Monthly Income, Growth & Traffic Report – March 2017

This is the 54th 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 March

March has been a successful month on a nubmer of fronts.

But looking back it doesn’t feel like I achieved all that much as most of my effort went into moving everything over to Drip.

With that said the blog is now running on the perfect foundation for future growth – it’s just up to me to leverage that now.

The $6,444 SEO Giveaway

Last week I launched a giveaway to win 1 of 3 SERPed Ultimate Accounts wroth $2,148 each.

The giveaway closes in less than 24 hours – so claim your entry now!

I’ll be completing the draw and handing out the prizes later this week.

For those of you that haven’t heard of SERPed, I highly suggest you watch this short video-

Impressed? You should be!

So claim your entry now!

Drip Migration Completed

After a month of preparation I finally completed they migration to Drip.

During the process I was able to streamline a lot of things and bring things under one roof. For example I was previously using forms from Aweber, Leadpages and Thrive Leads.

Now everything is delivered by Thrive Leads which makes management and split testing of all the forms across the blog a lot easier.

You should check out my previous income reports to see exactly why Drip is so awesome.

I officially made the switch 2 weeks ago across 2 days.

Day 1 was to migrate all forms and entry points to my email list to Drip, while day 2 was focused on migrating all existing subscribers from Aweber.

Everything went smoothly and I’ve already sent a number of broadcasts and drip feed campaigns, some of you may have noticed the slight change in email formatting.

New Experimental Email Campaigns

One of the things I love about Drip was the website tracking feature.

It’s possible to track exactly which pages people visit on your site and then use that data to trigger email campaigns.

So for I have setup 2 experimental campaigns to see how it performs-

Campaign #1 – SEMRush Trial

The first experimental campaign I setup with Drip was to drive more people towards the exclusive 14 day SEM-Rush trial I have setup.

This is how it works-

1. Visitors reads the SEM-Rush review
2. 3 hours later they receive an email promoting the 14 day free trial
3. If they don’t open that email, 3 days later another email is sent

This is what it looks like in Drip-

So far only a handful of people have triggered the campaigns email so I will be watching closely over the coming weeks.

Campaign #2 – Hosting Affiliate Sale

This campaign works on the same premise by triggering emails to people that read my guide to get started with blogging.

Except this time instead of promoting a free trial, it’s promoting the affiliate sale directly.

So once people read the guide, 3 hours later they get this email-

And then if they don’t open it, it’s gets resent automatically a few days later with a different subject line.

These 2 campaigns are really just scratching the surface of what can be done with Drip.

I’ll be overhauling my entire email marketing strategy in the near future to accommodate the new abilities that Drip brings to the table.

Automatic Broadcast Resends

One of the other little features that I love with Drip is the automatic resending of broadcasts to people that don’t open them.

When you send a broadcast Drip gives you this neat little option-

I have already used this on 2 broadcasts and it works really well.

Take a look at the stats from this re-send which saw an extra 7.3% people open the email and an extra 893 clicks-

And all of that happens automatically!

Deleted 42,918 Subscribers

During the migration process I also took time to clean my email lists up.

I was pretty ruthless with the cut and deleted anyone that hadn’t opened an email from me in the past 6 months.

That took my total email subscriber count from 87,989 people to 45,071.

Now deleting that many people was kind of scary, because it’s taken me a long time to build that number – but in the end it is quality that counts more than anything else!

So all in all, I highly recommend Drip – it really is the future of email marketing!

Content Creation

With my focus on migrating to Drip contention was limited to 4 posts this month including last months income report.

We started out with 22 TED talks for digital marketers which in my opinion is a great post,m but the stats are telling me otherwise.

That was followed with the SERPed giveaway, updated review and video tutorial.

Last but not least I updated this sneaky post to help you increase traffic and links from people that copy and paste your content.

Crunching The Numbers

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

Visitor Statistics

Last month traffic dropped off to 58,943 but has increased this month to 60,453 (1,950/day).

That keeps it just above my 60,000 per month goal but I would like to see that grow to 65,000 per month in the near future.

Most Popular Content

By far the most popular post this month was the updated SERPed review and giveaway.

That was closely followed by the Web 2.0 PBN tutorial along with this how to make money on Fiverr guide.

Top Traffic Sources

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 traffic dropped to 48,836 (1,744/day) which has dropped off slightly more to 45,175 (1,457/day) this month.

Google are making lots of updates at the moment so I’m waiting for the dust to settle before taking a closer look at things.

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 increased from 16,614 to 19,146 this month.

That also had an impact on total minutes watched which increase from 75,755 to 93,165 respectively.

