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April 2016 Income and Traffic Report

Welcome everybody to another edition of the Income Bully Income Report. Each and every month, no matter how great or how awful I do, this is where you can see things under the hood.

I don’t put up some of the monster numbers that other bloggers have, hopefully I’ll get there.

I don’t share these reports because I want to make myself feel good. I share these reports for a level of accountability, and show others what is working and what isn’t for things that I try.

My experience doesn’t come from running a blog or sharing theories. My experience comes from running my own marketing agency, and a few other side businesses. I’m not a make money online guru or expert blogger, so if you’re new here, no need to worry about the guru style BS, you won’t find that here.

The income reported here is made 100% from the blog and “internet marketing”. It does not include business consulting income, offline income or traditional investment income.

What Happened In April?

April was a fun month. Actually, to tell you the truth, I think April was the most fun I had with this blog.

I’m starting to try out new strategies and testing new things out that haven’t ever crossed my mind in the past. I’ve spent time testing out traffic generation methods, learning a few tricks here and there with certain platforms, and investing more time in the promotion area instead of content creation.

Here are a few of the major things that have happened this month.

Included in Matthew Woodward’s Income Round Up

Okay, so I usually try to go in order with this stuff, but I can’t resist. This happened just a couple days ago, I was featured in Matthew Woodward’s Income Round Up.

What many of you may not realize, is that he’s one of the reasons I decided to start this blog. He’s one of the reasons that I have been motivated to put out content, and attempt a slightly more passive income than the agency world.

I emailed him in 2014 about starting a blog, shortly after releasing my Ultimate Blueprint to Start a Web Agency and this was his response to me:

Well if you already have a buyers list, you already have the start of your blog in place – probably the hardest part is having an audience to launch a blog to, you have it 🙂

There is certainly room in the market for someone to dominate the local SEO world – I get questions every day for that and my knowledge isn’t great there.

Feel free to send anything over you want me to review.

We had a few exchanges, and that was before I even knew what the domain for this blog would be.

Anyway, I consider it an honor, and quite an achievement to be included in his round up.

I also almost forgot, I was mentioned in another round up on social media today, which is pretty sweet!

Implemented a New Twitter Strategy

Twitter has also been kind of low on the side of traffic volume for me. It’s never been a focus, but I decided this month to switch up what I’ve been doing and start tweaking it a bit.

While it hasn’t been a large source of traffic, it has been a strong enough source that I can’t ignore.

I started thinking, that if it’s contributing as much traffic as it is with a very primitive strategy, I should be able to triple or quadruple the benefits I get from Twitter if I’m able to develop a solid strategy.

I’ve been tinkering away at it this month and have started to see results, especially towards the end of the month. I’m not ready to share it yet, since I’m still refining it but you can expect a post on it soon!

Another thing I’ve decided to do, is ditch buffer. Buffer is what I was using to manage Twitter and schedule tweets and content.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with them and feel there’s a lot lacking in their platform. Moving up to the business plan at $99/mo instead of $10/mo is quite a jump, and one I can’t justify with them given their current features.

So I decided I’m going to get away from Buffer, and use TweetDeck. It’s free, you can schedule posts, and it’s a lot faster when mass scheduling than buffer is. At least, it seems that way, but there’s a bit more manual effort required, which may be bad in the future… or I can have a VA do it.

Another thing I’ve JUST STARTED doing in Twitter, is using Twitter Cards. I didn’t know anything about this until a few days ago, adjusted some settings in yoast, and now my twitter feed is pretty when i share a link.

Example:

twitter-cards

Isn’t that sexy?

I’m sure some of you guys are going to laugh and say wtf, you didn’t know about Twitter cards?

Well… I was doing it all through buffer, and added images to tweets because they say images get more engagement. I didn’t know much about the cards. Anyway… no excuses. It’s all fixed now!

Launched My Hosting Affiliate Site

I’ve been talking about it for like 4 months it seems. I finally did it, kind of. I still have some content I need to add, which will all be complete this month. I don’t expect it to generate any revenue until mid to late June, but should be interesting in seeing how this plays out.

Once all the content is up (I need like 6-8 posts on there) I will be keeping a log for my rankings and different activities I’m doing in order to rank the site and bring it more traffic.

I think there’s potential there for it to bring in up to $1,000/mo, maybe even more. However, those aren’t my projections, just the potential. I project to bring in a steady $200/mo with no additional work after the initial setup stage.

I’ve Made a BIG Decision About This Blog’s Future

Many of you discovered this blog for the first time from my post about Local SEO Experts Lying To You… Many of you liked it.

Of course, it ruffled up a few feathers, but that’s okay with me.

I’ve come to realize that this blog has performed pretty well with about a 2 hour time investment on a weekly basis.

The people I’m competing with in the Local SEO space, are investing 40+ hours a week on their blogs, their brands, etc. and combined, I’m never going to be able to take the market share I want. I feel like I’m keeping up pretty well, considering my time investment vs. theirs.

But I understand, that my 2 hours a week vs. 40+ hours multiplied by however many fake gurus there are out there, isn’t going to cut it. It just isn’t. I can’t argue with math, and until I know how to manipulate the space-time continuum, it’s hopeless… I might as well not try.

