Art Of Money

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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

All very encouraging.

Google Ranking for Keyword Phrases

[this is the first month for these]

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

$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

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

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:

1. 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.)
2. 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)
3. 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.
4. 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