July Field Report - Month 15!.

Hi WA'rriors And WA'rriorettes

Building an online business is a long term game, by heck this is not my first nor my last blog that I will be building - why, well, I am the kind of guy who genuinely loves all aspects of blogging and the whole skill set of it all and improving upon that.

Looking back a year ago - month 3, by that point I had not yet gotten my first sale and was only beginning to make progress in terms of the number of starter referrals.

Organic Search Traffic : 341

No Of Referrals: 10

Earnings: US$0

I was delighted then, progress is progress, and was just triple the previous month.

And a mark of showing the progress and the difference that a year makes - provided you stick with your plan and keep working hard and producing content - lets have a look at July 2020.

Organic Search Traffic : 13,800 (Just down on my April (month 12) Record Of 13,990 sessions)

No Of Referrals:144 (Record)

Premium Referrals: 8 (joint Record)

Conversion rate: 5.55%

Recurring Sales: 9 (record)

Yearly Sales: 2, Joint record outside of Black Friday Sales.

Earnings: US$291 (record, sort off) + US$457 To be released and paid on Sept 1 alongside August Earnings. August, I am already guaranteed to report record earnings!.

Note: As part of my earnings I do not like to count yearly sales as I see these as a bonus, and an advance payment on future months. Getting yearlies is great, but it is at the expense (if you catch my drift) of future monthly income. Kissing good bye to one monthly recurring income means I have to replace that (the other went yearly directly).

These numbers might not look too fantastic but it is light years ahead of where I was 12 months ago. Traffic has been like a yo-yo lately despite not getting hit by any Google Update. In April, the way my traffic was moving looked like I could feasibly expect 20,000 traffic by now but when search volume drops for certain keywords your traffic drops also.

I have since stopped chasing such temporary keywords. It is great finding them but, when you do you must also accept traffic to drop significantly over the following months as interest in the topic drops.

Traffic, is in essence only a number. How many visitors (sessions) you get i snot always a true representation of how well your site is doing. While My traffic was up significantly from June from 11,600 to 13800, a 2200 improvement I was on course to hit 15,000 sessions in Month 15!.

But a drop mid month put an end to that!. The drop only occured due to a run away article getting literally 50% and often more of my traffic experiencing a reduction in traffic. No other major issue. I got traffic to more articles (505 posts got traffic, Up from 452), 18 posts got more than 100+ visitors (up from 14).

More annoying I was looking like for most of the month I'd not only make my goal of 150 referrals but sail past it and hit as much as 180.

Still, we shall see what Blogustus holds.

Keep hanging in there, keep producing great content, keep building your business. The reality is these days it can take 2 to 3 years to build a successful site in competitive niches. Just take a look around at the successful members here like Grace (littlemama), Chris (Benjisdad), EddySolomon, RoopeKiuttu, Jerry Huang, Nathaneil, SimonInAsia, none of these guys (and gal) build thier sites in a couple of months or just in one year.
Zero to US$10,000 - 3 years is a good timeline!. Zero to US$1,000? around 18 months - I guess it all snowballs from there on in!. I have noticed month 18-20/21 tends to be the tipping point.
So keep going and keep plugging away!

Derek.