September Round Up – Traffic and Income

Well after a pretty hectic August with the birth of my son I though September would be a little calmer!! Well I can tell you…. it was from that!

This is my 11th Traffic and Income report and the blog is progressing slowly but steadily. As always I set myself a few targets to complete each month. Doing this helps keep me motivated as well as publishing my traffic and income reports to give me focus and a goal to aim at.

 

 

What have I got up to in September

I have had quite a lot going on in September with this blog. The first thing I did was to purchase a new laptop so that I could work and spend time with my son at the same time without being in the office (If that’s even possible). It sort of worked out anyway, and I managed to get a lot of work done!

Blog changes

I started by making a few changes to the blog. I wasn’t quite happy with a few things and I wanted to improve my users experience. I removed the option pop up as it wasn’t proving successful. It was probably getting on peoples nerves too and I also heard that it was causing problems in certain browsers. So that went!

I then decided to increase the size of the content area, in turn, sacrificing the width of the sidebar. I think the blogs appearance looks better and less cluttered and I certainly think that its easier to read now. Let me know your thoughts!

I then added more categories to the blog and included this in the sidebar, as you can see. Im hoping this will improve navigation and make it easier for you to find what you are looking for quickly. It may also help to keep users on the blog for longer.

Featured on HealthyWealthy

I was asked to participate in a an ‘experts’ round up. There were some big name influential marketeers in that round up so it was good to be amongst them. I personally think my answer was the best 🙂 but I would do wouldn’t I

They liked my response and asked me to do another for a different blog!!

 

PNB Fiasco

Towards the end of the month I got caught up in the whole ‘PBN’s are dead fiasco’. A few of the popular Internet marketeers all published posts about PBN’s being dead. I totally disagreed with them and stayed up for a few hours one night to write a hit back post, which you can see here: http://doseoyourself.com/pbns-not-working/

It seems a lot of people have been jumping on the bandwagon here and a lot of people are missing the point. If you use a ‘PUBLIC’ network then you are going to get hit sooner or later! this is obvious.

But if you use a real PRIVATE blog network that you own yourself, then you have no worries. Private blog networks are just as powerful as they have always been. The idea is to build real looking sites and keep them private.

These IM’s that have been using Rank Hero and other well know networks should know better!!

 

Long Tail Pro

Last month I explained how I had used Long Tail Pro to find keywords that I could add to my posts to help increase my organic traffic. This certainly worked as last month I got 500+ more organic traffic., so I decided to make a short video tutorial which you can see here.

This was my first video and I must admit, it could have been better, but Im sure I’ll improve with experience!

 

Case Studies

Although I have not published anything about them yet. I have been working on 2 case studies which I will be revealing very soon. I know everybody loves a great case study, so I’ll be publishing mine hopefully next month. One of them is about ranking an Amazon niche site!!

 

Purchased websites

One of my passions and goals is to build a portfolio of profitable websites. I mentioned last month that I had purchased a website and that I had spent a bit of time working on it. The first month brought in +$760 profit. This month I have done little work on it, but seen some steady improvement.

The site made $928 in September which is great. I will be looking at adding further sites to this portfolio in the future!!

 

Posts published this month

September was a good month for content. I managed to get 5 new posts published, which is great!

http://doseoyourself.com/google-sandbox-seo/ – I thought it would be good to cover a few issues surrounding ‘Google Sandbox’. This post answers most of the questions that you have been asking yourself.

http://doseoyourself.com/hide-my-ass-review-vpn-seo/ – The blog needed some reviews, so I started by reviewing HMA, this is a popular VPN service which I use for SEO purposes.

http://doseoyourself.com/keyword-research-using-long-tail-pro/ -My first ever video on DoSEOyourself. A little rusty but I got their in the end. Long Tail Pro is a great tool, check out how to use it to your advantage here.

http://doseoyourself.com/pbns-not-working/ – This was a spontaneous post that I had no intentions of writing, but I just couldn’t resist. This post got quite a bit of traction!!

http://doseoyourself.com/september-2014-10-posts/ – As usual I publish the Top 10 posts that I have read this month. Some really good stuff for you here.

 

Traffic

 

 

WooHoo!! Finally I have broken the 4k mark. This was one of my targets last month. Traffic is up to 4,203 which is 770 more visitors to last month! Mainly down to the promotion of my post about the latest PBN update and a little more interaction on the forums!

 

Where did that traffic come from

The increase was mainly down to the promotion of my post about the latest PBN update and a little more interaction on the forums! Another area where I keep a close eye on is our organic traffic.

It’s also interesting to see my direct traffic increasing too. There is a good case that this is actually organic traffic too. Check out this post: http://www.conductor.com/blog/2014/09/direct-traffic-long-urls-must-organic/

My healthy wealthy contribution also brought in over 80 new visitors

Yet again I met my goal of getting over 1500 organic hits!!!!

 

 

 

Most popular pages:

As usual, my page on building private blog networks sits on top spot:

 

 

 

Email sign ups and social media

My subscriber rate is slowly increasing, but it is moving in the right direction. I will be looking at new ways to increase this….

Email subscribers = 259 (+22)

Twitter = 539 (+7)

Google+ = 230 (+14)

 

Earnings

Probably your favourite bit 🙂 Last month was a record breaking month due to a big payment I received. No doubt figures will be down this month!

HAM = +$93

Bluehost = +$90

Consultancy = $180

Services = $140

Total profit for DSY = $503

 

Profit from purchased websites

Site 1 = +928

Expenses

Hosting -$29

 

Total overall profit = +1402

Down on last month due to the lump payment I received from the Ecommerce site that I built for a client, but not a bad profit. Hopefully I can increase this next month!

Note: I do not include any income from my ‘already established’ online businesses here. I only quote profits that are a direct result of this blog!!

 

Metrics

Not much change again. I really need to publish something that gets shared across the SEO world to gain more links, in turn will increase these metrics

 

 

Summary

I good active month in terms of building the blog and progressing. Profits down but that’s ok, as I am looking at building a big authority site and gaining an online presence. The profits will come later!! I met all of my targets that I set myself so that makes me feel better too!

Organic traffic is up and so to are subscriber numbers

 

Plans for next month

I am not going to set myself too many plans for October as I will be spending 3 weeks in Spain, so I maybe a little limited to the amount of work I do. I shall be releasing the first series in my Amazon niche site case study, so keep your eyes out for that.

It would also be great to increase my organic traffic to 2000, although that maybe asking a little to much, unless I find time for optimisation. I am also planning on improving all of the content in my ‘Rank any site in Google’ posts!

Time never stands still with SEO, so its good to keep my content fresh and up to date!