Stats & Analysis for March 2008 – $2,091 earned
Last month I broke the $2000 mark with income which was largely due to my ebook. To be perfectly honest I did not expect to match it this month but I did! In fact, I earned just a few dollars more which is rather cool. Lets get straight to the money…
Income
- Bluehost – $1,690
- Keyword Elite Software – $97.08
- 20 Ways to Make $100 a Day ebook – $76.95
- SeoMoz Membership – $60
- Teaching Sells – $51
- Direct advertising sales – $47.75
- AdSense – $32.43
- The Easy SEO Report – $10
- Standing Start Profits membership site – $8.73
- StumbleUpon Traffic ebook – $8
- Zen to Done ebook – $4.75
- Deal Dot Com sales – $4.73
Total income earned during March 2008 – $2,091.42
Like last month, I was unable to access live statistics for Blog Mastermind which might boost the final figures when commission details come in.
A strange thing started happening this month – I found transactions from products that I didn’t even know I had promoted! To figure out what the ClickBank sales were I had to form the hoplink using the publisher code in the stats to work out what I had sold! I have no clue when I promoted Standing Start Profits, but I must have done at some point.
The Keyword Elite software was promoted, well mentioned, in my ebook. This is where having assets such as an ebook can build a passive revenue over time because they keep earning trickles of income, even many months after initial release.
Bluehost Commission Breakdown
One thing that I wanted to do last month but was unable to was to break down exactly where my Bluehost sales had come from. Only the last 2 periods (of two weeks) are available in detail and I didn’t realise that so this month at the end of each period I wrote down the details of where my sales had come from. For March this is that breakdown:
- WordPress ebook: 14 ($910)
- Banner in blog header: 9 ($585)
- Others: 3 ($195)
It was a similar breakdown in February though I don’t have the exact numbers. I was expecting to see sales of BlueHost dry up in March. I assumed that most of the signups came from the ebook at the time when I did the email marketing campaign but that is not the whole story.
The download page for the ebook had 5,637 pageviews this month which is only slightly less than last month. Therefore even though I’m sure the email campaign brought in a lot of initial traffic, the traffic continues to come in. I am sure that the promotional box that I have on my header section helps a lot which means that as long as this blog gets traffic, the ebook will get downloaded and new sales can continue to come in.
Another assumption I am making is that many people do not read an ebook as soon as they download it. I am terrible for this – I download ebooks all the time and then forget about them. On my hard drive right now in my Internet Marketing folder are sitting over 100 ebooks and reports! I have read some of them but certainly not all. However, whenever I am about to do something new, I go look at my books and read relevant ones and I suspect other people do this too. So my assumption is that as long as my ebook remains on people’s hard drives, there is the possibility of sales continuing to trickle in for months or possibly even years into the future.
Blog Stats
RSS Subscribers
Last month I ended on 1,593 subscribers and yesterday I ended March on 1,811 bringing my growth this month to an additional 218 subscribers, *hello* :-)
So the growth is about the same as it was last month, around 200 new subscribers. It’s nice to see steady growth month after month. If the numbers continued to grow by around 200 every month I would double my subscribers by the end of the year which would be pretty good and that seems quite feasible.
Traffic Stats
Here’s the overview graph.
Analytics is playing up slightly by showing a zero on the 31st when there were actually 691 visits on that day. I’m pleased to see a few more ‘hills’ in the graph this month – what that indicates is that certain posts do quite well and bring in more traffic than usual. These are traffic numbers:
All of the numbers are up slightly from last month. Page views had an increase of around 5000 views which might have had something to do with my Easter Egg Hunt :-)
Traffic Sources
Search engine traffic is continuing to increase every single month, now accounting for 18% of my traffic which I am pleased with. Direct traffic was also up from last month which means that more people have my site bookmarked or are reaching me from a link in an external file such as my ebook.
