Welcome to my monthly income report for January 2016!
Since October 2015, every month I publish a detailed report with all the accounts for my online businesses. On them I include the earnings and expenses, I tell a little bit about my personal experience and what new things I have been trying during this period of time. I explain as well what my future targets are and if the previous ones have been achieved or not. Why doing this?
It helps me to keep track of my personal finances. In any moment of time I can look back at my reports and see what steps and results I got from determined strategies, like a log book.
Increase trusting. I also want to show you that I am a real person starting from the first step. There are many amazing bloggers out there reporting their incomes of thousands of dollars, but I found very little bloggers reporting low amounts of money like me. I think this can help to starters and to people who are not decided yet to start their own online business.
Motivation. Writing here my results will put me on that kind of uncomfortable position in which I need to demonstrate that I can go one step further instead of getting lazy and rely in excuses. My finances are open to everybody!
All earnings here reported are coming from Passive Income sources. I am not including any kind of outsourcing because the intention is you show you how far I can go with only passive income sources.
This is my fourth month reporting my accounts and I’m liking it a lot despite the little time I’ve been spending due to some personal stuff. I love blogging!
You can have a look to my previous monthly income reports:
Income Report October 2015: $75.91
Income Report November 2015: $117.61
Income Report December 2015: $161.53
If you want to follow my future Income Reports you can subscribe to my email list.
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CONTENT CREATION
For the purposes of this section I will include the posts/pages created for each of my Niche Sites and then for the PIW blog:
Niche Site 1
I’ve published 6 new posts, one of them with more than 6,000 words and the others between 1,000 and 2,000. I’m focusing in quality content. The truth is that 3 of these posts have been written by participants voluntary, people passionate about my Niche that want some exposure and I happily accepted. Two of them are doing well with 325 and 144 visits from organic traffic. Ouh yeah! I just realised that the higher the Domain Authority of your website the sooner Google will index your new posts in high ranks.
I created a new content strategy for NS1 which requires a lot of work but that hopefully will multiply my traffic x3. For it I need to create new content and optimize the SEO of almost 400 already created posts. That’s why this month I put a lot of energy in my NS1 and I already updated around 200 posts out of 400. These updates are giving more value to the content and include some long tail keywords which will help to rank higher. For February I need to keep working on it since still there is a lot of work to do.
Nothing else in particular, a little bit of maintenance here, some comments reply there… and that’s it! A total of around 35 hours spent on my Niche Site 1.
Passive Income Wise
Here is the list the posts and pages included during this time so you can have a look to what I’ve been working on this month
Passive Income Report December 2015
10 Tips to Save Money and Increase Your Savings in a 30%
How Did I Save $179.67 in My Car Insurance
The Ultimate Guide to Smart Link Building (respecting the Penguin). This last one it’s a very interesting tutorial (updated for 2016) about how to do proper backlinking and improve your SEO.
This month I have written two “saving” posts. With them I intend to help people saving money because life is not only a matter of earning more but saving too. That’s why I created the “Save Money” page in the blog.
INCOME REPORT
Google Adsense (from niche site 1): $135.07
Previous Month: $152.07
Diference: – $17.00
The Blogger Network (from niche site 1): $84.37
Previous Month: Not included
Diference: + $84.37
YouTube (from niche site 1): $1.28
Previous month: $2.04
Difference: – $0.76
Amazon Affiliate Program: $0.00
Previous month: $2.52
Difference: – $2.52
ShareASale Affiliate Program: $6.66 Click here to register for free with ShareASale
Previous Month: $4.90
Difference: + $1.76
AdWorkMedia CPA Affiliate Program: $0.95 Click here to register for free with AdWorkMedia
Previous Month: No available
Difference: + $0.95
Bluehost: $0.00 Click here to register your hosting with Bluehost
Previous Month: $0.00
Difference: + $0.00
Another month with zero earnings from Bluehost. Hopefully one day I will get anything from it because it’s a really good service to promote and for somebody trying to start it would be an amazing purchase.
EXPENSES
This month I needed to upgrade the hosting for my Niche Site 1. Before I was using a shared hosting with a limitation of 150 GB of transfer data, now I have my own VPS in where I have up to 5,000 GB and host unlimited number of domains. A total of $70.00.
The initial investment for the hosting and domain name (for PIW) was done in October and this one is already running for free.
Net Total Balance: $228.33
Previous month: $161.53
Difference: + $66.80 (+ 41.3%)
January has been the best month so far since I started in October 2015. The amazing here is the addition of The Blogger Network as an advertisement network for my Niche Site 1; $84.37 for a month where the ads started displaying the 20th of January, so in only 11 days I can see is a big success and will be my great ally for the next month for sure. As a consequence, Adsense earnings decreased a little bit because now it’s sharing ad blocks with The Blogger Network. I display TBN ads in the header and sidebar, and Adsense blocks inside the content. They fit really nicely both together but I have some suspects that if I only display TBN ads my earnings will increase.
Anyway, I will let both running together for one whole month and then start experimenting to see the performance of each one.
This is my fourth month reporting my accounts and is going up and up. Obviously it’s nothing to compare with other famous bloggers (which you can fin in my Favourite Bloggers Income Reports), but for a starter like me it’s considered an important milestone. I am above the $200 and this is starting to be very exciting.
TRAFFIC AND METRICS
Since last month I decided that I’m going to report only the most important metrics for each of my websites because before I was reporting pretty much everything and perhaps at some points it was so much information. This month I add all the metrics and then a small comment by the end.
Niche Site 1
In January I wrote 6 new posts and I updated around 200 posts. However, the results from those 200 updates will take time to see. Almost not social media promotion and I didn’t work in backlinks. This website is working now in auto pilot.
