January 2022 - Most Productive Month So Far!
Analyze This!
Hello WA Friends,
I wanted to get a head start and publish the blog today instead of Saturday as I have a big school assignment due Sunday. Getting sick really affected my productivity this week, however we are still on track to publish all 3 articles by the end of today!
I do have to get one complaint out of the way though first sorry. One frustrating thing I have been dealing with here is the site feedback system. The comment system is amazing and so much better than it used to be, however the site feedback does not seem to function nearly as well. There are 2 places to get site feedback on WA. In the main platform I have been waiting 16 days, and in the comment thread 9 days. Very frustrating! My website link is in my WA profile page so if any of you fabulous people want to give me feedback I would appreciate it greatly. I know I need to improve but I just need some guidance as to what and how.
I mentioned in my previous blog post about how I got lost in the weeds looking at analytics and keyword rankings. I have heard people refer to this as "Paralysis by Analysis". I don't want to fall into this trap again, nevertheless it is the end of the last full week of January 2022. In light of this I thought it might be a good idea to take all analytics data I have so far and do a blog post about it. Going forward I plan on only doing this once a month so I can get feedback from all the awesome WA folks instead of just worrying myself over what I may be doing right or wrong.
If any new people are reading this you should know that had I prioritized the training, I would never have to have waited so long to get results. As the training says our goal should be 3 articles a week, that is of critical importance!
2020
So to start with I will be analyzing the data that GA emailed me, which I created a spreadsheet with. I am not sure when I set up my GA, but the first email report I have is from July 2020. So Let's analyze that 2020 data! The spreadsheet starts in June, however the graph covers the whole year.
Obviously I was not keeping up with things very well in 2020, I had started out with a lot of motivation after finally rejoining WA and re-launching my site. Unfortunately shortly afterwards, my dad had his 3rd heart attack in late 2019. This led me to being very depressed when he refused to do anything the doctors were advising to get healthier (like stop drinking and smoking).
The beginning months of 2020 I was obsessing over these metrics and trying to figure out why keywords weren't ranking, when I should have been making more articles! There was a giant spike in users in June, unfortunately I never saw it or I might have been motivated to produce more. The reason for this is that is around that time both my Dad and my Grandmother died. After the funerals I became even more severely depressed for many months, which as you can see was not good for productivity.
Despite all of this I did manage to publish my first affiliate review article in November 2020, as you can see by the following graph from CJ. Since it was a gardening product I really published it at a terrible time, heading into the winter. It received 70 affiliates clicks and no sales after being published before going back down to just 1 click before the end of the year.
2021
2021 got off to a rocky start. I had finally pulled myself together and gotten over my depression. I enrolled in College courses to begin working on my MBA in January, and worked for DoorDash to pay the bills. Between Work and school, once again I left my WA business sitting on the back-burner causing lackluster results. Although on the bright side I took many classes about starting my own business which have been invaluable to me as I continue this WA journey. Let's dive into the data again!
There is obviously still a TON of room for improvement, but wow I actually made some progress! (Although I could have done a lot better if this had been my top priority.) The website almost doubled the amount of users, sessions, and page views in the second year. On the negative side, the avg. Session duration decreased by about 50% and the bounce rate increased a few percent as well. This means I need to re-evaluate some of my content that people are leaving too quickly to try to make it more engaging. We want our visitors to stay as long as possible!
In April 2021 I added my second affiliate product review. And as I mentioned in my last blog article I made my first sale late in the year, causing me to finally open up my eyes and make the website my top priority. Although in the first year I received 71 Affiliate clicks for 1 company, in 2021, I received 589 for 2 companies. CJ has an awesome feature on their graphs where you can compare with the previous year, as you can see.
2022 (January)
In January 2022 things seem to be taking off. We planned out 30 days of our keywords before the month began as the training says to do. We committed to publishing 3 articles a week as the training says as well. So what have been the results? Obviously January is not over yet so these numbers are a few days premature.
Wow 278 users already! As you can see by the spreadsheets above that is higher than almost every other month except for 2 of them! The bounce rate is way down compared to the last 2-year averages as well, another good sign! Plus the avg. session duration is over 4 minutes, showing that visitors are resonating with the content and spending more time on my website.
Page views for the month are at an astonishing 2,316. This is almost as many as I had in my first entire year, and already at about 50% of what I had for all of 2021 as well! We can see more info about page views in Google Search console Insights (but only for 28 days). This is a great tool and can also show you which pages people are spending time on, and which ones people are clicking away too fast that you might need to improve.
