This is the 61st 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 October
The first week of October was all about open cart week for my product.
But:
It really didn’t go smoothly – in fact, if it could have gone wrong – it did go wrong.
When Natural Disaster Strikes
Over the past few months I have being preparing for the JV launch of my product.
Everything was going great – that was until I opened the cart for sales on Monday and was struck by Hurricane Nate shortly after-
That left me with without mobile service, internet, electric and water nearly immediately after opening the cart for the launch.
So for the first 4 days of my 5 days of sales, I had absolutely no internet access what so ever.
Luckily I had already scheduled all of the launch emails BUT I was unable to respond to comments/questions and more importantly react to problems.
Problems like PayPal automatically reversing all payments to the tune of $40,000.
On the last day I managed to get back online and spent the entire weekend fixing problems, responding to people and trying my best to recover lost sales.
Honestly there was nothing more I could have done to prepare for the situation – with no electric, internet or mobile service I was at the mercy of the hurricane.
Moved To HTTPS
If you didn’t know already, Google made a significant change to Chrome this month that means if your site is NOT running HTTPS – it will be flagged as ‘not secure’ during form fills.
This is a huge trust problem and if you haven’t made the switch to HTTPS yet I highly recommend that you do it as soon as possible.
ESPECIALLY if you have any kind of form on your site like email sign up forms, contact forms, comment forms and more.
Take a look at an example of the ugly warnings below-
So what are you waiting for? Get it done NOW!
How To Migrate To HTTPS
Luckily for me activating HTTPS on the blog was as easy as a click of a button with Kinsta and came at no additional cost.
But not everyone is in the same boat as me.
Given the usual complexitys of moving to HTTPS and the risks of getting wrong, I highly recommend you get a professional to do it.
It should cost you around $50-$100 and the benefits of moving to HTTPS are far to strong to ignore now.
Content Creation
This month I published and updated 4 posts including the income report.
We started off with my incredible internal link building strategy which also shows you just how powerful internal links are when used correctly.
Then I updated my post about making quick money with surveys with some new insights and also results of my own earnings.
Last but not least I shared 21x IFTTT recipes for SEO, bloggers & digital marketers!
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 jumped to 72,072 (2,402/day) due to a huge increase in Facebook spend but this month it settled down to 65,852 (2,124/day).
That is still above my minimum target of 60,000 per month although it would be nice to hit 70,000 per month consistently!
Most Popular Content
There was one piece of content that stood head and shoulders above the rest this month.
And that was my internal linking guide which absolutely dominated the top 10 content this month.
Far far far behind it in second place was my making money on Fiverr tutorial shortly followed by my expired domains guide.
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 43,483 (1,449/day) which has continued to increase this month to 46,972 (1,515/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 increased every so slightly from 12,346 to 12,440 this month.
Total minutes watch also increased to 55,994!
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 85,635 to 89,866.
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 – 633 (8,207 last month) / Total: 63,588
- Twitter – 129 (320 last month) / Total: 17,013
- YouTube – 89 (184 last month) / Total: 15,140
- Facebook – 3,684 (3,684 last month) / Total: 31,231
- Google+ – -46 (-4 last month) / Total: 17,777
- RSS – 7 (7 last month) / Total: 547
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 $12,177.37 which saw a comfortable increase to $13,386.53 this month.
Earnings Total
- Affiliate Income – $11,487.12
- Consultation Income – $00.00
- Other Income – $13,386.53
- Expenses – $3,595.13
Grand Total: $21,278.58 / £16,254.71 ($24,039.88 / £18,183.77 last month)
Unable to post graphs at the moment – will update asap
Signing Off
October was a wild month to say the least with Hurricane Nate taking me out during the most critical 5 days of the year.
Although I haven’t reported the income from the product launch here, let me tell you that despite the problems – it still made a lot of money.
I never thought I would ever make a lot of money and be disappointed but here we are.
Over the next month I am working on some key improvements to the blog including flying to Miami next week to upgrade my video setup.
I have already prepared a huge “cornerstone” piece of content that will be launched when the first video from my new setup is ready.
Stay tuned folks – exciting times ahead!
Thank you again to everyone that has supported the blog over the years – you guys are amazing!