Social Shares

This month the total social shares across Facebook and Google+ increased from 75,816 to 77,484.

• Google+ – 26,862 (26,660 last month)
• Facebook – 50,622 (49,156 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 I deleted 42,918 people from my email list so the overall subscriber count is going to take a huge hit this month.

There are now a total of 116,158 subscribers across all of the various channels compared to last months 157,879!

• E-mail – -42,918 (995 last month) / Total: 45,071
• Twitter – 418 (167 last month) / Total: 15,486
• YouTube – 438 (136 last month) / Total: 13,842
• Facebook – 299 (113 last month) / Total: 23,172
• Google+ – -20 (-4 last month) / Total: 17,883
• RSS – 62 (17 last month) / Total: 704

Unable to post graphs at the moment – will update asap

Income Report

Here are the numbers you really want to see-

Affiliate Earnings

• A2Hosting – $5.00 (my A2 Hosting review)
• ActiveCampaign – $1.70
• Ahrefs – $533.50 (my Ahrefs review)
• Aweber – $115.71 (my Aweber review)
• Blog Advertising – $768.49 (Advertise)
• Blue Chip Backlinks – $100.00
• Bluehost – $130.00 (discount coupon)
• BrightSpark – $15.60
• BuyProxies – $83.70
• BuzzBundle – $73.59
• CashCrate – $14.25
• CheapWindowsVPS – $9.50
• CMS Commander – $9.61
• ConvertKit – $34.80
• Domain Hunter Gatherer – $468.10 (expired domains tutorial & Domain Hunter Gatherer review)
• Drip – $3.30
• Drip Revolution – $266.16 (discount coupon)
• FCS Networker – $227.48
• FreshDrop – $17.96
• GetResponse – $16.17 (review)
• GSA Captcha Breaker – $521.07 (review / discount coupon)
• GSA Search Engine Ranker – $579.49 (review / discount coupon)
• GSA SEO Indexer – $31.65 (case study)
• IPVanish – $165.51 (my IPVanish review)
• JustHost – $400.00 (start a blog)
• Keyword Researcher – $21.39
• Kontent Machine – $64.75 (review)
• LeadPages – $214.50
• LinkEmperor – $156.14
• LongTailPro – $1,055.34 (my Long Tail Pro review / discount coupon)
• MarketSamurai – $46.56
• MintVine – $13.04
• MTTB – $44.10
• MyThemeShop – $161.70
• OIOPublisher – $23.50
• OneHourIndexing – $561.39 (case study)
• PandaBot – $160.50 (case study)
• PowerupHosting – $6.30
• PrivateInternetAccess – $28.00
• PrizeRebel – $2.46
• Product Launch Formula – $640.00
• ProxyHub – $1.66
• Rank Tracker – $41.17
• Raven Tools – $49.87 (best backlink checker case study)
• RescueTime – $0.68
• SEMRush – $1,472.02 (my SEMRush review)
• SENuke – $44.10 (tutorial)
• SEO Clerks – $0.30
• SEO Content Machine – $72.38
• SEO Powersuite – $295.35 (see my SEO Powersuite review)
• SERocket – $325.80 (tutorial)
• SERP Book – $7.00
• SERPed – $1,328.86 (review)
• SwagBucks – $1.38
• TheBestSpinner – $186.50 (The Best Spinner review)
• ThirstyAffiliates – $12.68 (discount coupon)
• Thrive Themes – $54.87
• TrafficPlanetHosting – $280.00
• TweetAttacksPro – $114.35 (discount coupon)
• Ultimate Demon – $122.75 (review / discount coupon)
• URLProfiler – $347.34 (my URL Profiler review)
• VideoMakerFX – $84.00 (how to make money on Fiverr case study)
• WordAI – $119.35

Expenses

• Kinsta Hosting – $100.00 (See my Kinsta review)
• Aweber – $119.45 (my Aweber review)
• Drip – $295.50
• Facebook Advertising – $1,754.49 (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 was $11,302.90 which increased to $11,507.85 this month.

Earnings Total

• Affiliate Income – $12,754.424
• Consultation Income – $00.00
• Other Income – $11,507.85
• Expenses – $2,269.44

Grand Total: $21,992.83 / £17,629.45 ($21,191.52 / £17,249.90 last month)

Unable to post graphs at the moment – will update asap

Signing Off

Overall it has been a great month to close out the quarter.

Now that the Drip migration has taken place, I can focus on the next big project which is to publish the 4th update to my SEO course.

I’m also going to be preparing to re-launch it in the next couple of months so get on the waiting list now.

I have also prepared a lot of new content for the month so watch this space as some of the new posts are going to blow your mind!

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