January Round Up – Traffic And Income

The first month of 2014 is over and what a busy month it has been. I have been pushing the blog to increase traffic and this month saw my first ‘real income’ from this blog!!

Every month I will publish my reports, including traffic, income and everything I have done. Hopefully this will inspire you to do the same!

So here is what I got up to in January

I changed the theme for the blog!!

Half way through January something was niggling me, something was telling me to change the design of the blog. Now there was nothing wrong with the previous theme that I was using….

Apart from that, every man and his dog was using the convergence theme since Matthew Woodward released his blog over a year ago.

My problem was, I didn’t want to be ‘like everybody else’.

To propel the blog forward I felt that I needed to adopt my own style. Therefore I decided on a new theme.

I wanted something fresh, clean and responsive…. and I think I did a good job in finding the perfect theme. What do you think?

Here is a screenshot of what it previously looked like:

The new design is a little less cluttered, has a professional looking logo and I also added that yellow box in the top right hand corner with a little statement.

My reasoning behind this was to attract the readers attention to that box, not only to introduce myself but to catch their eye with the yellow colour, because directly underneath is my opt in box, which also has a yellow subscribe button.

I thought this may increase my opt in conversion.

My Opt-in Increased from 1.78% to 2.33%

So I guess it kind of improved things as well as giving myself a unique identity!

I also re-jiggled the menu and sidebar a little.

 

New posts added to the blog

Although I did spend more time interacting on forums and getting involved in discussions, I did managed to publish 3 new posts:

http://doseoyourself.com/my-top-8-youtube-videos-for-seo/  – This is a great little post I put together to help you with the whole process of SEO. I carefully selected what I thought to be the best video’s on Youtube for SEO. definitely worth checking out!

http://doseoyourself.com/diversify-rankings/  – I decided to write a post about diversifying your back links. It also includes some great tips about building links to your inner pages. Check it out if you want to boost your rankings!

http://doseoyourself.com/7-creative-ways-to-build-quality-back-links-right-now/ – If you are looking to get quality back links to your site then this post will help you to do that with a few sneaky methods that I use

 

Spent more time on the forums

Last month I joined BHW and Traffic planet and made a few posts. this month I made a total of 124 posts  on BHW, started 3 threads. This alone brought i quite a bit of traffic, which I’ll come to soon!

I also managed to get a warning on BHW for posting a link in my thread! whoops! It did result in 184 clicks to my blog though 🙂

As like last month, I have been trying to help people as much as possible on the forums. I added a signature to my BHW profile which has helped to drive more traffic.

I also started a couple of threads on Traffic planet including my Zero to 100,000 visitors in 12 months challenge!

Made my ‘How I Rank My Sites’ guide into a PDF

One feature I am looking to use more is the social locker plugin that I use on my blog. I decided to create a 75 page pdf which contains all of the steps in ‘ultimate guide to ranking sites number 1 in Google‘.

Every-time somebody downloads it I get a social share, which in turn, helps to drive more traffic to the blog.

 

Useful stuff I have read this month

Not done as much reading as I would have liked, but I did come across this great article called ‘Steal your SEO competitions #1 rank’. I also read this pretty epic post on Moz, A beginners guide to social  media!

Link Assistant also wrote this awesome post about the Hummingbird update

 

Traffic

Ok, we are getting to the interesting stuff now. This is now my 3rd month since I launched DoSEOyourself.

Last month the blog received 448 visits with 200 unique visitors. My target at the start of the month was to double these numbers….

Well I certainly achieved that!!

As you can see, the blog had a total of 2070 visits, and 1,176 unique visitors, a massive increase from last months 200!!

One thing that I have noticed and I am really pleased about is my bounce rate. Last month it was 52.23%. It is now 15.31% which is excellent as it shows that visitors are actually interacting with my blog and spending time on it and finding it helpful!

I put this down to more content being added and the design change. Lets see If I can get this number down to single figures!!

So where did this traffic come from?

The clear winner is BHW, which provided 770 visits. I did spend most of my time on that forum though. Time to diversify a bit now!

Here are the most popular pages visited this month:

Email Sign Ups and social media

Email subscribers – 27

Twitter – 15 followers (Please follow me)

Google + 13 (Please follow me)

 

Increasing the op-tin rate for email sign ups is a big thing for. At the minute it’s 2.33%. I want to increase this to at least 4%. I’ll be experimenting with a few things next month, so i’ll keep you updated on how that goes!

 

Earnings

The first 2 months have not provided any income at all, but this month saw my first bit of action!! I wasn’t expecting much and I am happy with the earnings the blog has made in only it’s 3rd month.

Kontent machine = $86.80

HMA = $23

TheBestSpinner = $40

Consultancy = $200

Total income = $349.80

 

Expenses

WPEngine $29

New Theme = $50

New Logo = $20

Total Expenses = $99

 

Total Profit = +$250.80

Hopefully I can increase this every month from here on.

 

Metrics

I will publish the Metrics each month taken from opensite explorer. As you can see, my Domain Authority has increased from 17 (last month) to 20, and my Page Authority has jumped from 30 to 32 🙂 Happy days!

 

Summary

It’s been a hectic month again but loved every minute of it! I managed to add 3 new posts to the blog and increase traffic by quite a lot. I also saw my first bit of profit which I am delighted about. But I most pleased with the new design/theme which I think will help the blog to push foreword.

I became more involved in 2 of the forums and have started to build a social presence. I also achieved everything I planned on doing this month 🙂

It’s great to hear feedback and it makes it all worth while when I actually get thanked from people who have found the blog helpful.

 

Plans for next month

I have some bigger plans for February, it mainly involves increasing my traffic. Again my target is to double last months traffic, so that means I will need at least 2,352 unique visitors.

If I succeed I will write a post on exactly how I did it!

I also plan to add a couple more posts and to increase my opt in rate

catch you next month!