$100 a Day Blogging – My Stats for May
It’s been one month since I launched the $100 a day project. The goal is simple: earn $100 a day from this site.
Here’s a 30 day update of all the vital stats, with a little summary below:
Traffic Stats
|
April 2007 |
May 2007 |
Trend |
|
| Monthly unique visitors |
6000 |
7,458 |
Up |
| Daily unique visitors |
200 |
241 |
Up |
| Daily page views |
308 |
409 |
Up |
| Feed subscribers |
400 |
500 |
Up |
All very encouraging.
Google Ranking for Keyword Phrases
[this is the first month for these]
|
May 31 |
|
|
glyphius |
9 |
|
information products |
n/a |
|
Internet business |
n/a |
|
Internet marketing |
n/a |
|
keyword elite |
4 |
|
make money blog |
12 |
|
make money blogging |
32 |
|
make money online |
41 |
|
make money online system |
9 |
|
making money online |
41 |
|
More Search Engine Traffic |
n/a |
|
theme zoom |
25 |
|
ways to make money online |
n/a |
The above results are also quite encouraging. I’ve marked in green bold the keyphrases that are a direct result of this month’s posts and SEO efforts.
Earnings Sources
|
April 2007 |
May 2007 |
Trend |
|
| AdSense |
$0 |
14.75 |
Up |
| Affiliate Sales |
$90.18 |
249.45 |
Up |
| Text Link Sales |
$411.38 |
175.00 |
Down |
| Other |
$30 |
30.00 |
- |
$14 in AdSense is actually not that bad considering that I had only the worst performing ad format in probably the worst position on the page possible. The affiliate sales were encouraging, especially if you consider that about $50 of them were for the building profitable websites course, which is a monthly (recurring) commission.
Besides that the huge drop in text links in actually misleading. In April I had a couple advertisers pre-pay for a year’s worth of links, so in retrospect I probably should have amortized the income, in reality the text link sales were about the same for both months. The “other” represents direct sales from this blog of my Real Blog Videos product.
Earnings Stats
|
April 2007 |
May 2007 |
Trend |
|
| Monthly gross earnings |
$485 |
$469 |
Down |
| Monthly expenses |
$30 |
$76 |
Up |
| Monthly profit |
$455 |
393.20 |
Down |
| Daily profit |
$15 |
13.10 |
Down |
Mmmm…all four of the most important indicators going in the wrong direction, maybe I shouldn’t have done this in public
Really the only difference was very minor and mostly a result of the 4 domain names that I purchased to use as affiliate links which increased expenses slightly. Factor in the anomaly in text link sales mentioned above and we’re going in the right direction.
Key Metrics
|
April 2007 |
May 2007 |
Trend |
|
| Number of visitors |
6000 |
7450 |
Up |
| Profit per visitor |
$.076 |
.05 |
Down |
| Goal completed |
15% |
13% |
Down |
Summary & Notes
Overall I’d have to say that I’m very pleased with the first month of my project. Most of the indicators are going in the right direction, and the ones that are not, I feel it is mostly because I didn’t focus on them at this point.
The traffic and feed subscriber stats are the most positive aspects so far.
Traffic increases were from:
- Focused content (it was always a problem for me that I was all over the place with my content. Now that I’ve stuck to my make money online theme for a week, visitors and subscribers know what to expect…which helps to build an audience.)
- Consciously writing the occasional bookmark-able post (the number one post for traffic for the month was, surprisingly, my recap post from the Problogger top 5 project, which became popular on Stumbleupon.com)
- Problogger’s group writing project was also great timing, since I was writing blogging tips it fit in perfectly with his crowd and the post I submitted broke a record for my site with 44 comments.
- Being consistent. I posted every weekday and all but one the posts went live at ~7:30 am Eastern time…just in time for the first cube-dwellers to be hitting the office, which is where the bulk of Internet consumption happens. Seriously!
Keyword Rankings from above – I used this keyword rank tracking tool to track them. I ranked highly for ‘keyword elite’ and ‘glyphius’ (two products that I reviewed) before this project, but the other ranking are very cool’. Overall good progress on my assault of Google for ‘make money online’ related searches.
Going Forward
In June, my focus will be to increase the profit per visitor number by optimizing the ads, and creating alternate methods of monetization which will hopefully not detract from the visitor experience. My secondary goal will be to create some pillar content (you grabbed the blog profit blueprint and read about what a pillar article is, right?).
Anything else you wanted to know for the month? How were the posts, especially if you’re a long time reader, did you like it that I actually stayed on topic for a whole month?
Thanks a lot for your purchases using my links, for your comments and just for reading, I really appreciate it.
Jon
Browse Timeline
Comments ( 5 )
tanya added these pithy words on Jun 01 07 at 6:39 amHey, thanks for sharing your stats and your project with us so openly. It makes for very interesting reading. If it’s possible, you should also check how many times your site has been bookmarked. Everyone is focusing so much on RSS, that they are forgeting about bookmarks which I still think is very viable. I use my bookmarks to save sites that have great content (like yours) that I can go back and reference. (I also use Delicious, but more for linking to a site on a page that is useful).
Rich Minx added these pithy words on Jun 01 07 at 7:04 amInteresting. Congrats on the traffic increase. Personally, I like the focus of the $100 theme and the gold ‘$100 a Day Blogging’ graphic caught my attention when I first visited you.
One question: what affiliate sales have you found most profitable?
Jon added these pithy words on Jun 01 07 at 8:14 am@tanya – there must be a way to track the number of times that someone bookmarks your site (without going to the SB sites and doing a search) but I don’t know of any…do you have a tool for it? You are right of course, that it is a significant event when someone makes the effort to save an article you have published.
@Rich Minx – it probably isn’t the answer you are looking for but…
“what affiliate sales have you found most profitable?”
The ones for the products you actually use and like, is my favorite answer for that.
For specifics, like I mentioned above, I rank highly for my Keyword Elite review, and that pays $97 per sale, and I can usually sell one a month, which is a very juicy amount.
Besides that the real money in affiliate marketing is currently to be found in CPA ads.
JMor added these pithy words on Jun 03 07 at 3:43 pmVery Nice. It has been very interesting how the $100 a day has evolved, and specially the steps and tools used, even some of your indicators initially dropped , I will surely follow your project’s evolution.
Michael added these pithy words on Jun 15 07 at 8:33 pmIt is always a love / hate thing when you post testing results. When you are successful people will steal your ideas and when you fail people think you are a failure. Well not really, but you know what I mean.
Michael