Income Report: 5 Months – Traffic Increasing

January came and gone just like that!  This month I concentrated on writing and have increased my postings finally which will help my organic traffic if I can keep it up.

I’ve entered a writing challenge at Wealthy Affiliate which started my motivation to write more and the community in there has been very supportive.  The challenge is almost a year long so it’ll definitely keep me going.

Another reason I’m writing better is my writing schedule that I created, which I’ll share more about in a sec.  It’s been really awesome having this schedule, highly recommended!

 

Here’s how I will break down my January analysis:

• What’s happening?
  • Writing Schedule
  • Social Media
  • YouTube Channel
  • Training

• Site Stats

• Did I make money online?

 

 

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

---

WRITING SCHEDULE:

I’ve been wanting to create a writing schedule for awhile now and have been putting it off.  Then last month when I was thinking about how to increase my blog posts, I got to my last lesson in Phase 4 of the Affiliate Bootcamp course and it called for a 20 day writing schedule!

Coincidence?  No, more like perfect timing. 🙂

Even after I read that, it still took me a few days to finally sit down and come up with one.

Boy…. Was I in for a surprise!  It has been awesome and now I’ll never stop having a writing schedule!  I blogged about it HERE if you want to see what’s included in my writing schedule as well as the benefits.

I highly recommend you do the same!

 

 

SOCIAL MEDIA:

As soon as I finished my last report and said that I won’t be adding anymore social media accounts, the next lesson in my training was to create a Pinterest account! LOL  Gosh I couldn’t get away from it, as I’ve always preached that you shouldn’t skip any lessons or tasks, and created one.

I totally don’t regret added that one because in one month, it’s grown nicely and traffic from it has been pretty good for a new account.  I shied away from Pinterest because I didn’t have much success with it before with my doll account, but this niche seems to fit it better for some reason.

 

Let’s look at the growth:

• Twitter – Followers: 4,553 this month, 4,085 last month.  I screwed up my account a bit in January by mass unfollowing people too soon so in return, I lost a lot of followers and so my net gain for the month is low.  This also hurt my traffic from Twitter too.

I was unfollowing because I was about to hit the following limit of 5,000 and I didn’t want to hit that level until my follower count caught up.  I follow the same strategy I use for Instagram which is explained here.

• Instagram – Followers: 2,514 this month, 648 last month.  Traffic from Instagram has been pretty good and really picking up speed to catch up with Twitter’s traffic.

• Facebook Page – Page Likes: 105 this month, 88 last month. I’m starting to increase the number of Facebook groups I post to and that has helped increase my page count.  Still very low and mostly will be this way for awhile.

• Google+ – Followers: 116 this month, 84 last month. Because I’m not able to automate that much on Google+ (can get banned easily), I’ve been just using the Wealthy Affiliate community to help me increase my followers here and manually implementing my usual growth strategy as mentioned above which is a much slower process since I don’t really have time to do it.

• Pinterest – Followers: 1,517 this month, 0 last month.  My last new account (crossing fingers!) already grew nicely in one month!  Again, same growth strategy as Instagram works on here too.  The traffic has been a great start from this platform.

For more information on how I grow my accounts, check out my Top 10 tips on how to grow your Instagram account post and this post on how I get all that automated with Mass Planner.

 

 

YOUTUBE CHANNEL:

The stats for my channel is growing:

• Total number of videos: 5 this month, 2  last month.  I made three videos in January and I’m getting more comfortable with them.  I even have one that I showed my face in and recorded myself! 🙂

• Subscribers: 27 this month, 19 last month.

• Minutes Watched:  641 this month, 179 last month.  I think that’s a pretty big jump for adding just 3 videos, I’m pretty excited about that!

• Views: 164 this month, 76 last month.

 

Here are my all time stats:

 

MORE LEARNING:

I ended the month at Phase 5, Lesson 2 of the Affiliate Bootcamp Course, so it appears I’m doing one phase per month.

Now that I have a writing schedule, I actually have to remind myself to go into the lessons again when I have free time.  Lol

I’m at a point where I can pretty do without the course now, but I’m going to finish it because there is still much to learn about videos (mostly what Phase 5 is about) and pay-per-click (last two phases 6 & 7).