That is… if I plan to continue taking the same 2 hour a week approach.

I’ve decided to invest 40 hours a week into the blog… maybe more.

The amount of income the blog gets, isn’t much, definitely not enough for people in the US to live off of. That isn’t my main concern, money will come eventually. I have plenty of money to live off of and other sources of income that I don’t disclose in these reports.

The reality is that this blog will never grow to the amounts of traffic that others have if I continue down the same path. I don’t pat everyone on the back saying good job, I don’t make friends for the sake of getting a bit of extra promotion, I’m just me. And being me isn’t bad, it just means I need to put in a lot more effort in order to make up for the missed “opportunities” that come along.

I have such a strong drive… and it’s not necessarily a NEED to grow this blog… I just really, really, really want to dominate my competitors. In some cases, I think what you WANT is a stronger motivator than what you NEED. It certainly is in this case.

Some of you may be asking why I’ve only invested 2 hours a week in the blog so far. Well, want to hear the truth? I think it makes me quite vulnerable if I dedicate 40 hours a week to the blog and it only brings in $2,000-$3,000 each and every month. It could set me up for a major disappointment, but right now… I don’t care, I can at least for a couple months justify the time involvement with other metrics.

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How Did I Do On My Goals For April?

Launch Hosting Affiliate Site – YES

Hit 2,000 Twitter Followers – YES

Traffic Case Study – NO. This was to test posting frequency, but I decided not to follow through because the numbers and results would be skewed.

Complete 1st Draft of Local SEO Course – NO.. Not very far on it at all but it’s coming.

Get my Email Lists and Autoresponders under control – NO… I need to. I have a lot of duplicates from using multiple lists, and my autoresponders are outdated. I should be able to boost traffic and affiliate sales by better implementing my autoresponder series.

New Blog Posts in April

March Income Report

6 Best Kept Secrets to Dominate Local Search Results

SERP Tracker & SEO Ranking Reports: ProRankTracker Review

The Poor Man’s Guide to Launching a Web Agency

7 Productivity Hacks to Improve Your Business

The Local SEO “Experts” Have Lied To You Over and Over

David Vs. Goliath: How YOU Can Defeat The Giants With Your Marketing

The next section, would usually be about the most popular content, but 3 out of the top 5 posts are listed above. Two other posts made the top 5. #1 was easily the Local SEO Expert Bashing post.

The 2 posts not listed above that made the top 5 is my guide about marketing for a vape shop. The other was my guide for parasite SEO.

April 2016 Income and Traffic

Self Created Income/Courses

Income: $1,746

Coaching Income

  • 2 Sessions

Income: $550

Note: I’m not publicly offering coaching yet. If you need help with strategy for local SEO, or building your business or marketing your business and might be interested, contact me. I plan to add a page on here this month for coaching.

Affiliate Income

Affiliate Income – $525.57

TOTAL Income Bully Blog Income – $2,821.57

Thoughts On April Income

It’s nice to be above what I did last month, but there’s not a big difference. I seem to continue bouncing up and down with no measurable different either way.

When I look at the income, I don’t think it matters if I do $100 or $2000… it seems like I’m stuck where I am, and if you’re not growing, you’re losing. I’m losing right now.

What I DO like seeing though, is more variety on the affiliate side of things. The more products or services I review, the more opportunities I have to earn income with different offers. Some offers perform horribly, others perform pretty good.

I need to bring in a consistent flow of reviews, good or bad, in order to expand the variety. I think affiliate income can be doubled or tripled relatively easily in the next 3 months.

OTHER METRICS FOR THE BLOG

Alexa Rank – 319,884

Twitter Followers – 2,210

Youtube Channel Subscribers – 53

Google+ Followers – 35

Aweber Email Subscribers – 1,920

More Metrics:

Unique Visitors – 7,393

Bounce Rate – 72.14%

Pages Per Session – 1.69

Average Time On Site – 2:27

Thoughts on Metrics in April

Definitely happy with the way the metrics are going. The increase in unique visitors was huge. My math may be a little fuzzy off the top of my head but I believe that’s around a 60% increase in growth. Would be nice if Income increased by 60%, but hey, I’ll take it.

Twitter, I set out to get over 2K followers this month, last income report I was sitting at 1798 and crushed that goal.

All the metrics have improved.

Double thumbs up.

I also need to give a special shout out to Andrea. He’s been sharing many of my posts in Facebook groups, and he’s been killing it for me with social traffic. He has easily accounted for about 1,300 unique visitors in April.

He even got banned from a group on Facebook for sharing MY content. The admins of the group emailed me a year ago wanting to do a webinar/hangout type thing and I blew them off… now they ban people that share my stuff, others have done it since and they remove the posts pretty quickly. Bunch of cowards that don’t want their audience following someone else… So screw you LCT.

They’re some of the people I was referring to in my rant a little over a week ago.

I also tested out a traffic strategy with Quora. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize until a day or two ago that their traffic reports as direct. So I built a URL to track the source, so hopefully I’ll be able to analyze the data next month.

