Earnings & Accountability Recap - September 30th - October 6th
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
Not much to speak of here. I spent the whole week looking at the analytics of my sites trying to determine the impact of the latest Google update. The impact for me is fairly cut and dry. Sites with an EMD that had 10 or less articles were hit hard. Authority sites and sites with an EMD that had 10+ articles were not. Tracking the analytics across so many sites is very tedious, and makes me wonder how much simpler life would be if I had one site more like about.com instead of so many smaller sites.
Site Launches
I launched one new site last week, and this might be the last site that I launch in the month of October. I am finding that as a team, we are spending quite a bit of time building sites, and that the actual "building" of the site has zero profit. What makes the money is the content, and I think we can save a ton of time if we focus on building out one or maybe even just a few authority sites.
Niche - home loan modification
Traffic - 233 unique visitors
Monetization type - Adsense (for now)
Revenue from 9/30 to 10/6 - $6.11
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 campaign created and a package of 50 tweets created.
List building - n/a
My thoughts - Keyword research shows that this site could be a really big earner. I realized after building this site that I had several other real estate sites that I could have put this content on. I need to do a better job of tracking my sites and identifying when and when not to build a site. Not too many clicks on this site yet, but one of them was over $4, which is a very good sign.
Last Weeks Sites
Site #1
Niche - mutual funds
Traffic - 5,962 unique visitors
Monetization type - Adsense (for now)
Revenue from 9/30 to 10/6 - $48.78
Traffic Source(s) - No changes here. To get traffic to this site, I am still using direct response banners, networked blogs (via an existing Facebook account) and Twitter.
List building - started writing a free report, but as of right now it is not completed yet.
My thoughts - It's funny how the results from one particular site can make you rethink your whole approach to site building. This site started with much more content than my sites normally do and as a result, it is earning more revenue than the smaller sites are even though it is newer. Not only that, but the clicks in this market a much higher than some of my other sites are. Seeing the analytics on this has made me realize that I need to stop building new sites and start putting all of my content in one place so that I can focus more on content production and waste less time on building brand new sites.
Site #2
Niche - digital photography
Traffic - 4,823 unique visitors
Monetization type - Adsense (for now)
Revenue from 9/30 to 10/6 - $34.22
Traffic Source(s) - No changes here. To get traffic to this site, I am still using direct response banners, networked blogs (via an existing Facebook account) and Twitter. 90% of the visitors from this site come from banner ads on my other sites.
My thoughts - This site's earnings seems to be stuck in the $30-$40 per week range with the amount of content that it has right now. For the rest of this month, I will focus on adding more content to it and see what that does to the earnings potential of this site.
Site #3
Niche - frugal living
Traffic - 880 unique visitors
Monetization type - Adsense (for now)
Revenue from 9/30 to 10/6 - $11.77
Traffic Source(s) - No changes here. To get traffic to this site, I am still using direct response banners, networked blogs (via an existing Facebook account) and Twitter.
My thoughts - I can easily see a love/hate relationship forming with this site. I love the value of the clicks, which are regularly in the 2.80+ to $4 range. I dislike the low traffic numbers though. This site could definitely use a lot more content as well, which is something that I will focus on for the rest of this month. I think if I can get 20k people to this site on a monthly basis, it can easily earn $500+ per month in Adsense revenue.
Content Created
Sunday - 10x1
Monday - 10x1
Tuesday - 10x1
Wednesday - 10x1
Thursday - 10x1
Friday - 10x1
Saturday - 10x1
Total - 70 articles created in 10 markets
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
I appreciate sharing this. It's much appreciated and helpful. I have few questions. 1. When you say traffic from direct banner, does this mean that you have banner ads that promote your other sites in every niche site you create? If yes, is this in the same niche-related sites? 2. When you launch a niche site, do you usually use EMD with 10+ articles now?
Please find your answers below:
1. Yes, I have a fairly large portfolio of sites, and I have learned that running banner campaigns on them is the cheapest and fastest source of traffic for new sites that I am launching.
2. I had not been exclusively using EMD's for new sites, I was only doing that when my research showed an EMD that I felt was worth building a site around. I'd say that 80% of the time I was building sites using a naming convention like keywordtips.com, keywordsite.com or keywordblog.com.
You are welcome. The smaller sites are going well, but it seems that I will be focusing on authority sites from now on.
Thanks for sharing. Everything I'm seeing and historically in this site indicates that the money is in the list. Get those freebies generating leads for you.
I expect you are well beyond this introduction to Authority sites but it might be a good refresher or maybe a different perspective. If nothing else maybe a new strategy that you might implement.
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/building-an-authority-site
Thanks so much for sharing your earnings recap with us! It's really valuable and inspiration. I was wondering: what are networked blogs?
You are welcome! Networked blogs is a service that allows your blog posts to automatically be syndicated through FaceBook. You can read more about the service at http://www.networkedblogs.com
See more comments
Thanks for sharing your site results. I can see the value of adding content as quickly as possible. What is the size of your articles? From what I am reading, the lengths people recommend ranges from 200 words, to 400 words to 800 words. What is the "sweet spot" for an article?
I am not sure that there is a literal sweet spot as far as the size of articles goes. As for my team, right now, we don't produce or publish anything shorter than 750 words. In general, we aim for 850 to 1000 words and that range is what our quality assurance processes are based on.
That makes sense. Thanks for sharing!