Here we go again with another income and traffic report for the Income Bully blog.
You guys know the spiel now, but for those of you that are new around here, I share the income and traffic of this blog, along with future plans, and analyze how I do each month.
I don’t include offline income, traditional investment income, or other projects I have, only income through this blog and projects I announce through this blog.
I do this, because it’s helpful to me, holds me accountable, and it’s also helpful for some of you.
While I don’t have the humongous numbers that some others have, everything I list is 100% real, no fluff, no sketchy accounting.
My expertise is not in running a blog… I’m not a blogging guru, just someone that likes to share things along the way.
So lets see how I did.
What Happened in May?
Last month in my April Income Report, I talked about wanting to invest a lot more time in the blog. I wanted to focus a lot of content creation, content promotion, and really getting things to another level.
My reasoning is because there’s a lot of people out there, putting out lower quality information but it will be impossible for me to compete with them unless I spend more time on this blog.
My thought was a good one. The idea is good. The execution was awful.
I wanted to put in 40 hours a week. Yeah, that’s not happening right now and won’t for a while. I think a more realistic goal would be 20 hours a week. I managed to invest in 31 total hours last month. Pretty bad.
What makes matters worse, is that about 80% of the time invested, were tasks that I didn’t have planned! Finding the perfect platform to manage my twitter account queue. That alone took a long time, but will hopefully save me time in the future. Moving to HTTPS took time as well, and that wasn’t even on my to-do list!
Anyway, I need to plan a bit better for June. That’s the moral of this story.
Was Mentioned in a NicheHacks Blog Post
NicheHacks is a really cool site that many of you have probably followed at some point.
It was pretty cool to wake up one morning and see some referrals from one of their blog posts. I feel like I’m moving on up in the world!
April, started getting included in Matthew Woodward’s Income Roundups, and this month got a bit more visibility from niche hacks.
While I’ve been a bit disappointed overall in the month of May, this was definitely a big highlight.
Tweaking My Twitter Strategy
I had a pretty big month in twitter followers growth for April, so I wanted to continue tweaking my strategy in May.
I know that the more I tweet, or schedule tweets, the more followers I get, the more clicks I get, and the more visibility I get overall. I believe a lot of the links I’ve managed to naturally get for this blog, came from people finding me on Twitter, then linking from forums or blog posts.
So, even though the traffic doesn’t perform as well as Facebook traffic, it’s still worth the time investment to improve my strategy.
One of the problems I had, was I was spending too much time scheduling content. Even with Buffer, it just wasn’t working for me.
I’ve tried Buffer, HootSuite, TweetDeck, and about 10 other platforms out there trying to find the perfect one. One of my favorites was MeetEdgar but I don’t like the idea of spending $50/mo for a basic plan, and I tried charming their support team and CEO into giving me a free subscription but they wouldn’t budge.
After a lot of frustration, I found Social Pilot, which allows bulk upload, cool scheduling, and a lot of different options. Even content curation is offered. I forget what I pay, I think it’s $9/mo for 200 tweets or posts per day and 1,000 schedule tweets in the queue. It’s so much easier than what I was doing before. And as this blog grows with more content, and I find other content I want to share, the 100 queue limit with buffer wasn’t enough anymore.
Moved the Blog from HTTP to HTTPS
Like I mentioned above, this wasn’t part of my plans for the month of May, it wasn’t on the to-do list, it wasn’t even close to crossing my mind until the day I started to move.
Do you ever have days where you have a lot of things to do, some that are pretty important, but then you have an idea and can’t pass it up? You just have to go through with it and do it, no matter how much time it’s going to take? Well, that’s what happened to me.
I’m wanting to offer coaching, for freelancers and people that are running agencies for web design, SEO, marketing, etc. I don’t want to link people off site, so I needed to get an SSL certificate for it, and even though the page isn’t live yet, I needed to prepare I guess.
I also wanted to test to see whether it actually provides increases in rankings or benefits in search. The jury is still out on that, but one big benefit I’ve wanted from this, was to be able to see referral traffic from other https sites, like Quora, and others. You don’t always see your referral traffic with an http site.
You can read more about me moving from http to https in a blog post I wrote this month.
How Did I Do On My Goals in May?
Let me tell you something…
It would be very convenient if I skipped this section this time.
I’m not going to, because maybe I need the public embarrassment, and public shaming.