Even after I’m done with the course, Wealthy Affiliate has weekly live video training that I can learn from, so there’s always something new to learn there on that platform.  Plus all the other training members create in there as well.

 

 

SITE STATS

---

Now the fun part!

Here are my site stats at the end of January:

• Posts – 36 (12 new)
• Pages – 11 (1 new)
• Comments – 665 (143 new)
• Subscribers – 20 (1 new)

I’m really excited that I’ve reached my 12 posts goal that I set for myself when I wrote my December report!

It was hard work to get it up to 12 posts because I didn’t have a writing schedule most of that month, but now that I have a writing schedule, reaching 12 posts a month will be the norm and will be achieved much easier.

 

Now for my Google Analytics:

For the first time, I hit 1,000 sessions!  1,007 to be exact. 🙂  Woohoo!  Last month I had 745 sessions which is a big 35% increase, which makes sense too because I had low days during the holiday season in December.

My lowest day is now 17 sessions, compared to 4 the previous month!  Things are definitely picking up and I hope this upward trend stays as we roll into month 6 for February.

 

Here’s the cumulative graph for the 5 months:

It looks like my January month shows that my traffic is getting more steady as my low points are now way higher, and even more blue shading.  However, the high points are not breaking any records so I’m hoping I will have some days break 50 sessions/day in February.

 

Let’s take a look at my traffic sources:

My biggest increases are my Social and Organic traffic which I’m pretty happy to see.  Social traffic remains a top traffic source for two months now which shows the power of social media in the beginning stages of your blog.

I’m wondering how long it’ll take Organic traffic to catch up to and surpass the Social traffic.  I’ll be celebrating the day my Organic traffic becomes my number one source of traffic! Lol

 

Which social platform performed the best?

Looks like my top three social media platforms are:  Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest – remember my Pinterest account is only one month old and it’s already almost 14% of my Social traffic!

My mess up in my Twitter account cost me a decrease in traffic for January which made Instagram’s traffic a very close second.  Facebook and Google+ don’t surprise me one bit as their following is not that big.

This shows me I definitely need to keep growing my social media accounts as they are definitely a good source of traffic!

 

 

DID I MAKE MONEY ONLINE?

---

Yes!  Not as much as last month, but still had revenues of $135:

• Wealthy Affiliate – $31 – After losing my first Premium referral in December, I was able to get two more in January so that shows me people will come and go, I just have to keep getting more and more referrals to not notice the people I lose. 😉  I also made money at Wealthy Affiliate by creating trainings on the platform.  Now, that’s pretty cool!

• Adsense (Site & YouTube) – $7

• Mass Planner – $5

• Consulting – $85

 

Expenses for the month:

• Aweber – $19
• GoDaddy – $2
• HostGator – $4
• Mass Planner – $4
• Screencast-o-matic – $1
• Wealthy Affiliate – $25

Total expenses for January is $55, giving me a Net Income of $80.

How fun, two months in a row with a black bottom line! 🙂

 

 

SUMMARY

---

It’s been a good month overall I think and I’m going to keep writing more content to increase my traffic.  I won’t be going over 12 posts a month I don’t think, because my goal is posting 3 a week.  Depending on where things land in the month, I may have one post more or less.

If you like what you’re seeing and want to build your own blog along with me, I highly recommend you read about Wealthy Affiliate, see below.

It’s been life changing the things I’ve learned, and I’m also helping others in the community as well, earning myself a Top 50 ranking, out of over 800,000 members.

I’m “littlemama” in there and I hope to see you on the inside so I can help you build your own online business too!

Remember, this business is not a sprint but a marathon.  More results will come as I keep pushing forward… I hope you will follow along and also build yours at the same time. 🙂

 

 

 

Please do not hesitate to ask me anything about this 5th income report or this website in the comments below!!  I will answer your questions and would love to hear your thoughts on how you’re doing and what you have been up to!  Thanks for visiting!!

 

 

Let’s make money online!