September 2016 Income and Traffic Report

It’s hard to believe we’re already in October. A few more months and we’ll be kicking off 2017. Time really is flying by, and it brings back all the memories of when I was a kid, and it seemed like it took forever just to get to the weekend.

Now, I turned 30, and it seemed like it was a week ago, but already a couple months went by. It seemed like yesterday when I published the August Income and Traffic report.

Crazy how fast time goes by.

Time isn’t very kind if we’re not being productive. It carries on no matter what you decide to do. Procrastination definitely doesn’t help, and putting off making a decision regarding your future, is not going to do you any favors.

Enough with the reflection, let’s get down to what happened in the month of September.

What Happened in September?

If you read last month’s report, you know that I’ve been struggling with being productive on this blog, and managing my time, creating content, and pushing forward.

While the struggle will probably continue, September was a good step forward in overall productivity.

Have Been Working on the Local SEO Course

One project I’ve been working on for a while, is my local SEO course. A lot of you have been asking about it, and I’ve finally been able to make a lot of progress on the course. I do have a release date in mind for early December. The official date will be announced later this month.

This course is going to be the most comprehensive local SEO training on the market. The initial release will be by PDF. Eventually, I will release an audio and video version for the course, but the focus right now is on the PDF version. The upgrades will be available probably in February.

There’s going to be a lot of content, so I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to format it to make it easier to consume.

Included in the Passive Income Wise Round Up

I really like the income round ups people have been doing. Matthew Woodward’s blog usually brings quite a bit of traffic when he posts his income round up that includes this blog.

This month, PassiveIncomeWise started doing these round ups as well, and dropped by to let me know. He has a list of 24 bloggers, making 531K/mo combined. Pretty impressive stuff.

Been Meeting With Tax Attorneys and CPAs

This is something very time consuming that I’ve been wanting to do. I’ve already used CPAs and tax attorneys in previous businesses but I’ve been wanting to get a consensus opinion on situations with blogs and semi passive income.

What I’ve been doing is using thumbtack, and other sources to bring these people to me. My offer was to pay a fee for an hour, + lunch/dinner/beers in exchange for information and their opinions.

What happened, is that I’ve been able to get a pretty cheap consulting fee since it is a more casual environment.

The outcome? I found out that I know a hell of a lot more about tax law and tax strategies than the people I was meeting with.

I’ll be doing a post on different business structures for those in the US, and detailing the experience pretty soon. However, my advice to all of you, if you have a good CPA or tax attorney, keep them around because they are definitely rare.

New Content In September

Local SEO 911: Algo Updates? Changes? Hold Onto Your Wallet!

Are You a F*#!ING Entrepreneur or a Thin Skinned Cry Baby?

The 3 Step Workshop System – Teach First, Makes Selling Easy Later

3 Project Management Hacks to Skyrocket Your Productivity

September 2016 Income and Traffic Stats

Self Created Income/Courses

• Ice Cold Email Gold
• Ultimate Blueprint To Start a Web Agency

Income: $1,443

Coaching Income

• 2 Sessions

Note: Page coming soon for coaching.

• Project Consulting – $6,000

Coaching sessions – $550

Income: 6,550

Note: This is income that isn’t directly made through the blog, but without the blog wouldn’t have been made.

Affiliate Income

• Long Tail Pro – $1 trial (see my review here)
• NameHero Hosting – $0 (review)
• Clicks Magazine – $17
• Mobile Renegade – $ 157.71 (See it in action here)
• Mobile Renegade Mega Deal with Facebook Plugin – $139.68 (Blog post + Video)
  
• TeamWork Project Management – $6
• Social Pilot – $3

Affiliate Income – $323.39

TOTAL Income Bully Blog Income – $8,316.39

Thoughts on September Income

Well, it’s hard to be disappointed when I was about $70 away from breaking my record month in income from this blog. That being said, if it weren’t for the miscellaneous income, I’d be in the same spot that I’ve been for the majority of the time, staying at the average amount around $3,300.

No commissions or referrals to NameHero this month, but that’s not necessarily a big surprise. I don’t actively push hosting yet, but once I make my transition away from aweber and completely finish my autoresponder series, I should be able to get at least a few sales here and there for hosting.

