September and October Combined Income/Traffic Report

Welcome to another IncomeBully Income Report!

Income reports aren’t exactly a new thing for a lot of bloggers, I’m not the first one to do this. The reason I’m doing it is to track the progress from the very beginning stages. It seems that a lot of the more popular blogs that have been doing income reports, started tracking income a while after building a presence.

My income reports, started from day 1… no waiting around to show fluffed up numbers to boost my ego. This in my opinion, is more beneficial to the readers here, but it’s also beneficial to me to break down each month and see what needs improvement, and what has worked to generate more traffic and income.

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

What Happened in the Last Two Months?

First, I want to apologize to you all that I haven’t been keeping the blog updated in September and October… and for that matter, a good chunk of November.

I’ve had a lot of things going on offline, and other businesses that have stopped me from being able to update the blog. It’s no excuse though, I should have had content planned, created, and scheduled for periods of time that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with it.

Big mistake on my part, because traffic and income from the blog have taken a devastating hit. You can’t expect to increase traffic, or revenue on something that isn’t active and up to date!

It wasn’t just these past couple months though, even the month of August had a period of inactivity.

So what have I been up to?

I’ve been working on finishing up a big consulting project that has taken up more time than I anticipated. That’s finished now so a lot of time has freed up.

I’ve also taken on a personal project for a small business to help with their website and SEO. That project has taken much longer than expect due to the consulting project, but now that I’m 100% back I should be able to knock that out in no time.

There’s been a few offline projects as well, but it really isn’t exciting so I won’t bore you with the details.

What I’ve Learned

Look, we all know that if you have a blog and you aren’t posting regularly, the results aren’t going to be very good. I already knew that, but even during a period of neglect, the blog still generated an income.

That is no reason to believe that a blog can survive without frequent or at the very least, steady updates. However, I see it as a sign of encouragement. It’s a testament to how beneficial a blog can be as long as you continue to put forth a strong effort.

As we get through this report you will see a significant drop in income as well as traffic. The same will probably be said for the November Income Report that I’ll post on December 1st. That is to be expected, but at the same time a very good sign that I’ve still generated a little bit of income and traffic while away.

To get back on track.. and to prove I learned my lesson.. I need a plan!

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Plan Going Forward…

In order to prepare for the unexpected detours life tends to provide, I need to have a plan and I need to execute that plan.

I need to take steps in order to prevent this blog from ever becoming derelict.

1.) I need to prepare scheduled content.
This should have been an obvious one. If I had enough content prepared, even at a posting rate less frequent than what visitors have been used to, it could have made a huge difference in income and traffic. It also would have prevented me from regressing the position of the blog. I made great strides in the early months and this small period of neglect has now set me back.

If I had content already created and scheduled, it would appear as if I never left!

2.) Reduce my load of content.
This doesn’t mean I need to slow down on content or slow down on production. Instead, what I mean by reducing MY load of content is that I should be establishing relationships with others and have some guest posters on a regular schedule. For example, Paul Savidge made a few contributions like his Beginner’s Guide to CRO.

Having a network of guest bloggers or contributors would allow for regularly posted content… quality content. This would help me, them, the blog and the visitors.

It wouldn’t just be beneficial as a safe guard for inactivity, it would improve the quality of the blog and offer different perspectives as well as providing beneficial content in areas that I don’t specialize in.

3.) Start Varying the TYPES of Content published.
For those of you that produce a bunch of content, blog regularly, publish content for clients, etc. I’m sure you all understand how time consuming textual blog entries can be.

I will undoubtedly encounter more situations or periods of time where I won’t have enough time to sit down, and type out 2,000 words or so every other day for the blog. However, it wouldn’t be difficult to use something like Periscope, or Google Hangouts and make a video post for the blog.

Another thing I’d like to do is start a podcast for the blog. Ever since Tyson Downs contributed his guest post on how to start a podcast, I’ve been wanting to implement it as an additional form of content. Though, it’s not necessarily a quick and easy solution, I could record a group of podcasts in one setting and schedule them out over a period of time.

With these 3 steps I should be able to prevent something like this happening again, and also bring the blog to a new level.

Alright… so lets get to the interesting stuff.

September/October 2015 Income Analysis

Here’s the breakdown.

My Ultimate Blueprint To Start a Web Agency
Ice Cold Email Gold – The Key to Cold Email Marketing Mastery
Total Self Created Product Income : September – $1,780 / October – $1,010

I just combined my two guides/courses as one income stream. In the year end report I will break down both of them by income.

Affiliate Income

Mobile Renegade – September – $45.06 / October – $67.59

Clicks Magazine – September – $17 / October – $17

Arvixe Web Hosting – September – $70 / October – $70

BlueHost – September – $0 / October – $65

MyThemeShop – September – $0 / October – $48

TOTAL Affiliate Income – September – $132.06 / October – $267.59

Total Overall Income – September – $1,912.06  / October – $1,277.59

As you can see, big dip in income. Later in the tabled that I publish to show progress month by month, you will be able to see how big of a drop it is!

I was surprised to see October beating September in affiliate income.

I was also surprised to see my very first affiliate commission from mythemeshop after the blog has been so inactive. In fact, a few months ago I talked about possibly removing the mythemeshop ad because of piss poor conversions it receives on their end. I’m still considering that as a possibility.

Below is a table to show the progress along with other metrics of the blog on a month by month basis. Since this is a combined report, I haven’t tracked end of September or October metrics like followers, email subscribers, alexa rank, so in the table you will see N/A displayed for September, but October will display today’s numbers.

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

As you can see, a drop in traffic leads to a drop in income. I also had an increased bounce rate, likely due to many of you coming back here to see if there’s something new, then leaving right away, so my metrics are a bit messed up!

I also lost some twitter followers, but gained a couple youtube subscribers as well as continued to build my email list even though it has been at a very slow pace in the last 2 months!

Plans for November (The rest of it)

Being nearly halfway through the month of November, I don’t have specific plans for the blog that are exactly ground breaking. Now that I’m back in action, I’m going to start executing my plan and start publishing content again.

I do have a couple ideas for affiliate niche sites that I would like to get started on, one of which I think can generate passive income for quite some time with hardly any on going work to the website. We will see how that goes!

To put it simply, the only thing I really want to focus on for the rest of the month is getting things back on track. Using Twitter again and expanding my reach, publishing regular content, attempt to build traffic back up and also revenue.

I pretty much screwed myself over with this period of neglect. The progress I made has been lost, and I’m sure it’s going to take those 2 months I missed, and then some in order to catch up!

Final Thoughts

My thoughts are conflicted when it comes to the last couple months. I’m disappointed in myself for not making the time to keep up with everything but I’m also glad to see that even though I had a big reduction in traffic and income that it STILL did produce a very modest income.

People are struggling to make $100/mo when it comes to the internet and their blogs but I managed to do that without a single post, or a single email to my list in the last couple months.

I’m motivated by both things.. the disappointment I have in myself, but also motivated by the huge potential there is.

I suppose that’s it for now, but make sure to keep coming back because there definitely will be new content coming up!