This is the 45th 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
This month was officially my birthday month and I finally hit the big 30!
Unfortunately, old age is already taking its toll and I’m feeling a bit rough around the edges and dragging my feet today to write this report.
So let’s get down to business!
Content Creation
I published a total of 4 posts this month which is 1 less than last month.
We started the month with a tutorial that shows you how to get Twitter followers easily step by step.
Then you learned how to build an email list that will make you recurring revenue every month without fail.
Other than those we just had the regular income report roundup feature and I didn’t have time to write the very best of internet marketing post this month.
Crunching The Numbers
So let’s get our hands dirty and take a look at what my lack of attention to the blog has done to the important metrics.
Visitor Statistics
Traffic dropped this month from 49,921 (1,610/day) to 45,440 (1,515/day) which is another big hit after last months drop.
This takes me even further away from my traffic goal and is something I need to pay close attention to this month to recover.
Most Popular Content
Yet again the most popular post on the blog is an old tutorial about how to make money on Fiverr.
This was followed by my tutorial that shows you how to start a successful blog and it was nice to see the 6 figure membership site make an appearance again.
Top Traffic Sources
Not much has changed in the top traffic sources this month which are still dominated by organic search and social.
Search Engine Traffic
Search engine traffic dropped from 38,355 (1,237/day) last month to 36,575 (1,219/day) this 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 showed a drop this month from 22,795 views to just 20,469 views this month.
However the total minutes watched took a huge drop from 100,353 to 83,915 this month which is the lowest it has been in a year!
Social Shares
This month the total social shares across Facebook and Google+ increased from 52,565 to 53,164.
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 1,704 new subscribers which is slight decrease on last months 2,073 new subscribers.
There are now a total of 139,872 subscribers across all of the various channels!
- E-mail – 1,106 (1,204 last month) / Total: 76,898
- Twitter – 274 (340 last month) / Total: 12,527
- YouTube – 188 (275 last month) / Total: 11,433
- Facebook – 96 (236 last month) / Total: 20,623
- Google+ – 16 (4 last month) / Total: 17,873
- RSS – 24 (14 last month) / Total: 518
Unable to post graphs at the moment – will update asap
Income Report
Here are the numbers you really want to see-
Affiliate Earnings
- 99CentArticles – $201.03
- ActiveCampaign – $1.80
- Ahrefs – $357.13 (my Ahrefs review)
- Aweber – $150.30 (tutorial)
- Blog Advertising – $995.47 (Advertise)
- Blue Chip Backlinks – $100.00
- BuyProxies – $53.40
- CMS Commander – $4.80
- Drip Revolution – $165.31 (discount coupon)
- FCS Networker – $218.68 (discount coupon)
- FreshDrop – $27.33
- GetResponse – $4.40 (review)
- GSA Captcha Breaker – $378.55 (review / discount coupon)
- GSA Search Engine Ranker – $24.65 (review / discount coupon)
- HQ Biz In A Box – $13.80
- JustHost – $320.00 (start a blog / discount coupon)
- Kontent Machine – $532.50 (review)
- LeadPages – $106.80
- LinkEmperor – $181.15 (review)
- LongTailPro – $591.15 (my Long Tail Pro review / discount coupon)
- Magic Submitter – $1.79
- MyThemeShop – $165.90 (review)
- OIOPublisher – $23.50 (case study / discount coupon)
- OneHourIndexing – $474.86 (case study)
- PandaBot – $60.30 (case study)
- PowerupHosting – $97.00 (discount coupon)
- PrivateInternetAccess – $28.00
- ProxyHub – $3.90 (discount coupon)
- Raven Tools – $0.15 (best backlink checker case study)
- S2Member – $44.50 (my SEMRush review)
- SEMRush – $115.94
- SEO Content Machine – $81.76 (discount coupon)
- SEO Dominators Club – $29.98 (discount coupon)
- SEO Powersuite – $566.33 (see my SEO Powersuite review)
- SERocket – $334.80 (tutorial / discount coupon)
- SERP Book – $18.72
- SERPed – $1,537.36 (review)
- Social SEO Booster – $267.72
- Spin Rewriter – $38.50
- TheBestSpinner – $178.00 (The Best Spinner review / discount coupon)
- ThirstyAffiliates – $73.78 (discount coupon)
- ThriveThemes – $147.00
- Traffic Planet Hosting (now called WPX Hosting) – $740.00 (Case Study / WPX Hosting review)
- Ultimate Demon – $121.96 (review / discount coupon)
- URLProfiler – $171.15 (discount coupon)
- VideoMakerFX – $270.00 (how to make money on Fiverr case study)
- View2Be – $16.50
- WordAI – $117.35
Expenses
- Traffic Planet Hosting (now called WPX Hosting) – $49.99 (Case Study / WPX Hosting review)
- Facebook Advertising – $53.32 (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 resulted in a juicy zero dollars!