Page views: 299,810 (+36,042 compared to December 2015)
Average Session Duration: 2min 41secs (2min 38secs on December 2015)
Number of new people visiting the site: 58,816 (+6,830 compared to December 2015)
A total of 92,447 visits are coming from organic search, 99% of them from Google. In fact organic traffic has always been the real target. Three months ago the organic traffic was only one third of what has been in January, this is crazy!
The reason why I have this large amount of Organic Traffic is because since the beginning I started using a very powerful tool: Long Tail Pro. This tool allowed me to find keywords with low competition and high search volume. 90% of the traffic is coming from long tail keywords which are the ones I obtained from Long Tail Pro. You can try it out, they offer a 10 days free trial, time enough to do proper research before starting a website. In my case I use it almost every day each time a write a new piece of content.
Niche Site 1 is a gold mine and I need to keep working on it. The goal is to increase this amount x3 by the end of 2016, will it be possible?
Google Adsense Metrics
I would really like to share more data from my Adsense account but since the politics of Adsense are very restrictive I will post the maximum I can.
Cost per Click (CPC): $0.21
Clicks: 668 with a total of 693k ads impressions
Page RPM: $0.66
Now you will wonder why this low CPC and RPM. The explanation here: Niche Site 1 is in a niche that is not lucrative, however as you can see it is easy to get a high volume in traffic. When I first created Niche Site 1 the idea wasn’t make money out of it but with the time I realised the potentiality of creating a small business with it.
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Passive Income Wise
PIW has increased the traffic compared with last month. Traffic is more stable as well and every day I received a minimum of 30 visits. Since the beginning of the month I have been working actively in a marketing forum (Warrior Forum) and I have received some visits from there too.
Page views: 3,376 (+983 compared to December 2015)
Average Session Duration: 1min 56secs (2min 11secs on December 2015)
Number of new people visiting the site: 1,358 (+353 compared to December 2015)
Interesting numbers. Referrals and Organic continue increasing compared with December. This is because I created My own personal list of Favourite Bloggers and their Income Reports. What I did is to send comments to those bloggers added to the list telling them that they are part of it. Some visits from organic search meaning that Google has already indexed Passive Income Wise. That’s good stuff!
With almost doble visits than the second one, the Favourite Bloggers page is the most popular in the entire blog. As every month, the previous income report is always one of the most visited too, it seems people like to read them. Other of the popular post has been The Marvelous 17 Steps to Start a Blog with Bluehost, apparently there is a big demand in online tutorials and people learn by reading them.
GLOBAL STATS (SEO)
In December I started this new section and I will keeping this month too. It includes the global and general stats of my Passive Income Wise blog. These indicators are SEO metrics which will help me to know “more or less” how the website is growing along the time.
I am very surprised of the growing in terms of SEO. With a total of 432 backlinks and Domain Authority of 12 I am sure that February will have much more organic traffic. After all, SEO is about numbers. I am quite happy with these metrics because out of the 432 backlinks I only created less than half of them, so the other half are coming from people sharing my content =)
To check the number of backlinks and where they are coming from I use Moz or Ahrefs, however Semrush offers a really good service too.
If you want to learn about how to do proper backlink and increase you SEO as I did, you should read The Ultimate Guide to Smart Link Building (respecting Google Penguin). All my strategies are reported there and you can follow them step by step and obtain similar results than me or even better.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Since last month I only report social medial related with PIW.
Facebook. Support Passive Income Wise Liking us on Facebook or with a Friend Request.
Likes Page: 161 (+94 New Likes)
Friends: 1,430 (+1,191 New Friends)
Twitter. If you don’t want to miss any of my new tweets follow Passive Income Wise on Twitter
Followers: 1,040 (+214 New Followers)
Pinterest. Check out my new Pins by following Passive Income Wise on Pinterest
Followers: 506 (+506 New Followers)
Email List.
Subscriptions: 48 (+34 New Subscriptions)
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In January I joined Pinterest as I read that many bloggers drive a lot of traffic from there. So, why not? Let’s give it a try.
Last month I was worried about mail subscriptions. What I did this month is to ad an Opt-in at the beginning of every post and giving for free a guide about How to Create the Right Niche in 3 Steps. If you don’t have it yet, perhaps it’s time to think in subscribing. For the Opt-in I use a free plugin called PopupAlly, very easy to implement.
TARGETS FROM DECEMBER 2015, COMPLETED OR FAIL?
Earn $150 from Google Adsense (Keep the same amount than last month) COMPLETED
Create 5 to 10 new posts for Passive Income Wise. ALMOST
Update content in Niche Site 1 and create at least 10 new posts. ALMOST
Double the traffic in Passive Income Wise. FAIL
This month I spent most of my time changing the SEO in Niche Site 1 and therefore I couldn’t complete most of my targets. Still I’m happy because I did so many other productive things. Perhaps I’ve been a little bit greedy in thinking about doubling the traffic, I don’t know.
FUTURE WORK AND TARGETS
As a future work for December 2015 the followings are my targets:
Earn $300 from Advertisement Networks
Create 5 to 10 new posts for Passive Income Wise.
Update the remaining 200 posts in content in Niche Site 1.
Create at least 10 new posts for Niche Site 1.
Double the traffic in Passive Income Wise.
Create a “in depth” guide about how to use Long Tail Pro and doing keyword research.
This month is going to be very challenging, my targets are very high and I will need to work hard towards them. Plus on top of that I am finishing the second year of my PhD and my company is asking for results and reports.
Did you like my January Income Report? Are you interested in earning income online?
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This post contains affiliate links. These products have helped me to grow my blog and to generate more passive income.
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