLeads – $388.50
Traffic Planet Hosting (now called WPX Hosting) – $124.96 (Case Study / WPX Hosting review)
Tweet Attacks Pro – $119.68 (discount coupon)
Ultimate Demon – $145.46 (review / discount coupon)
URLProfiler – $21.92 (my URL Profiler review)
VideoMakerFX – $152.60 (how to make money on Fiverr case study)
WordAI – $97.37

Expenses

Traffic Planet Hosting (now called WPX Hosting) – $49.99 (Case Study / WPX Hosting review)
Facebook Ads – $450.00 (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.

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 month saw another drop off from $8,063.94 to $6,518.36 – I am working to recover that this month.

Earnings Total

Affiliate Income – $8,967.56
Consultation Income – $00.00
Other Income – $6,518.36
Expenses – $499.99

Grand Total: $14,985.93 / £9,597.81 ($17,643.67 / £11,621.06 last month)

Here is a complete look of earnings since day 1 of the blog-