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 that income has shown a slight decrease from $10,737.82 last month to $9,305.69 this month which is mainly affected by the exchange rate for the British pound right now.
Earnings Total
- Affiliate Income – $10,155.00
- Consultation Income – $00.00
- Other Income – $9,305.69
- Expenses – $103.31
Grand Total: $19,357.38 / £14,577.60 ($20,661.90 / £14,284.95 last month)
Unable to post graphs at the moment – will update asap
Signing Off
As I arrive into my dirty thirties it is evident that a number of the blogs key metrics are showing signs of decay.
At the moment it is nothing to be worried about, but it certainly needs my attention in some areas to ensure that trend doesn’t continue into the second half of the year.
That is going to start with a complete audit of the blog, from traffic sources through to content, email funnels and more!
All of that work is going to commence on the 14th of July, so expect lots of noise in next months income report!
Thank you to everyone that has helped me reach my goals – I couldn’t do it without you, the reader!
99 Responses
I saw your income report bro!
It’s awesome and I learn too much within last few minutes by reading this article. So, thanks for sharing such a great article with us.
No problem Roshan!
Wow! Matthew! Great! Keep it up!
Thanks Mark!
Love you Matthew for being a Honest guy and sharing complete income details. On thing I understood that content must be long enough to engage the user and quality, rest follow links :)
That is true, just focus on helping people :)
Thanks for sharing your hard work income
No problem Shivang :)
Great! Thank you for sharing.
No, thank you for reading :)
Enjoying following your site, Matthew. Being a bit adverse to link building myself and having recently started another new site which I plan to do no backlinking on, I follow your zero backlinking progress with great interest!
Kudos to you for sticking with this. I’ve come across so many case studies that fizzled out because people just stopped sharing updates, or gave up on their sites altogether.
It’s the small percentage like you who have the persistence needed to make it all work and provide great inspiration to others.
Thanks for your kind words Rebecca, I wish the best for your new site!
Awesome earnings Matthew it really motivates us to keep blogging and make passive income online.
Thanks Rohit – keep up the good fight!
Wow, after wathing your videos I’m very interested to see what I might learn.
I’m sitting on a “alternative/spiritual news” blog that gets 60k+ unique visitors/month on a slow month.
I own a corresponding Facebook Page with +26,000 “LIKES” growing at around 1200 “LIKES” per month.
I haven’t been able to successfully monetize the blog and I hope to learn how here.
Well the hardest part is getting the traffic, which you’ve done – now you just need this https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/make-money/monetizing/
You are the best Matthew
Thanks Chevy :)
Wow , nice man. I am now at $1600 per month, need to grow it
Awesome, great job Mahesh!
Good stuff… it’s been fun watching the progression over the years. Just noticed your endorsement/deal over at MyThemeShop for Authority. Is that a new thing? Maybe I missed it… anyways, kudos.
Look forward to what comes next — and hope Brezit doesn’t kick your earnings too hard!
Best, Chris.
Yes they rebuilt my theme for me and made it awesome =D
Sir You Are The Best . these things are inspiring lot of people.
hats off u ;) gud luck
No problem Kaleem!
Well, when you deliver good content to your readers, you get to see the results like yours. Congrats and hope you keep doing well :)
Thanks Tim!
mathew! you are awesome. i was surprised about your income report.
super. congrats to this great success
Thank you for your kind words :)
Well reports like these are inspiring. Glad to see you grow. And whatever marginal traffic loss that’s present, I think will be overcome this month.
Thanks Saksham!
You motivated me to work smartly ..
Thanks for inspiriting me.
That is great to hear Vikas, happy success :)
Good job Matt!
Thanks :)
Thanks Matt
No problem!
I don’t know how your not making 5x that with that level of traffic bro. I shouldn’t talk though I am not you! :)
I could list a bunch of reasons why :)
Epic.
I’m curious to see what you are doing on the 14th though. Congrats on a huge month. Love this blog.
I’m going to pull my finger out and get some work done!
This was very helpful. I will have to diversify my revenue strategy.
I’m running only Adsense on my site. seeing this report, I will also jump into Affiliate marketing.
I thought your site have hundreds of thousands of visit. seeing you achieve such amount of money makes me realize that I don’t need to 100k + visit to earn something meaningful.
I think Adsense is a very useless way of monetizing a site… what do you think.?
what exactly did you advertise on facebook?
