Income Report: 6 Months – Do You Know Your Site Speed?

There’s been some up and downs to this month so I have to enjoy the highs when I have them.

This February, I was getting a little frustrated with my blog because the traffic was not getting any higher than 50 sessions a day, although my lows are not as low anymore.

It wasn’t a great month for sales either so I’m scratching this month off regarding that.

However, there’s some great news about traffic near the end of the month that is giving me more hope!

 

I will break down my February analysis:

• What’s happening?
  • Mommy-only Vacay
  • Site Speed
  • Writing Schedule
  • Social Media
  • YouTube Channel
  • Training

• Site Stats

• Did I make money online?

 

 

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

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MOMMY-ONLY VACAY:

I got to enjoy the Christmas present my husband gave me mid-February when I went to Playa del Carmen, Mexico with my long time friend, Jade.  It was so fun to be on a mommy-only trip, something I have not done before.

It was an all inclusive resort that just opened in Dec, 2016, I sure drank and ate enough. 😉  You can read about my trip here.

Hey, my blog was still working while I was gone thanks to my spiffy writing schedule, more on that below!

 

SITE SPEED:

A member at Wealthy Affiliate, his name is Anis Chity (@HilAli1994), notified me that my site was not performing well, out of a 100, my site speed score was in the red like 41 mobile and 48 desktop.  Too bad I didn’t take a screenshot of this!

Increasing my site speed would apparently increase my rankings which has been slowly but surely climbing.

It took a few days of research and a lot of headache figuring it all out but after a few plugins, compressing my images, and getting rid of blocking javascripts & css scripts, my site speed is now at upper 80’s & 90’s in the green!

You will see the jump in my traffic near the end of the month!

That’s just for my homepage, I still have to optimize some more of my posts so that my entire site will have great speed.

If you want to do the same thing, you can start with this post here and then I have the rest of the solutions with an upcoming post.

Without Wealthy Affiliate, I wouldn’t have known about this and it would have taken me even longer to get my rankings up.  This has sure been a blessing and I owe it all to the best training platform!

 

WRITING SCHEDULE:

I’m definitely continuing with my writing schedule and in fact, I have an upcoming blog post with a video that’s about to publish in a few days to show you how I do mine so keep an eye out for it if you want to learn.

Without my schedule, I wouldn’t have been able to go on my week long vacation in Feb and still have my blog publish 3 fresh posts!

For the month of February, I’ve been consistent with 3 posts a week but at the last week, I increased to 4 posts a week and it’s been still working well.

Although it’s a slower process to schedule out posts publishing 4 times a week, I know that the more posts per week, the better my site will rank as well!

 

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Let’s look at the growth:

• Twitter – Followers: 5,728 this month, 4,553 last month.

• Instagram – Followers: 4,639 this month, 2,514 last month.

• Facebook Page – Page Likes: 111 this month, 105 last month.

• Google+ – Followers: 132 this month, 116 last month.

• Pinterest – Followers: 3,340 this month, 1,517 last month.

Although my social media accounts are growing nicely, at least three of them, my social traffic doesn’t reflect the same and I’ll go into more in the stats below.

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: 6 this month, 5  last month.

• Total Subscribers: 36 this month, 27 last month.

• Minutes Watched per Month:  864 this month, 641 last month.

• Views per Month: 195 this month, 164 last month.

I find it so interesting to see that even though I only added one video in February, my minutes watched and views are still better than last month!

This goes to show that my older videos still have many chances of being watched and the more videos I produce, the more views I’ll get.

Most of my video traffic is from YouTube itself right now, half from search and half from suggested videos, which is pretty cool.

 

Here are my all time stats:

 

TRAINING ALMOST DONE:

I ended the month at Phase 5, Lesson 10 of the Affiliate Bootcamp Course, so I only have 2 phases left which is dedicated to PPC (pay per click advertising).  I’m not sure if I’ll use it yet at this point because I want to concentrate on getting more organic traffic.

What I can do after I finish Phase 5 is go on to their Online Entrepreneur Certification course to see if there’s anything else I can learn.  They are similar courses but that one is for building your site in any niche.

There are still past weekly live video trainings I can go check out as well.  There are over 200 old ones that I can view, so there is still much learning to do on the platform.

