February Round Up – Traffic and Income

Now into my 4th month and it really feels like the blog is moving in the right direction. Last month we saw my first bit of income, and my target for February was to double my traffic! so lets see if I achieved that…

I will publish my traffic and income report every month as well as outline everything that I have got up to. Hopefully this will inspire you to do the same..

What I got up to this month

After re-designing the blog last month I decided it was time to increase my traffic. So I set about various ways of doing this. in fact, my next post will be about increasing traffic and I’ll show the exact methods that I used.

Firstly I decided I needed to broaden my presence so I created a Facebook page and a Tumblr blog

I also set up an account with Reddit and Inbound.org

I wanted to set the foundations for a better social presence and I believe this will help boost traffic in the future.

 

New posts aded to the blog

Most of my time has gone towards promotion but I still managed to produce 5 posts, 1 of which was used as a guest post:

http://doseoyourself.com/make-money-affiliate-niche-sites/ – I wrote this post to show you how I made a nice profit from affiliate sites. I explain the processes that I used and some great points that you can follow!

http://doseoyourself.com/ultimate-guide-wordpress-seo/ – The ultimate guide to setting up WordPress for SEO. Most of us use WP these days so I thought this post would go down well. You can learn a lot from it

http://doseoyourself.com/bounce-rate-how-to-improve-it/ – I got into a pickle over my Bounce Rate and discovered a problem on my blog, which I explain here. I also shared some great points on how to lower your bounce rate!

http://doseoyourself.com/10-best-articles-this-month/ – I thought it would be good to share the Top 10 articles published this month. I have gone through the net finding the best content for you to read through.

 

Signed up to 2 new forums

Previous to this month I had spent most of my time on BHW and Traffic Planet, so this month I decided get involved on Warrior forum and CPElites.

I was actually introduced to CPA Elites by a visitor to my blog named George. He liked my work and kindly offered to place my link in his signature!! He used the DoSEOyourself logo as is signature and thanks to him he brought in 284 visitors!! So a big thanks to George..

 

I reached out (and it worked)

One thing I tried this month was to reach out to other influential figures in this market. Basically I found articles that were related to some of mine, I then emailed the author and asked if they would like to link to my article as I felt it would benefit their readers!

Although I only got 2 replies I did get 2 new links and I got offered to guest post on Tung’s blog Cloudliving. You can see it here

It was really important that I got at least 1 guest post this month to help reach my traffic goal.

 

Added a sticky sidebar widget

Last month I managed to increase my opt-in conversion from 1.78% to 2.33%. So to try and improve this further I decided to add a sticky sidebar widget so that my opt-in form and Google+ link was always in view.

Did it make much difference? 

No….

My conversion rate fell to 1.6% for this month!

 

Got distracted with other work

As much as I wanted to promote the blog this month I did get caught up with some of my other projects, and unfortunately I couldn’t do as much promotion as I had wished. However, I wasn’t going to let that stop me from reaching my goal!

 

John Chow Sponsored Tweet + Facebook advert

At the start of the month I did some consultancy for a client which brought in $130, so I thought I would re-invest this $130 to promote the blog.

I used John Chows sponsored Tweet service and he sent out 3 tweets for me, and i spent $30 on facebook ads to see what that would bring. I really don’t have much experience with fb ads to be honest!

They both brought in a bit of traffic, but nothing to shout about

 

Useful stuff I have read this month

Usually a list a few articles or books that I have read this month, but I decided to write a serrate post on this and I have listed the top 10 articles published this month

I’ll probably continue to do this every month

 

Traffic

Now we get to the good stuff. To reach my target of doubling my traffic, I need to get at least 2,353 unique visitors!

Jeeez!!!! that was close. As you can see, the blog got 2,310 unique visitors, which is an increase of 96.4%, so I just must out by a few visitors.

I’ll take that though 🙂

Here is a graph showing my increase in traffic since I started….

 

Bounce rate Issues

If you have read my post about bounce rate then you will have seen that I had some problems with a false bounce rate. What had happened is my Google Analytics code was installed twice on my blog.

This gave a false reading and made my bounce rate appear really low. I have since rectified the problem and my bounce rate has returned to a normal level.

So where did this traffic come from……

Here are the top 10 referrals, The clear winner again is BHW bringing in 1160 visits. You can also see that cloudliving and CPAElites helped a lot too!

Something I do need to increase is the organic traffic, but this is something that should happen naturally over time!

Here are the popular pages this month:

The How to get any site to the top of google is on top spot this month and I put that down to the Social Locker plugin that I have been using.

 

Social Locker Plugin Stats

It’s a great plugin. Here are the statistics from this plugin….

As you can see, 178 people downloaded my PDF  on how to get any site to the top of Google. Every-time this is downloaded it is shared on one of their social accounts 🙂

 

Email Sign ups and social media

Email subscribers = 63 +(36)

Twitter = 23 (+8)

Google+ = (+22)

I need to increase my opt-in rate and I will experiment with pop up and behind opt in forms to see if I can get it up to around 3-4%.

 

Earnings

Last month saw my first affiliate earnings. I have not got to caught up in my earnings as my sole purpose is to build up a good following for this blog and build a large subscriber base!

But lets see how I got on….

 

HMA = $15.55

Website Auditor = $48

Consultancy = $130

Total = $193.55

 

Expenses:

WPEngine = $29

John Chow tweets = $100

Facebook ad = $30

Profit = +$34.55

Down on last month but Im not worried about that. I will continue producing great content and earnings will take care of itself!

 

Metrics

Each month I will publish my blogs Metrics according to opensiteexplorer. It will give me a good indication to how the blog is growing…

 

 

 

Same as last month, although my number of back links has increased and I have a few more quality links, so this should increase in March once they take affect.

 

Summary

It’s been a busy month again and I had to move my focus away from the blog for a couple of weeks. I still managed to get a lot done with 5 new posts.

I also built my social presence and got my first guest post, which helped to increase my traffic to over 2000 unique visitors and nearly 4000 visits!!

A little profit was made from affiliate sales and hopefully this will increase as I grow the blog

 

Plans for next month

I am taking a break in the first week of March so that will leave me with 3 weeks of work. I don’t think I will be able to double my traffic again next month, but I’ll give it a try :-). I will be writing some more posts and I want to write a good tutorial for you guys.

I will also be writing an epic post on how I increased my traffic by 96% in 1 month!!