Referral Traffic Analysis
Here are my top 10 referrers for March:
- StumbleUpon (3,248)
- The Warrior Forum (455)
- 45n5 Top 100 (359)
- Twitter (338)
- Delicious (173)
- Josh Spaulding (160)
- Teaching Sells (157)
- ProBlogger (154)
- LifeHacker (151)
- Courtney Tuttle (136)
One big surprise here was the Warrior Forum. I wrote a post about the Warrior Forum a few weeks ago as part of the marketing campaign for my ebook. I had intended to list my ebook and somebody else did it for me. I didn’t expect the listing to last long on the front page but I was wrong! It is still on the front page, it’s now a hot topic and that post has had 880 views. With 455 clicks that means that over half the people who viewed the post clicked through to my page – not bad!
You might also be wondering what Teaching Sells is doing in there – aren’t I supposed to be sending traffic to them? One of the advanced courses that is now being taught is all about creating niche sites and Tony Clark emailed me to ask if he could include my ebook as a resource for members which of course I agreed to.
As I looked through my referrers I was interested to note that I had inbound links from 776 individual websites! That’s quite a lot of links and over 150 of those sent me over 10 visitors and aren’t just spam links.
Keywords
Searches for my name almost doubled this month bringing in over 600 visitors and there were a total of 2,577 individual searches used to find me this month! That is what you call long-tail traffic. It took me hours to look through them all but doing so was an extremely valuable exercise and gave me a ton of ideas for future blog posts. I’m going to write a post about how to put your stats to good use!
As always, some of my more popular posts are attracting a large number of search terms. Posts such as the twitter guide, dofollow social bookmarking sites, and embedding youtube videos into wordpress all continue to attract a lot of searches.
However, what I have noticed this month is that I am getting traffic for more recent posts. For example, I saw a whole load of keyword searches related to the Easter Egg Hunt and this was posted less than 2 weeks ago. This tells me that my blog is certainly out of the Google Sandbox now which allows it to rank more quickly for new keywords.
Summary
Financially, I earned almost the same as I did in February which was a really nice surprise. I was pleased to see continued growth in RSS and traffic stats though it wasn’t exactly earth shattering growth. What I am noticing though is that successes from the past continue to work for me long after the initial work has been done.
My Wordpress ebook continues to make me money, old blog posts continue to bring in new traffic, ebook promotions are still working long after they were done. Every blog post that I write and every promotion that I do tends to bring results for a very long time. If that trend continues then I can only expect to see that growth continue month after month after month which means that a year from now, I could be seeing much larger numbers for the same amount of work time invested.
I passed the 6 month mark last week which was a big milestone for me. In those 6 months I have seen many blogs come and go. Its true what they say that the vast majority of new blogs do not make it past 3 months. I can tell you now that it really does get easier over time. If you are a new blogger who is struggling, hang in there!
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@Mark, you know that’s a shame in a way because i WANT people to be able to copy me – that’s why I try and lay out exactly what I do. Okay you can’t copy my specific words and ideas but everybody has their own individualism and if you can apply that in the same way I’m sure anybody else can have similar results.
And yeah I’m not into bashing, everybody is entitled to their opinion. The only thing I would edit out on here is profanity or personal abuse.
Caroline,
I am a 6 month IM person as well and I think I have just found a new home!
I totally agree that most people professing to help others in this business only give small chunks. That, unfortunately, is where I’m at.
I have an affiliate site I recently converted to WP that has not made me a penny, the blog cited above and a Build A Niche Store that I’m in the process of doing SEO on.
For the last two years, I’ve been selling mint vintage childrens books on ebay. As the collection is coming to a close and the money has all but dried up, I have been trying to develop on stream after another but none are flowing yet.
I’ll be reading your site inside and out for the forseeable future because you have so much to teach me.
I know that most readers of comments dislike hearing yet another story from a guy who’s busting his butt and getting nowhere so I apologize in advance to them.
I’m really glad to see you are making some money and I would kill to have my readership anywhere near yours.
Perhaps if I take to heart your many lessons and use the information I’ll get there much much sooner.
I’ve subscribed and I’ll definitely be back!
Jeff
Jeff Jones’s last blog post..Can One High Quality Link Really Make A Difference?
@Caroline — agreed. It’s not that you have not been completely clear about what you are doing (which has been really helpful to so many of us). I just meant to say that a lot of the reason that you have 1800 subscribers is because of you and not because of some formula. This just an opinion from a random guy…(me).
Mark Mason’s last blog post..Filsame is Brilliant — Butterfly Reports is Live
Hi Caroline, Congrats on the great month. As someone who’s only making $50 a month, you’re a role model.