Here’s some data so you guys can see my progress month over month.

Month & Year Unique Visitors Affiliate Income Total Revenue
December 2014 N/A $18.10 $3528.10
January 2015 921 $46.48 $4062.48
February 2015 1361 $223.65 $3239.65
March 2015 2324 $70.58 $2697.58
April 2015 2528 $400.90 $2391.90
May 2015 6422 $400.90 $2829.90
June 2015 9830 $449.96 $3378.27
July 2015 8015 $586 $3621.86
August 2015 6209 $777.93 $8386.24
September 2015 2372 $132.06 $1912.06
October 2015 2249 $267.59 $1277.59
November 2015 2331 $331.68 $1757.68
December 2015 2191 $306.56 $1981.56
January 2016 4126 $463.09 $2411.09
February 2016 4850 $754.95 $3219.95
March 2016 4505 $419.77 $2239.77
April 2016 7393 $525.57 $2821.57
Month & Year Unique Visitors Bounce Rate Pages Per Session Time on Site
December 2014 N/A N/A N/A
January 2015 921 51.07% 2.93 4:04
February 2015 1361 49.74% 2.63 3:22
March 2015 2324 54.65% 2.65 3:24
April 2015 2528 54.36% 2.09 2:06
May 2015 6422 58.11% 1.89 1:56
June 2015 9830 61.4% 1.82 1:58
July 2015 8015 67.91% 1.68 1:30
August 2015 6209 65.03% 1.72 1:57
September 2015 2372 74.96% 1.63 1:27
October 2015 2249 75.94% 1.62 1:30
November 2015 2331 73.23% 1.75 2:01
December 2015 2191 72.71% 1.64 1:53
January 2016 4126 69.56% 1.75 2:18
February 2016 4850 69.96% 1.71 2:29
March 2016 4505 72.12% 1.66 2:16
April 2016 7393 72.14% 1.69 2:27
Month & Year Alexa Rank Email Subs Twitter Youtube Google+
December 2014 N/A 69 N/A N/A
January 2015 2918591 212 72 0 N/A
February 2015 1492063 336 95 7 N/A
March 2015 997051 419 125 13 N/A
April 2015 786089 506 399 19 12
May 2015 537433 611 573 26 11
June 2015 377461 755 970 31 18
July 2015 290185 896 1063 38 17
August 2015 242955 1054 1339 40 19
September 2015 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
October 2015 369324 1162 1261 42 20
November 2015 372286 1190 1258 45 20
December 2015 349370 1236 1238 45 22
January 2016 350881 1374 1533 50 22
February 2016 320070 1577 1674 51 26
March 2016 344099 1675 1798 52 27
April 2016 319884 1920 2210 53 35

Plans and Goals For May

Well, since I’ve decided to dedicate a major increase in time for this blog, I need to be able to utilize that time and grow my audience here as much as possible.

Here are a few goals I have for May:

Work on a New Affiliate Site – I found what I think is a really good niche for an amazon affiliate site. If everything works out, and my research is accurate, it should be relatively easy to have it generating at least a few hundred dollars each month, and that’s very conservative.

I’d like to build and launch the entire site this month.

Complete PDF Version of my Local SEO Course – I decided “first draft” isn’t a clear enough goal. I intend to have 3 tiers of the product, the basic PDF version of the course, PDF + Video, and PDF + Video + bonuses + other cool stuff.

I want to launch this course in Mid Summer. Ideally, mid June, but I’m not sure I can pull it off. It will be a MASSIVE amount of content. I intend for this to be the most complete, and thorough Local SEO course EVER created.

Start a Facebook Group – Okay guys, I hate facebook. I don’t login. Of all of my “friends” there’s only maybe 5 that I actually like. I hate it, I hate logging in and seeing people complain about the same stuff they were complaining about a year ago. I hate the people complaining about political talk in their feed, but they think that everyone wants to see pictures of their food, drinks, and ugly kids (is that too much?).

But I realize, many of you like Facebook. So I guess I will create a new Facebook and start a group so all the readers here can network with each other, and have a place to hang out without the guru BS you so often see.

In the future I would like to add a forum here, but baby steps for now!

Take Care of My Autoresponder and Email List – This was one for last month, but since it’s important and I didn’t get to it, that’s a priority this month. I’m missing out on traffic, and potential affiliate commissions AND long term engagement with the blog.

I need to get this under control.

Officially Launch Coaching Services – I was unsure of whether I should do this. I like to respond to people that have questions, whether through comments or email, and will continue doing so. This is just a more in depth 1 on 1 help type thing. Creating strategies for people wanting to grow their business, another set of eyes to help troubleshoot issues, that type of stuff.

With just a few people trying it out in the last few months, I realize I enjoy it a lot. I have to figure out a few details and then I’ll let you all know when it’s launched.

Final Thoughts

This income report ended up being much longer than expected. Sorry about that!

This month, ended up being the most enlightening and beneficial to me, even though income is where it always is, I think the future path of the blog’s progression is in a much clearer light.

I don’t know if my gamble is going to pay off with the increased time… but I’m kind of an all or nothing type of guy.

Let’s see what happens.

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