I was thinking if I can register for some affiliate program and advertise on other sites. what do you think bout that?
thanks
Well perhaps this could help you further https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/make-money/monetizing/
I hate using AdSense myself so I have to agree with you :)
Matt you are doing great results and looking at your results so far, I won’t say I “hope” or “wish” because I know you’ve put in efforts to get to where you are today.
Human beings has the mentality of… when one sees a successful person, everybody wants to be like him.
One thing I want to tell you is this: I Believe In myself and with that believe in myself and determination, I will do this and better than these results.
Emmanuel
Then I can honestly tell you, that you have already beaten the hardest part of the battle to success which is the mindset :)
Thank you. Very encouraging!
Nice income and your expenses really are minimal. Perhaps more outsourcing and injecting some more funds back into your business may help increase traffic and income overall? You are clearly a busy guy and sometimes you need the humility to say you need some help!
Ian, you are 100% correct and I have considered bringing a small team on board to drive the blog forward but at the same time this is my own personal endeavor and in a sense I want it to stay like that. While it would be nice to gain more traffic and income, I don’t really need it and I am happy with current levels :)
Well of course you don’t need it, you are making a significant income monthly already! Also understand it being your personal project, people have followed your for your personality, not some ghost writers. I do feel that your site and brand has untapped potential though. Nevertheless, it’s your ‘baby’ so best of luck with it.
Hey Ian,
You are 100% right – there is a lot of untapped potential, probably more than I can comprehend!
Great report and website,
May I ask why you share all your strategies, analytics, data, reports, you are sharing every thing except your list :) .
why did you share it if you afraid from the competition ?
I do share my list?
I think he means your actual subscriber list – as in the emails – which I should hope you are NOT sharing!
Ohhh I thought he meant the number but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the actual list haha
I read your income report the last few months and I wondered if this month you’d start to see some decay in your stats. Content for this site has kind of reached a plateau (as you pointed out – you posted less posts in June than July).
The internet and all of it’s wonderful algorithms are constantly evolving to reward fresh, relevant content. I mean… you haven’t updated your YouTube account in 2 months!
It’s something I’ve been dealing with – content management – I’ve had lots of content *in production* but I haven’t been posting it. Engagement is down, stats are down. Luckily, those wonderful algorithms I’ve found are quick to forgive and if you start to bang out lots of great, relevant content that has high engagement.
Sorry, not June vs. July, I meant June vs. May :)
Well, I made the conscious decision last year to reduce the number of posts from around 8-10 per month to 3-5 and it didn’t really make much impact on growth.
However at this point there is a plateau on the content front because I have been busy working on other core things behind the scenes that need to be in place to move forward. For example I’ve spent the last couple of months doing actual keyword research and on page SEO for the blog for every historical post. I’ve also been hiring designers to rebuild featured images and split testing a new post layout that I may deploy to every post historically.
Also I’ve been putting lots of little things into play that help reduce my work load/time investment, eg the new contact form https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/contact-me/ that gives me all the info I need at my finger tips depending on the request.
There are other things I am not happy with that I want to improve upon before driving forward with the content as well. For example I want to segment my list better and make it so that current subscribers don’t see any optin boxes ever again on the blog to improve user experience etc etc
Once all of that is in play, then the content and subsequently traffic can flow again. In the mean time I am focused on improving the overall user experience, structure and processes.
I absolutely understand. Same for me – I’ve been doing housekeeping which has kept me from being able to bang out fresh content. Once you’re done with that and prioritize creating content, I’d bet that your stats will shoot up again. I’m finally back into a position to be able to do it and its a relief to see my stats go back up again, haha.
Yes I really want to get back to making videos again regularly, I really enjoy the entire process end to end and YouTube historically provided the highest quality traffic by far!
When you have some links for your new content, please shoot them over!
Don’t worry, summer is a slow time and this year we have the soccer chamionchip in Europe -my traffic is down on all days when good/important games are on (especially when ther german team is playing).
There was also the copa america tournament at the same time here!
Great insights. But rather than participating in solo affiliate programs, I prefer to join affiliate network who themselves hosts lots of other affiliate programs.I believe they are easy to promote.
I don’t really care if its network based or self hosted, if it’s relevant to what I’m doing – I will sign up anywhere.
That are very big number congratulations sire. You have lot of good post.
Thanks Alec!
Great post! I’m just about to start publish my own income reports. Any tips for them? I don’t want to ramble too much on them as yours seem quite to-the-point and don’t take a lot of time to consume.
Peace.
Well, this one was quite to the point but I also like to share what changes I have made, why I made them and what impact it had as well as a few general bits from life!
Happy Birthday Matthew,
and great report as always.
