Monthly Report - Steady as She Goes!

byMToback

753 followers

2 days ago

Didn't do as well as I did last month, but still better than break even and I tried to start a new subniche. That takes time.

I stopped updating all but the primary niche, mini pcs. I continue to expand in home office as well. 33/36 have views, but no sales there yet.

Number of Posts: I stayed with about 2 a day. There might have been a few days with 3, but not many. A few updates as well. Need to do more of those.

Number of Views: 7300 page views on a little under 6000 sessions. That's compared to a little over 6000 views on a little under 5000 sessions in February. Granted February has less days, but that's still an increase overall.

Google traffic is growing. From 1100 the previous 28 days to over 1500 now. The average position dropped slightly as well from around 28 to 26.

And my domain authority is growing. moz . com has me at 6. It was around 3 last month.

Pinterest was down for awhile, it's now up 20% since last month. I am not consistently creating pins. But I have a campaign running until something this month that is posting pins for me. I need to create a new campaign.

Facebook is up from almost nothing to 30 views a day. It's the same story as Pinterest.

So everything is growing.

Amazon: Still only have Amazon as an Affiliate. I did apply to a couple of programs but either haven't heard back or was rejected. Will keep trying. Meantime, I got a little over 1000 clicks with 56 ordered items. That's about a 20% session to click rate and over a 5% order rate. Not bad. Last month it was 933 clicks with 66 ordered items. So about the same session to click rate but a little better order rate of over 6%. Revenue was lower. I ended the month with $4700 in sales and $123 commissions. Last month it was over $8000. One thing I learned about Amazon is, you never know what people are going to buy. For the month, people bought 8 items based on what they clicked on. The rest is what they were thinking about buying. One day last month that was 2 boxes of instant hot cocoa. Another day it was an $800 solar battery. So the idea is to get them "into the store".

Amazon has a program called Creator Rewards. You get a bump in commissions if you meet certain sales quotas. This month I barely made the $4K maximum, so I ended up with an additional $160 and so it looks like I got almost a 6% commission rate. I renewed for the next three months. The payouts start lower, end lower and top out at an additional $140 for $3500. That will help get the commission rate to somewhere around 5% assuming I meet the quota.

They also have a program called creator connections. Individual vendors have sales and give you higher commissions on certain products. You have to create and submit content (blogs, videos, etc) for each product to get the commissions when you make a sale. So far, it's been a bust. I have only had less than 50 clicks and no sales. Also I reached out to the vendors to see if they had more sales materials, products I can review, etc. One had even reached out to me asking if I wanted to get a product to review but when I said yes they never responded.. No response from any of them.

Ads: I finally got google adsense to work. Probably won't keep it. I don't understand it at all. I got it turned on around 3/17, and in the last two weeks I have made $1.67 on 655 impressions. In the same time I have probably had triple the number of page views. Part of the problem seems to be that it randomly can't find the ads.txt file. I will let it go for another 2-3 weeks then decide if I want to keep it or not.

Where to go from here: Time is a problem for me right now. I don't have a lot of it. But with the extra money, maybe I can find someone on fiverr or upwork to help update or edit some of my posts. I have a draft of what my workflow is. I need to spend time improving it, then try to find someone.

Overall: We're still breaking even and more on the affiliate marketing. Need to see if this new subniche will work or not. I was hesitant to add home office to home computing and maybe I need to move it to its own site. Will see. As for ads, I would have thought with over 6000 views I would make a few dollars a month on ads. Probably not worth it yet.

I need a new social media campaign soon as I think the current one is running out of posts.

For now and until things settle down at home, it's steady as she goes and try to figure out how to scale this without taking a lot more of my time.

Onward!