I didn’t accomplish one, single, goal in the entire month. Nothing.
I had just a few goals I wanted to work on, and accomplish, and I didn’t do anything. I went the entire month, without doing what I wanted to do.
Sheesh.
Never have I had such a long streak of total, unfocused effort.
Don’t get me wrong, I did a lot of things in May, actually I put more time into the blog than I have in previous months but the end result was not what was intended. I was working on unplanned actions, things that probably weren’t as important in the overall scheme of things.
Hopefully June will be a month of renewed focus.
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New Blog Posts in May
May was kind of a light month in content creation, which I sort of expected. I would like to ramp up content efforts in June.
Here are the blog posts that were published in May:
The April Income and Traffic Report
It’s 2016. If You Don’t Have a Blog for Your Business, You’re Missing Out.
Gurus Wrong Again: The TRUTH About Exact Match Domains
Why I moved My WordPress Blog from HTTP to HTTPS
As you can see, only 4 posts published, but all are high quality content. I plan on doubling the amount of posts in June.
Top 5 Most Popular Posts in May
1.) Gurus Wrong Again: The TRUTH About Exact Match Domains
2.) How a vape Store Doubled Their Sales with These 3 Simple Things
3.) April 2016 Income and Traffic Report
4.) How I Ranked a Client’s Site in 20+ Cities for 60+ Keywords
5.) The Ultimate Guide to Using Parasites for SEO and More
May 2016 Income and Traffic
Self Created Income/Courses
Income: $1,578
Coaching Income
- 2 Sessions
Income: $550
Note: Still not publicly launched. It’s coming soon though!
Affiliate Income
- Long Tail Pro – $.50.. $1 free trial (see my review here)
- NameHero Hosting – $100 (review)
- Clicks Magazine – $25.50
- Mobile Renegade – $156.21 (See it in action here)
- Mobile Renegade Mega Deal with Facebook Plugin – $139.68 (Blog post + Video)
- Mythemeshop – $29.40
- TeamWork Project Management – $6
- ProRankTracker – $0… Lots of free plan signups, but no upgrades.
Affiliate Income – $457.29
TOTAL Income Bully Blog Income – $2,585.29
Thoughts on May Income
A slight decline from last month, but I kind of expected that to be the case since I was so unfocused for most of the month.
I don’t have much to say about it.
One concern though is that my affiliate income should be increasing. For the most part, I haven’t been trying to monetize from this blog very much at all, and I think once I redo my autoresponder sequence, I’ll be able to improve my per subscriber monthly value.
It’s tough, because I’m so picky about things I promote. However, the things I do promote, I’m not promoting very well. I need to do better with that. I also need to add sales pages on the blog for both of my products.
OTHER METRICS FOR THE BLOG
Alexa Rank – 338,710
Twitter Followers – 2,763
Youtube Channel Subscribers – 56
Google+ Followers – 35
Aweber Email Subscribers – 2,074
More Metrics:
Unique Visitors – 6,469
Bounce Rate – 72.27%
Pages Per Session – 1.74
Average Time On Site – 2:16
Thoughts on Metrics in May
Seems about right. I’m actually surprised that my traffic didn’t dip a bit more than it did. I expected around 5-5.5K visitors due to less content than April.
Other on page metrics are about the average.
I’d like to grow my subscriber list a bit faster than I am. Twitter grew another 500 followers so that’s a plus.
Overall, I’m not necessarily happy about the metrics for May, but I am happy it didn’t dip as much as I thought it would.
Here’s some data so you guys can see my progress month over month. Since this list is getting long, this will be the last time I will include it in this post. Next time I think I will link to a separate page showing the historical tables. Or perhaps, I should include the previous 12 months, then link to the full list. Let me know what you guys think.
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 |
May 2016 | 6469 | $457.29 | $2585.29 |
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 |
May 2016 | 6469 | 72.27% | 1.74 | 2:16 |
Month & Year | Alexa Rank | Email Subs | 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 |
May 2016 | 338710 | 2074 | 2763 | 56 | 35 |
Plans And Goals for June
After a bit of a disappointing May, I realize the biggest thing I need to do, is develop a plan and strategy for this blog. It’s okay to go and do unexpected things, it’s important to be pretty fluid, but I need more direction and I need to stick with it.
Work on My Local SEO Course
I actually wanted to launch this course in June, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that. If that’s not possible, I at least need to have it near completion by the end of the month.