Mobile Renegade is rebranding, and going to be called profit renegade, so I’m not sure if the deals I have made with the creators will stay in tact. If I want to continue to bring in commissions from the software, I need to reach out sometime this month and make sure the deal is the same!

The coaching sessions are things I really enjoy, and would like to finally start pushing that instead of just waiting for people to contact me randomly about it because they see or heard I offer coaching.

Overall, the income is fine for the month, but there’s a lot of improvements I need to make.

OTHER METRICS FOR THE BLOG

Alexa Rank – 356,964

Twitter Followers – 3,257 (been inactive for the last 2 months, so an expected decline)

Youtube Channel Subscribers – 71

Google+ Followers – 39

Aweber Email Subscribers – 2,537

More Metrics:

Unique Visitors – 4,535

Bounce Rate – 74.53%

Pages Per Session – 1.57

Average Time On Site – 1:58

Thoughts On Traffic and Blog Metrics

My overall traffic increased this month in comparison to last month, so that’s a good sign. Nowhere near where I want it to be, but if you factor in the amount of money made per visitor, my numbers are some of the very best in the industry, even if you ignore the miscellaneous income this month.

Twitter following has taken a dive, which is to be expected since people will unfollow “inactive” people. I haven’t been on twitter in the last few months, and even though it doesn’t send me the highest quality traffic, it still brings in a few subscribers.

There’s really no excuse for why I should be ignoring it, since at a minimum, all I really need to do is queue up tweets that I already have in a spreadsheet to send traffic to past blog posts.

Other than that, new subscribers were low this month, lower than I would like. I expect a much larger increase in the month of October.

Overall, since there were improvements from last months numbers in unique visitors, I have to be happy that progress was made. I just need to keep pushing forward and focus on higher growth.

All Time Stats For The Blog

*If you guys have a better idea on displaying historical data please let me know. It’s getting to be too much to list everything here. Should I just list the past 12 months and on the income report menu page, display all the data in one place? Let me know!

What I Need To Do in October

There’s a long list of things I need to do, but here are a few that I plan to focus on.

Launch The Coaching Page

I’ve been thinking about it for a while but it just never gets done. I need to just do it. I don’t need it to be pretty, just functional. There’s no point in waiting for perfection.

Add a Sub Menu

One thing that bothers me about this theme I’m using from mythemeshop (shameless plug) is that the menu is limited. I of course can add drop down items, but that takes away from user experience and clarity of navigation. I’d like to add a menu for specific categories, and content below the HOME / ABOUT / ETC. pages.

My pal Majid, member of the IncomeBully Mastermind group will be adding that for me.

Once that’s finished, I guess I need to better organize content, tags, and categories so people can easily find content they’re looking for.

Continue to Polish the SEO Guide

I want to make sure this guide is ready to go, and launched early December. I need to cut the fat, add some more meat and think about organization for easy reading.

I also am waiting for a few anticipated changes to happen at the end of the month, and possibly November, so I can get the right screenshots put in the guide!

FINALLY Finish My Autoresponder Series and Launch FB Campaign

I’ve been talking about this for a while now it seem. I make a tiny bit of progress here and there, but nothing major. This month it’s going to be finished… I promise.

The reason I want to redo my autoresponder is because I’m moving away from aweber, and I haven’t updated the sequence since a year and a half ago. I could do a much better job directing people to older and newer content. I could also do a much better job segmenting subscribers.

One thing I’m really excited about, is also launching a FB ad campaign with a kick ass 7 day FREE boot camp lead magnet. That should really boost subscribers, and also should convert a decent chunk into buyers for my ultimate agency blueprint

Final Thoughts

I have a very busy month in October, which is why It’s the 5th(or 6th depending on where you are), and I’m just now publishing the income report for last month.

Insanely busy, without even factoring in the blog itself.

This will probably be the most challenging time I’ve had since the launch of the blog, and it will certainly be a struggle to meet the goals I set for myself, along with balancing other projects with content creation.

We’ll see how it goes in a month from now!