 

SITE STATS

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Okay, enough chit chat.

Here are my site stats at the end of February:

• Posts – 50 (14 new)
• Pages – 13 (2 new)
• Comments – 748 (83 new)
• Subscribers – 21 (1 new)

 

I ended up with 14 new posts in February and that’s pretty cool because I had just increased at the end of the month to 4 times a week publishing schedule.

That also means I’ve slowed down on my comments.  I usually get close to 150 comments a month, but now that I’m posting more, it’s a lot of posts to get comments for in the community.

Also, I’m starting to get more organic comments so I can just wait for more from my visitors.

 

Now for my Google Analytics:

Though a shorter month, I was able to surpass January’s 1,007 sessions with 1,113 sessions in February.  Not a huge increase but look at that spike at the end of the month from fixing my site speed!  Yay!

Finally was able to break 50 sessions a day mark with a day high of 76 sessions!

My lowest day in Feb is 21 sessions, compared to 17 the previous month.

 

Here’s the cumulative graph for the 6 months:

I look forward to breaking 100 sessions a day, my next goal!  I don’t know about you but I’m pretty excited about this graph and what it represents.

There’s much to look forward to and the upcoming months’ traffic should reflect the effect of my increased posting schedule and better site speed.

 

Let’s take a look at my traffic sources:

 

This month, my biggest increase is my Organic traffic at 32% which is great!  I hope that the site speed had something to do with that because it was hovering around 200 during the month and didn’t seem to increase much.

See how Social traffic only increased a little bit from Jan even though my following increased by a lot?  As I take a closer look at the Social channels, I think I know what the problem is.

In general, I know I haven’t been on the platforms as much last month because of my writing schedule.  I’m definitely spending more time on content creation.

However, I think the Social channel still did great even with 3 days less than Jan, it still beat it out.

 

Which social platform performed the best?

Wow!  Look who pulled ahead for the first time?  Facebook!  This is because I’ve been slowly increasing the number of Facebook Groups that I’ve been sharing my posts to.  So I need to keep doing that as it’s working.

Pretty disappointed with Twitter though, my usual number one Social traffic.  Instagram and Pinterest are even worse with the amount of followings I got for the month, this traffic is horrible.

For Pinterest, I think it’s because I’m not posting to my other boards.  I’m only posting to one board and not varying the pictures I post.  Posting to other boards will require to actually go on the platform and do it manually which is a pain.

I guess for Twitter I need to social around more, I’ve definitely not been doing that as much too and letting my automation run its course.

I’ll need to step it up in March on these platforms.

 

 

DID I MAKE MONEY ONLINE?

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Yes, $17!  LOL  Not much for my 6th month but I know there’s more to come:

• Wealthy Affiliate – $5 – My Premium referrals don’t seem to stay with me, but I’m confident as my traffic grows, I will find the people who will dedicate themselves to this business and not treat it like a hobby.  This $5 is just from training I created, so there are other ways to earn on the platform!

• Adsense (Site & YouTube) – $1

• Mass Planner – $10

• Amazon – $1

 

Expenses for the month:

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

Total expenses for Febuary is $55, giving me a Net Loss of $38.

The up’s and down’s of a business is real even for online.  Will I be crying about this a year from now?  Hell no, I’m not even worried about it now because I know what’s to come.  The flood gates will open up one day! 😉

 

 

SUMMARY

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The fruits of our blogging efforts always come months down the line and this fact has been seen over and over again.  This journey has still much path to travel and I’m in it for the long haul.

The knowledge I have gained this month about site speed has been so invaluable.  There’s so much to learn in this adventure so this is why it’s such a marathon.

This is also why so many people QUIT at this point because they don’t see it “working” but if you can hang in there with me, I hope to show you much better results in another six months.

With my writing schedule giving me 4 posts a week, my site speed up, and finishing my training at Wealthy Affiliate, I’m now in a much better position than I’ve ever been to earn more in the future.

I’m so looking forward to the next six months and see where this journey takes me!

It all started at Wealthy Affiliate and I hope you will check it out and see what you can learn as well:

 

Please do not hesitate to ask me anything about this 6th 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!