Quick question about your BlueHost commissions. Which affiliate network are you working through?
Doing the math, it looks like you’re making $65 per sale. Is that per sale of a 12/24 month hosting plan? Have you looked into Commission Junction? Bluehost offers $90 per sale through CJ.
I’ve heard mixed things about some of the affiliate networks out there. Someone said that some of the networks are shady and scraping some of the profits off for themselves. (I forget the term). I’ve never run anything outside of CJ, so don’t have any experiences to share. Any thoughts?
WebDiggin’s last blog post..You have a 1 in 14 chance of winning $5
@Jeff, if you have a scan through the archives I have quite a few posts where I do breakdowns of large subscriber jumps, effects of my twitter guide, ebook and so on. Also the monthly stats posts like this one break down a lot of the details. Start with those posts :)
@WebDiggin, yes BlueHost pay out a flat $65 per sale, regardless of whether its a 12 month or 24 month plan. I go directly through their site, I wasn’t even aware you could go through CJ! I’ll have to look into it.
Caroline,
I will absolutely be going through your posts because I have a lot to learn and your talent for putting it in terms that mean sense is extraordinary!
I’ll be back and checking in for sure.
Thank you,
Jeff
Jeff Jones’s last blog post..I’m Going To Start Making Money With Build A Niche Stores!
Great post Caroline, it is certainly very courageous of you to reveal your income statistics as your are!
[...] For example, Caroline shares her web stats and earnings for the month of March here. [...]
1. Dearly Beloved Caroline:
2. Greetings!
3. I think, at this point, you beat me to it and there is no two cents for you! :-)
4. Trust you do not need it anyways… Got over £1000 pounds already! ;-)
5. If someone is listening, I just have this to add…
6. When you choose to help others WITHOUT THE FEAR OF LOSING energy, time, talent, treasure, gifts, ideas, skill and many other things that we all cling to, the REWARDS are always enormous.
7. Now, it may not come overnight, but it will SLOWLY and SURELY come OVER TIME!
8. All Caroline does here is help people, most especially “ME”, do not know if anyone else genuinely gain one or two things from here but I do each time I visit and that “MUST” pay off someway in the long run for Caroline.
9. Keep this quote in mind each time you do something on this planet…
10. What You Make Happen For Others, “GOD” Will Make Happen For You!
11. Note that, it is not the people you did it for that will necessarily make your visions and dreams happen, but “God” who rewards every seed sower with abundant harvest.
12. Hope those two cents will go round to everyone who gets this.
13. Remain blessed and a blessing and please do not forget that there is always room for improvement Caroline. That is one room that can never ever get filled.
14. It is always my prayer that every one that “genuinely help” others, will “reap the rewards of their labour” and interestingly enough, Caroline is a point of contact for everyone wearing that shoe.
15. We shall communicate again soon if God is willing!
16. High regards,
17. Olakunle Solomon Fatoye.
Olakunle Solomon Fatoye’s last blog post..How to Choose the Best Home Business for You
@Olakunle, thank for you for your thoughtful comments as always. I prefer to think of “God” as the Universe. Everybody has their own definition. I’m glad that I can help people with this blog, that is my intention :-)
Nice! well done Caroline. I made €6,- last month lol…just started though:-)
André
André’s last blog post..Video – SEO Optimization: Top Google Rankings FAST
@Andre, well they say the first dollar is the hardest! It took me something like 4 months to start making any money and then it went up quicker from there so well done!
Thank you, that means a lot to me. I was so happy when I saw my first euro on my Tradedoubler account!
I realized that I did quite well when I read your article about the 30 day challenge! €6,- is about $9,40.
Now I am hooked and there is no way back :-)
I learned alot from your website, keep up the good work!
- André
André’s last blog post..Searchengine Classification
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I’m new to blogging as I just started for the past couple of week. I never thought the idea of having income from it was real. My blog sits in a free wordpress.com.
Thank you for the new insightful thought of having income from blogging.
azris last blog post..Witch Yoo Hee(Korean Drama)
@azri, the vast majority of the income earned in this month was due to my ebook. Although I couldn’t have done that without the blog, I certainly wouldn’t have earned as much without the ebook!