December Round Up – Traffic & Income

I have made it through another month and yet again it has been a very hectic one. Although I did managed to get a away twice and it was Christmas and New Year!

So Happy New Year To Everybody 🙂

Each month I will publish a report on everything I have done and the things I have got up to. It will include my traffic stats, profits, stuff I’ve read etc…

By Keeping track of my of how my blog is progressing each month will hopefully inspire you to do the same.

So Here’s what I got up to In December 2013

 

Moved My Blog to WPEngine

At the very beginning of the month I decided that it would be best to switch Hosts and move my blog to WP Engine.

Why?

Because my plan is to continue building this blog each month and eventually it’s going to start getting more and more visitors, therefore I needed a Hosting company that I could trust and WP Engine seemed to tick all of the boxes.

It does cost a bit more than your average host but they offer 2 great benefits:

1) They make automatic daily back up’s of your site

2) They have their own ‘caching’ system so your site runs a lot faster!

These 2 benefits alone are worth the extra money. Not only Do I have peace of mind that my Site is backed up. I also know that it runs smoothly and quickly for my readers!

Not only that but there support is very good and I am very glad that I made the decision to move to them early on in my adventure! They have some good deals here

 

New Posts Added To The Blog

Yet again I was busy typing away this month as I wanted to add more quality content before promoting the blog. Here are the newly added posts:

http://doseoyourself.com/my-failed-attempt-at-local-seo/ – My Failed Attempt at Local SEO – This is a great post about local SEO and you will learn a lot from it. Not only will you learn from my mistakes but there are some great tips to help rank your site:

http://doseoyourself.com/review-rank-cracker-is-released/ – Matthew Woodward released his long awaited software called Rank Cracker, so I decided to do a post about it!

http://doseoyourself.com/what-seo-strategy-does-your-site-need/ – Many people struggle with SEO because they don’t adopt the correct strategy, so I decided to do a post about it. Check it out, it will save you a lot of time!

 

As well as adding these 3 new posts I have also been working on a couple of case studies and experiments which I plan to reveal over the coming months!

I have also continued to update this post about why one of my sites has lost rankings, and I still have plenty more to add. It’s already at a whopping 5000+ words

 

Holidays!

Took a Trip To Spain

I managed to escape to Spain for 4 days with my Girlfriend. We both needed a short break and it did us the world of good!

Although I was still doing a bit of work, answering emails and reading up on SEO stuff.

 

Went To Paris

We also managed a second trip and this time we visited Paris between Christmas a New Year! It was a great City and we did a lot of walking around and sight seeing. Arrived back late New years eve but we were too knackered to do anything.

 

 

 

Useful Stuff I have Read This Month

With my 2 trips this month I have managed to get quite a bit of reading done. I read a book called ‘Golden Apples’ by Bill Cullen. If you want to be successful then I recommend you read this book, it’s a great read.

I also read a few Internet Marketing posts including this post from Tom Schmitz about website structure. It’s important that you get your structure right to help your rankings.

I also read this very intriguing post from Jason Acidre about how he increased his website traffic by 44% in 1 month by utilising long tail keywords.

If you are interested in making money from affiliate products and niche sites then you must read this post by David McSweeney about how he grew an affiliate site from $0 to $3,934 a month!!

 

 

I Got Active On The Forums

Last month I did no promotion what so ever because I was busy preparing content. This month I have continued to generate more content for the site but I decided it was time to get involved on the IM forums.

My aim was not to do any promotion, but to just nudge my way in and start to get involved so that when I do come to promote my blog I will have a bit of reputation!

I just want to help people out as best I can and offer them solid advice. The rest will take care of it’s self

I joined the BHW forum and Traffic Planet.

So far I have only replied to other peoples posts and comments, I have not actually created any myself yet.

I have made 16 comments on BHW and 20 on Traffic planet. I have a footer link on my Traffic Planet profile but I need to make more posts on BHW to get that privilege.

My BHW Profile – http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/714060-jaselc.html

My TRaffic Planet profile – http://trafficplanet.com/user/11423-jason-chesters/

 

 

Traffic

This is only my second month and I have still done No promotion, so Im not expecting much traffic at all, although there should be some trickles coming through from Traffic planet and some long tail keywords on Google.

As you can see, we have started to pick up a bit of traffic, with 448 visits with 200 unique visits! Most of the traffic is organic and also a fair chunk from Traffic Planet.

Here are the most popular pages visited:

Im quite happy that my blog has started to get a bit of traffic at this early stage. I’ll be looking to increase these numbers every month!

Email Sign ups

Total = 7

A little slow but it’s very early days. I will see how it goes over the next few months and maybe look at ways of increasing the opt-in rate by testing different methods. It’s important that I build a list of loyal subscribers to my newsletter as this acts as a good safe guard should traffic suddenly stop!

You never know whats around the corner!

Earnings

Same as last month! Zilch… but that’s not a problem as Im not expecting to make any profits just yet. My main aim is to provide people with helpful knowledge and provide great content that will bring visitors back to my blog. Earnings should take care of themselves.

Luckily I already have decent earnings from other sites that I own so I am not reliant on this

 

 

Metrics

Each month I will publish a screen shot of my sites metrics to see how it progresses! I’ll use opensiteexplorer

 

 

My Computer Died

I got the dreaded blue screen of death. I switched my PC on and I was greeted with this blue screen with some error message and a load of other shit.

Luckily I have 2 computers. I use a MAC as my main computer and a PC solely for link building and SEO software. It was my PC that died and I have still yet to fix or replace it, so any link building projects I had going are now on hold until I decide what to do!

Summary

It’s been a very hectic month but a cracking month at the same time. I managed to take 2 trips away and visit some really nice places. I continued to build this blog and add fresh new content. I also read some great posts on other blogs and we also started to see our first flurry of visitors 🙂

Maybe somebody will actually read this report this month!!

I started to get involved on the forums and this will act as a stepping stone to bring in more visitors to my site. Earnings are still at zero but that’s ok!

Plans for next month

Now that Christmas and New Year are out of the way I can focus on 2014 and this is the year that my blog will really take off. I have tons of ideas and plans so stick with me.

Throughout January I will focus more on promotion and increasing visitors, mainly via the forums. I will also add a couple of new posts and continue to work on my case studies. My target for January is to double the traffic and opt-ins from December.