This is the 60th 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 September
For me September was all about preparing for the JV launch of my product.
Every minute of every day was dedicated to that sole project and what a wild ride it was.
Content Creation
As I was focused on the product launch during September, I didn’t pay much attention to blog content.
In fact this month was the worst month ever in terms of total content published.
But don’t fret – I already have the next 6 weeks of content scheduled out and locked in to make up for that.
Quuu Promote Experiment Failure
You may have heard of Quuu before – basically you can either sign up to get hand reviewed content suggestions relevant to your niche to share on social media easily.
Or you can sign up to submit your post to be reviewed as a content suggestions which takes seconds to do.
So after submitting 9 posts to the platform, I started to see some very encouraging results-
According to Quuu across my 9 posts I have had a total of-
- 6,808 shares
- 2,572 clicks
Incredible right!?
So knowing that the Quuu platform adds Google Analytics campaign tracking to the links, I jumped into Google Analytics.
I was excited!
But thats the the problem with expectation-
The reality is they sent 1 visit.
With 100% bounce rate.
And zero seconds on site.
So is Quuu just jacking peoples money and faking stats?
I would like to find out.
If you use Quuu promote please fill out this form.
Learning Video The Hard Way
Whilst preparing for the launch I ran into a huge amount of problems.
The main problem was not being properly prepared.
I wanted to re-record all of the launch videos and last time I did it with a GoPro and an iPad.
That worked great when I was filming outside but inside it was a different story and I very quickly learned the importance of lighting.
After many stressful days a friend came through and lent me some equipment-
After learning this lesson the hard way I am going to fly to the states later this month to pickup everything I need to build a full video studio.
Unfortunately I can’t just press a few buttons on Amazon and have it all show up here.
Re-recording the launch videos was very stressful and where I had planned for 3 days of work it ended up being 2 weeks of work.
But with that said, I am going to be producing much more video content in the future across the blog – stay tuned 🙂
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 to 56,457 (1,821/day) but this month it jumped to 72,072 (2,402/day) largely due to increased Facebook spend.
Most Popular Content
I really slacked off on content production this month.
The content piece that stole the show was actually a post I was using to generate leads for the launch, but I have removed that now.
So technically that means the guide to making money with Fiverr stole the top spot again!
Closely followed by my awesome guide to choose the best WordPress theme for you.
Top Traffic Sources
Not much has changed in traffic sources with a good mix of traffic coming from Google organic and social sources.
An interesting note, I saw a huge leap in YouTube traffic the past months AFTER deleting YouTube Cards I had previously setup.
Search Engine Traffic
Last month search increased slightly to 44,121 (1,423/day) which has continued to increase this month to 43,483 (1,449/day).
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 decreased from 13,746 to 12,346 this month.
Total minutes watch also dropped to 53,661!
Social Shares
I am having a problem with Google+ data today, I will come back and update this section.
This month the total social shares across Facebook and Google+ increased from 83,925 to 85,635.
Subscribers
The most important metric on the entire blog – earning a subscription from someone is the ultimate form of commitment and conversion.
There are now a total of 131,550 subscribers across all of the various channels compared to last months 130,333!
- E-mail – 8,207 (790 last month) / Total: 62,955
- Twitter – 320 (190 last month) / Total: 16,884
- YouTube – 184 (96 last month) / Total: 15,051
- Facebook – 3,684 (177 last month) / Total: 30,668
- Google+ – -4 (-10 last month) / Total: 17,823
- RSS – 7 (-26 last month) / Total: 567
Unable to post graphs at the moment – will update asap
Income Report
Here are the numbers you really want to see-
Affiliate Earnings
Expenses
Consultation Earnings
I separate out the consultation earnings from the affiliate earnings. The blog drives affiliate sales directly and whilst it does generate 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 $12,929.53 which decreased a little to $12,177.37 this month.
Earnings Total
- Affiliate Income – $14,614.57
- Consultation Income – $00.00
- Other Income – $12,177.37
- Expenses – $2,752.06
Grand Total: $24,039.88 / £18,183.77 ($23,409.06 / £18,069.45 last month)
Unable to post graphs at the moment – will update asap
Signing Off
While September was all about preparing and promoting my product launch, October is about sales.
The first couple of weeks will be focused on driving sales and also supporting new students as this is the “hand holding” period.
The final two weeks I intend to take a bit of time for myself and start building out a framework to begin growing a team to drive the blog.
Thank you again to everyone that has supported the blog over the years – you guys are amazing!