I wish you a successful and productive audit of the blog. ;)
Thank you Manu – the audit might take a bit longer now than before in my old age :P
Try writing a blog post of your own – that might help.
How will it help? You realise you said that on a post I wrote right?
Wow! That’s great to know about your income! I hope I will achieve such income soon!
No such thing as hope Deepak, just hard work and determination :)
Hi Mathew, I just want to still pandabot is working can I give a try to that.
thanks
Yes you can use it :)
Hi Mathew.
Just wondering you say you have ever an expense of $103, but that’s just you marketing and hosting expenses. Wouldn’t your autoresponder count as an expense?
I would love to know what it costs you to maintain your email list.
Cheers
Pierre
Hey Pierre,
Yes that is because one of my other business absorbs that cost and its never here or there to host the mailing list for this blog under the same account.
However I am going to migrate away from Aweber to a dedicated Infusionsoft account in the near future and then I will start adding that as a running expense.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that my Aweber account is like super old (like 12 years old) and is on a legacy plan that is around 10-15% of the prices they charge now HOWEVER for a long time I had a very old interface with very limited features while new accounts had all the new fancy stuff and they kept pushing and pushing me to upgrade to the new plans which would of cost me an extra 4 figures per month so I held out for 3-4 years and eventually they upgraded me free because I guess it was too much hassle to maintain the old platform – mwahaha :P
Thangs for you,,
=D
Awesome Man, i Hope i can achieve 1% of what you guys have already achieved. Great inspiration
Don’t rely on hope. Rely on your own hard work and determination to succeed.
That’s so cool brother hope I will learn from you to get the success.
Thanks Muneeb :)
Great work, keep it up.
As far as other income is concerned, it could be :
The Paid Posts or Reviews.
The SEO courses you are/were selling
There is also a free seo tool you are offering, maybe thats the part of other income.
Apart from that, there was also a website which provide different deals related to internet marketing software or products.
Is im guessing right? :D
Paid posts go into the ‘blog advertising’ category
I never revealed my income from the course or reported on it, but I will write a mega case study one day :)
How do you propose I make money from a free tool :P
Hey Matt,
First off, welcome to your 30’s.
Secondly, I’ve been a huge fan of your blog for years now. In your post ’12 months to a top 100′, you cite that your blog was motivated by the fact that others like John Chow and Problogger were each losing their quality.
I’m a bit worried that’s starting to happen here. Some of your guest posts in the last few months have been pretty click-baity with little substance.
I know this is just my opinion, but it really does seem like most of the content lately has had misleading headlines, and lacks the deep saturation style that you used to build this blog.
So while you deserve time off, maybe keep this in mind when you come back and begin to overhaul things.
Haha thanks!
I value your feedback and its an opinion I share to a degree, I have had my focus elsewhere (see my reply to Sarah for more details) that will improve a lot of things before I turn my attention back to content production.
I really miss making videos and I will get back to that once I have laid the foundations I plan to lay :)
Hey there.
I read each of your income reports. In fact, I have downloaded the whole zip folder of your past income reports and read it in my free time.
I dream to start an online venture, but my mind gets bobbled because of too many options.
Just can’t decide between affiliate niche site, viral sites or keep going with content writing (this is what I am currently doing – writing product reviews, articles & long long case studies for others) and start content writing agency of my own.
Do you enjoy writing?
Amazing, Matthew!
You’re my hero!
I mentioned you and your blog in one of my videos. I know that I am not a native speaker of English, and my English sucks a bit, but here it is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtQCBEoCUsU
I trully believe that “what other successful people have done, I WILL do as well”. So I am happy to be your subscriber, and to learn from your experience!
Thanx a lot!
Thanks for the mention Alex, very kind of you!
I have shared the video on my buffer for you.
Your English is very good and clear to understand, you pronounce all of the words perfeclty – try and add a bit of flow/excitement into your voice if you wanted to make it better!
Thanx, Matthew!
Hi Matthew, Happy Birthday. Congrats as you hit 30s & hope this year be filled with lots of amazing surprises and happiness in your life. Your Income is still very nice even with little traffic drops.
Thanks Sandesh =D
Happy belated birthday!
Once you hit your thirties, signs of decay become part of normal life. ;) Just kidding (I’m 44, trust me, 30 is very very young!)
Haha thanks Anne =D
Very encouraging. I’ll follow silently and hope one day I’ll be able to do 0.001 of what you’ve achieved. Keep it up man
Hey Martin,
There is no such thing as hope, just hard work and sheer determination to succeed :)
Lol. I’ll rephrase that. “I’ll work hard for just a fraction of what you’ve achieved”, Thanks for encouragement