Launch My Coaching Service
This shouldn’t be that difficult to do.
This was one of the primary reasons I decided to go to HTTPS, I figured it couldn’t be much harder making the entire site HTTPS. All I really have to do is setup the page. Even though I don’t expect it to be a high volume offer, I still want to wait a little bit longer so I can prepare better. It’s going to be a more high end type deal, so either way, it will be a nice experiment.
Create Sales Pages for My Products
This should have been done a long time ago.
Right now if someone buys my agency blueprint, they have to go to the Warrior Forum, then click the buy button, then go to Gumroad and buy. I should have the process entirely on this site.
I do enjoy having WarriorForum traffic, but it’s mostly through my signature on WF, I might as well bring it to this blog instead.
Get Organized
Probably the most important thing I need to do in June is get organized. Go through all my old blog posts, add proper tagging, clean up my evernote cabinet which is a disaster, my email is a mess, my aweber account needs to be cleaned.
There’s a lot I need to do just to lay a foundation for this blog. It’s crazy that 1 year and a couple months after launching, I’m still in a baby phase without a solid foundation.
I can’t grow unless there’s solid ground to stand on.
Final Thoughts
Kind of a rough month for me, to be honest. It wasn’t that bad, I certainly had worse but the lack of focus and lack of planning made it really bad. Usually when I set some goals, I can at least cross off half of them, but I guess I had the pre-summer funk.
Oh well, not every income and traffic report is going to be great. That’s the point of it all. If I didn’t do these, I probably wouldn’t be paying attention as closely as I am, and wouldn’t make the necessary adjustments.
Sometimes we all need to take a sort of inventory of our efforts, in order to make adjustments and improve as we continue down our paths.
What I find most interesting is your value per visit. You might not be growing as fast as you want but your earnings per visit is very good.
I love watching income reports. I must say that I’m eager to see how you get to the next level of income and traffic.
I like to think of it that way too lol. I’m also eager to see how to get to the next level. The biggest problem is time, and how to effectively use my time for the blog instead of getting sucked into time consuming tasks that don’t make a long term impact.
I feel you on the getting organized point. Big struggles with that all the time. Most would say I’m an organized person, but maybe it takes an organized person to realize how unorganized their shit is
Yep… I’m big on organization but if I let my email get out of control for a few days, then it’s a mess. My evernote is a disaster, have outdated logins, notes, a bunch of stuff that used to help me stay organized but I’ve let that slip up quite a bit.
Do you have a backlinking or outreach plan so some of your posts move up in the serps? That seems like a way to get some easy movement.
Congrats on the niche hacks post.
Hey Chris, good question. No, I don’t really have an outreach plan, just letting things happen naturally. I will probably start some sort of outreach in the near future.
Very inspirational! I look forward to seeing more of your success :o)
Thank you for sharing the report! New here and I learned a lot. I published my first revenue report yesterday and I’m looking forward to seeing the one I’ll post in July 2017!
I followed you on Twitter right now. I just wanted to let you know that I couldn’t find your follow-me Twitter icon on the blog. Not sure if that was intended or not. I ended up clicking through the link in this post to get there.
What’s your twitter user name? It’s somewhat intentional, I don’t want to distract away from the blog. My focus isn’t really to gain followers to my twitter from my blog, my focus with Twitter is to use the network to funnel in visitors TO my blog.
Hey Anne, thanks for coming by. I’ll go and check yours out!
I really like the format of your income reports, especially the tables to see how the numbers have changed. Have you considered adding some charts of these numbers?
I’ve just begun my passive income journey and it’s started rather poorly as the ad network and affiliate links scheme I was hoping to join refused my application. Totally my naive fault, it just mean more work ahead.
According to the rejection comments, I need to spend close to 40 hours per week on content too. Eeek!
Hey Matt, good suggestion on the charts. I’ve tried out a few plugins but didn’t find one I liked. Have any recommendations?
40 hours a week on content? Geeze.. I’m not very savvy about different ad networks and affiliate networks. Can you just go to an easier one?
I was thinking of something like Excel and then just taking screenshots. I’m afraid I don’t know of anything more exciting.
I think you’re right about different ad networks, from what I’ve read since then there are a *lot* around!
I hate excel, but you’re probably right lol. I’ve tried out a few WP plugins but haven’t found one that worked the way I wanted.