Traffic, Popup, Mailing List, Calls to Action, Referrals, Money
This is the monthly organic search traffic to my website Earn Money with Marcus since May 2015. Keep in mind, this includes a period of several months around the beginning of 2016 when I wasn't doing much on the site because I was focusing on another site.
These are the stats for the HelloBar exit popup I've used for the past 85 days:
New visitors to my site see the following popup when they go to leave my site:
This has resulted in 62 subscribers to my list on Aweber. I use double opt-in because it reduces the likelyhood of being marked as spam.
I have a 9-lesson autoresponder series:
In addition to this, I use onesignal.com to create browser push notifications. I currently have 29 visitors signed up, but hardly anyone seems to click my notifications.
I also have bright call-to-action buttons on my blog posts which lead to my main WA review. I'm experimenting with different colours. I'm currently on lime green, It's supposed to have an arrow on the left but it's not displaying properly. I don't know why.
I get referrals most days. Some days I get none, but usually I do get at least 1 or 2. The most I've ever had in one day is 6.
I currently have 10 premium referrals. 8 of those are from 2016. 4 of them are from this month!
Here are my payments received from WA since September 2015. Keep in mind that the first one was a lump sum after saving up a few commissions for much of my first year here due to setting the payout threshold high then suddenly lowering it and taking the money.
It's not my only income, though. I also have a contract for the company I used to work for. It's 21.5 hours per month at £15 per hour, then £20 per hour if I have to work extra hours. But it's a retainer contract so if there's not enough work to fill 21.5 hours in a month I still get paid my standard amount. I provide admin and technical support for their websites and Virtual Learning Environment.
I've also made a few sales from my new tablet site, but I will go into that separately another time...
So there, I'm far from rich. I'm heading in the right direction, though. I mean, 40% of my current premium referrals are just from this month! So I'm doing something right.
I'm happy to be completely open like this, although I understand not everyone is comfortable being this open, and I respect that.
If you have any suggestions for how I can improve things, I'll gladly read them. If you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them.
All the best,
Marcus.
Recent Comments
28
Hey Marcus, I have a question. Did you link your Hello bar to your Aweber? If not, how did you send those subscribers e-mail follow up from Aweber? If yes, how did you link and do I need to pay for it? Because SumoMe plugin, similar to hello bar, requires me to pay in order to link my Aweber account.
Yes, my HelloBar is linked to Aweber. HelloBar is free, but Aweber costs money. It's easy to link the two, though. You'll see within the HelloBar settings.
Yes I know aweber need to pay. But I was trying out with SumoMe and it requires me to pay in order to link it with aweber. That's why I'm asking if hello bar requires that. If not, I would like to give hello bar a try.
Thanks for sharing,Marcus. That is brilliant. It is going to be even better by the looks of it.
Best,
Anke
You've obviously got a winner here, I'd really concentrate on this site! I'd try using text links to WA at the end of your articles (worked seamlessly into the content). Your conversion rate could go up even higher.
It's worth split testing. But check out this discussion on Reddit:
"If your site is mostly seen by first-time visitors, a button will likely be more effective. However, if you run a site that is more focused on having returning visitors over and over, a text link will be more effective over time."
https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/418r6j/buttons_vs_text_links_when_to_use_each_actual
https://blog.aweber.com/case-studies/buttons-vs-text-links.htm
What I do is use highlighted text links at the bottom of my articles and if that doesn't grab visitors, I also have a big ol' button/graphic after that to try to get visitors to my sales page. I haven't tested this out yet so I can't tell you if this approach is a good one or not.
Anyway, yeah, I'd split test it to see which works better for you (or maybe both?)
Thanks for your honest feedback to us! Your posts are always helpful-always good info on building an online business, not what you had for breakfast lol
Good info Marcus. Maybe the best thing we can do is look at your site and see how we can use your example to improve our own sites. Thanks for your willingness to let us see.
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Awesome Marcus...way to go! I'm rooting for your continued success.
Thanks!