So what about Affiliate clicks? 2 of my CJ affiliates have moved to different platforms, but I will just use the CJ graph to illustrate this and do a more in depth analysis of the affiliates clicks at the end of next month. This blog post is already super long so I don't want to torture you anymore!
So as you can see in all of 2020 their were 71 affiliates clicks with 0 sales. In 2021 their were 589 affiliates clicks with one sale. And just in the first month of 2022 their were already 356 affiliates clicks with 1 sale!
On the down side my keywords still don't seem to be ranking very high but hopefully that improves soon as well.
I know I said I had a big announcement last blog, unfortunately being sick has set things back about a week. If you made it this far thank you so much for reading through all my nerd talk and graphs. I would love to hear your feedback, ideas, suggestions, and comments too!
Wishing you all the best,
Jeremy.
Recent Comments
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Starting my own blog business and this has helped me how the numbers work. I think you are on your way to growing in the right direction. And its only been one month in the new year and your numbers have improved. I'm new to this so maybe this might help but if you go back and amend your articles with words that may improve your numbers, that might help. I've seen bloggers do this. Also, distracts have been in your key reason why you fell back. How about use it to your advantage. Instead make it a goal to keep on building for the people in your life that has left, I am sure they will be so excited to know that they are part of the reason why you are growing. Hard to lose loved ones but knowing they are proud of what you have accomplished and still with you inspirit. Keep it up. Hope to see your new numbers soon.
What an informative post!
First, I want to say congrats on getting out of your depression. I know exactly how hard it is as I lost my grandmother last September and that has greatly affected me.
You are living proof that no matter how tough things get, if you push through and keep working toward your goals that you will see progress and that is where success comes in.
You also are transparent and share your failures. Without failures we wouldn't grow and learn.
Kudos to you! Thanks for sharing. Heading over to your blog now! :)
Thank you so much Lisa! Depression is terrible, I miss my Grandmother but she was ready to go, my dad was a totally different story and I was feeling really down because we never seemed able to get along (mostly because he was crazy like most people in my family). Luckily I had my wife and kids to help me out and to get through everything.
I really appreciate all your kind words, thank you again. I look forward to seeing your website if you decide to share it with us!
Yes it is. I agree, I miss my grandmother so thing fierce as well but as yours mine was also ready to go. So happy that you had your family to get you through it.
I honestly didn’t even know we could put our website in the follow links area. We learn something new all the time.🤪 I will end up sharing mine. 😁
Those stats are amazing!
I really like the way you take notes of everything so you can monitor your progress.
I'm so lazy to do that, but your post inspired me to do so.
Anyway, keep it up! It looks to me you're on the right track.
All the best,
Minah
Hello Minah! Thank you very much but don't give me too much credit. I can be pretty lazy too, I just put all those notes together the day I did this post.
I wanted to get rid of the emails from google analytics but could not get do that until I had put them in the spreadsheet. Then the idea of putting it all together in the blog post just kind of hit me.
I will keep it up thanks again! Hope to see your numbers taking off too!
Great stuff.
I was just reading something Partha said the other day about bounce rates. He doesn’t take much notice of them, because it might mean they have gone to look at a product or another page you have recommended.
Wish I could remember who he responded to.
Anyway awesome achievement.
Stephen
Thank you very much Stephen that is a great point! I did not feel like it was a great achievement really yet but I hope it becomes one by the end of the year, I am going to keep working on it every day!
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Firstly I'm sorry to hear about you loss. I loss my father towards the end of last year, it does knock you for six.
Secondly you're right about waiting for feedback, I dont know whats happened in that direction, i assume people are just too busy with life and working on their own sites or just cant be bothered, either way its a waiting period that can frustrate you, if you let it.
You're doing well by the looks of your stats... Im seeing like 1 vistor maybe every 3 days or so, very slow for me and sno sales at all, i think I'll need to spend at least 1 month on driving traffic, organic traffic to it to see some results.
(I did send you some feedback in your PM, if you havent seen it)
All the best!
Hello Maximos, all the best to you too! I am sorry for your loss as well, thank you very much for your kind words. I barely ever saw my father and never expected to be so devastated when he passed away. .
I did get your feedback thank you very very much, I know I have not implemented it yet I have been so busy but I really really appreciated the advice and the background pictures you sent. You gave me the best feedback I have gotten so far!
I am sure your site will take off soon if you focus on adding quality content. If I had committed to doing 3 article a week from the very beginning I would have hundreds of articles by now, so don't make my mistake of only doing this for a couple hours a week like I did for so long! (You have an awesome website name by the way!)
You're welcome. And thanks