Earnings & Accountability Recap - September 23rd - 29th
1. Inspiration - My hope is that by allowing other people to see how things happen inside someone else's business, they will gain a better understanding of what it takes to succeed in their own business.
2. Social Feedback - I don't claim to be a guru or to know everything. I have learned that some of the best ideas and solutions come directly from the sharing of this type of information.
3. Transparency - I used to believe that "ideas" were valuable. That belief caused me to waste countless amounts of time, energy and money "thinking" about things. Then I found out that it is the IMPLEMENTATION of ideas that is truly valuable. This means that I now focus less on "trade secrets" and much more on ACTION. This has worked like gangbusters for me. So I stick to my guns and share what I do, how I do it and much more because I know that my key to success is "that I do it".
Productivity
This last week was a weird week for me. I felt like I was being really lazy by having my VA integrate more of my routine tasks into her workday, but it turned out to give me more time to do the things that only I can do. I spent the bulk of my week doing what I would want the CEO of this business to do, and the results were clearly visible. By the end of the week, I not only had the following week mapped out, I had a list of issues/questions that I wanted to answer during the month of October.
Site Launches
Instead of launching two authority sites in one week, I launched one larger authority site last week.
Site #1
Niche - mutual funds
Traffic - 1,929 unique visitors
Monetization type - Adsense (for now)
Revenue from 9/23 to 9/30 - $18.26
Traffic Source(s) - To get traffic to this site, I set it up on networked blogs, which allows the posts to go out via an existing Facebook account. I also had social bookmarking and a package of tweets created. Lastly, I created a few direct response banners and put them on other related sites, this is turning out to be my biggest traffic source as I create new sites. You simply can't beat free traffic.
List building - list building not currently setup on this site, will get that done this week.
My thoughts - NIIIIIIICE! This site was a LOT of work. I launched it with 50 articles and it seems that the reward for that was making $9 per every 1000 visitors. Keep in mind that the site has had less than 2000 visitors so it might not keep performing at those numbers. Investing has proven to be a highly profitable market in terms of ad clicks. Instead of flipping this one, I think I will hold on to it for a while.
Last Weeks Sites
Site #1
Niche - digital photography
Traffic - 4,514 unique visitors
Monetization type - Adsense (for now)
Revenue from 9/23 to 9/29 - $36.99
Traffic Source(s) - To get traffic to this site, I am using social bookmarking, content syndication and direct response banners on my other sites. The clear winner here is direct response banners, which not only are free, but are not subject to the approval any other company. This means I can run animated gif's or any other type of ad that I want. Animated gif tip ads are working like gangbusters for this site.
My thoughts - After seeing a solid week of .10 to .17 clicks, I was ready to give up on this site. Then the site suddenly starts getting $1+ clicks, which has shown me that I need to be more patient and not try to "see the future" of a site after only one week of existence. Now that I see these higher value clicks, I will go review the analytics and find out which pages are generating them and focus on driving traffic to those pages only.
Site #2
Niche - frugal living
Traffic - 1,953 unique visitors
Monetization type - Adsense (for now)
Revenue from 9/23 to 9/29 - $13.57
Traffic Source(s) - To get traffic to this site, I am using social bookmarking, content syndication and direct response banners on my other sites. While this site did not get as much traffic as the digital photography site, it still got just under 2000 visitors without Google, Yahoo or Bing, which to me is a WIN!
My thoughts - This site's performance is fairly confusing to me. It got some really high value clicks but not as much traffic as I would have thought it would have gotten. I think the banners that I am using need to be tested on a greater scale and then I need to look at which pages are producing the highest value clicks and focus on getting traffic to just those pages. This site got a couple of $2.80+ clicks, which tells me that it can be a big earner if I can get enough traffic to it on a monthly basis.
Content Created
Sunday - 10x1 + 15 in mutual funds
Monday - 10x1 + 15 in mutual funds
Tuesday - 10x1 + 15 in mutual funds
Wednesday - 10x1 + 5 in mutual funds
Thursday - 10x1
Friday - 10x1
Saturday - 10x1
Total - 120 articles created in 11 markets
Considering that I added the additional workload of 50 articles to the team this week, I was pleasantly surprised to see how smoothly things went. As a team, we created 50 articles with zero team meetings, problems or QA issues. My goal was to stress test our processes, so all I did was let each team member know (individually via email) what was needed from them and everyone stepped up to the plate and got their job done. The QA was 100%!
Ok, so that concludes the report for last week. If you have any questions about this report (or anything else) please feel free to leave a comment or send me a private message.
Sheryl
Recent Comments
14
Great ideas! I see now thatI have to be more conscious of those questions that an article is speaking too when I write... Thanks again!
OK! I think I'm getting it, but I normally think of this type banner as a list building tool. You are linking to an article on your website that answers the question and thus draws the traffic?
Exactly!!! As part of the content creation process, we create a list of questions that are answered by reading the article. Then, when the content is published, we already have all the info that we need to create banners for that article. This allows us to use the same banner template and just change the text and avoid having to get into a "creative" process which would take a lot more time.
Thanks Sheryl for another very informative post. I too would be very interested in how you develope the direct response banners you mention. Maybe another training?
Here is a link to show you some examples of what a direct response banner looks like. http://screencast.com/t/VLszZ1nkSn5F
The point of using a banner like this is that it gets a much higher click-through rate and the visitors are usually much more targeted (they are looking for the info that is promised). This type of banner is not new, they are literally everywhere, you probably see these all the time and think nothing of it.
Hi Sheryl, Great post, thank you for sharing. I am amazed at the amount of traffic you generate. I am clearly doing things wrong. I have a basic question...what are direct response banners and where would you (in general) put such banners?
Here is a link to show you what a direct response banner looks like. http://screencast.com/t/VLszZ1nkSn5F
I put these on the sidebar and within the content in strategic places. I use these banners to get visitors to optin to my email list, so they have a higher priority than most monetized placements.
Hi Sheryl, I really liked your blog this week. The report on the sites, content creation and the strategy to grow the traffic really enlightened me as to how to create income from websites. Your honest appraisal of the income generated is an eye opener and serves to demonstrate the necessity of building a biz slowly, that it is not a get rich quick scheme. Good primer for new WAU members. Thank you!
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Thanks for the updates
You are welcome Shawn!