This post may contain affiliate links for more info visit my disclosure page.
Wow! Time flies when you’re having fun! 🙂 I really can’t believe three months have past already and I’m writing my third income report. It’s been another busy month, even more so because I had to fulfill Christmas orders for my handmade doll shop, which I’ve said is very labor and time intensive. But still, I’m really surprised I was able to maintain the amount of content creation on my site like I did last month.
There were some days that I would stay up pretty late in the night but at least I had a couple days off for Thanksgiving. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving too, those who celebrated that is. 🙂 Alright, let’s get to it!
Here’s how I will break down my November analysis:
- What’s happening?
- Social Media
- Best Tools Page
- More Training
- Site Stats
- Did I make money online?
WHAT’S HAPPENING?
SOCIAL MEDIA:
The first thing I want to say about social media is that if your site is new like mine, your organic traffic will be very low in the beginning, and therefore, getting your social media accounts set up early can bring you free traffic while building your website and waiting for Google to trust your site.
Everything takes time so the earlier you do this, the better it is for your site.
At the end of October, I had 2 social media accounts, Twitter and a Facebook Page, this month, I added a third one, Google+.
Twitter – My followers almost doubled from 1,300 last month to almost 2,500 this month, which is grown from the beginning with MassPlanner, an automation software I use for all my social media platforms.
Twitter still remains my top referral for my site in November out of the three accounts I have!! If you only want to start with one social media account, use Twitter, it’s really best for link sharing and hashtag usage.
Facebook Page – Page likes have grown from 64 to 67, not much at all but guess what? It jumps to 78 as of this post, still not much but I increased from 67 to 78 in 2 days because of the bonus feature in Wealthy Affiliate: their community. I had posted a mini tutorial in my Wealthy Affiliate blog about how to like other Facebook Pages with your own Facebook Page instead of your personal Facebook account, see it HERE, and asked for a Like exchange from the community in there:
I’ve also started using MassPlanner to share my Facebook Page posts to targeted Facebook Groups in my niche. This is a way to increase not only reach for your posts but also Page Likes. I don’t do Facebook ads anymore for this page because they don’t allow it for make money online opportunities in their ads. Therefore, sharing posts to targeted groups is the way to go and automating it with Massplanner is the best, learn more HERE. 🙂
Engagement on my Facebook Page continues to be low, but guess what? People are clicking through to my site and it’s the second top referral to this website this month so definitely worth having as well!
Google+ – This is a new one for me, I haven’t really used this one before and from what I can see, the engagement level in the platform is a really low. I can tell because I’m using MassPlanner to grow this account and I’m not getting the same result as my Twitter account.
What I’ve heard good about Google+ is that it will rank your links well on Google search so it’s worth having even though not too much engagement is going on in there.
At the end of November, I had 12 followers and again, I used the Wealthy Affiliate community HERE to share my Google+ account and have 43 followers now as of this post and it’s only been 4 days. It’s all about effort, the more I got in there to share with others, the more followers I’ll get. So I’ll continue to do this in December to see what I’ll grow this to.
BEST TOOLS PAGE:
I added a Best Tools page that is promptly displayed in my main menu bar. The page lists the online tools I have used over the years I’ve been online.
Why do I have such a page?
- People want to know – As you grow your site, people will look to you for tools that have helped you create your site and helped you be successful and they want to use the same things.
- It’s a big money maker – Each tool I recommend is affiliate linked – don’t recommend a bunch of things, just one per category, thus “best tools” online.
- Post content – Each of these tools gives me a reason to post a review about them where I can explain further of what they do, how to use it, the back end info, etc. In fact, at this point, not all the tools have full reviews yet so I now have a few posts that I can work on for the coming weeks.
This is one of the best pages to have on any website.
MORE TRAINING:
If you’ve been following along, I take my courses at Wealthy Affiliate to learn how to build this website and make money from affiliate marketing. Last month, I ended at Affiliate Bootcamp Course 2, Lesson 4, for Nov month I ended at Course 3, Lesson 3… I haven’t started this one but I’ve read it, seen the video and just need to get to the task of it. The training gets better and better!
Did you guys see my Black Friday Deal for Wealthy Affiliate? I sure took advantage of it and now I’ve paid up for a whole year and my monthly cost is cut in half of what I was paying! Woohoo! Why did I take advantage of this? Not only it was to cut my costs, but also I want to concentrate on my site, not worrying about monthly payments. In addition, giving myself a year to see if this works is a good amount of time.
SITE STATS
Here are my site stats at the end of November:
- Posts – 16 (7 new)
- Pages – 10 (1 new)
- Comments – 367 (162 new)
- Subscribers – 13 (1 new)
The content production remained the same as Oct, total of 8 new posts/pages, which is good considering I had a lot of time taken away from this site as mentioned above. As my doll shop slows down in second half of Dec and Jan, I hope to kick up content creation in the coming two months to a point where I am able to schedule future posts, which would be awesome!
Comments continue to be awesome, it’s slightly more than last month and all thanks to the Wealthy Affiliate community – a side benefit that can’t be ignored! Comments increases your ranking in Google as it provides increased engagement on your site and increases your page word count – both of which search engines like.
I didn’t get to do much this month with my email marketing so only one new subscriber.
Now for my Google Analytics:
For November, I received 768 sessions vs October’s 559, up 37%!! Woohoo! This is so fun to see! I want to point out something small: My lowest day is 2 sessions, for ONE day, my next lowest day is 10 sessions!! That is so exciting to see because last month I had 3 days with 1-3 sessions so my site is definitely gaining traction here!
Here’s the cumulative graph for the 3 months:
Do you see a trend of more blue shades in November? This month also had the highest sessions per day at 52 and there were 3 of these days! Highest day last month was 48 sessions and only had one day like that. Things are starting to pick up slowly but surely!
My new visitors dropped from 67% to 57%, so just means I had more returning visitors… which is means I have some fans and have Wealthy Affiliate members helping me out more than once too!
My Direct traffic remained about the same, this traffic coming people who have my link already.
Social traffic increased a whopping 69%!! That’s very cool! Like I mentioned above Twitter remains to be the leader here and it will continue to grow as my accounts grow. 🙂
Referral traffic is a little strange. Although this traffic more than doubled, when I drill down into it, there are a few new referral sites in November that I don’t really recognize or know how they are referrals to my site. So I’m not too excited to see this and think maybe it’s spam. I hope in time as my site increases in organic traffic that these referral sites will be minimal and not skew my results too much.
Organic Search traffic almost tripled from 21 sessions to 59 sessions! Still small for the a whole month’s worth, but it’s definitely growing!
DID I MAKE MONEY ONLINE?
Yes, I sure did again! Not as much as last month, but I received $24 in gross income! LOL It’s all attributed to Wealthy Affiliate!! Last month I received $8 from them, but I didn’t make the threshold for a payout but on Dec 1, I did! I didn’t get any new referrals for November though so that’s a bummer but I already got one on Dec 1, so we’ll see how December will go.
I didn’t get more sponsored posts on my social media accounts in November so zero there. I thought I was going to get something but it didn’t work out.
For Amazon commissions, I didn’t get anything here either as I only added two new posts in November for My Mickey Life, my second niche site I created last month. I didn’t have time to update it so I didn’t even talk about much about it in this post. I think I want to add Amazon links to this site too in December to see what can happen.
How about expenses for November?
- Aweber – $19
- GoDaddy – $2
- HostGator – $4
- Wealthy Affiliate – $25 (Used to be $47, but because I went yearly with the Black Friday Deal, it’s now half the cost!)
Total expenses for November is $50, giving me a Net Loss of $26.
But hey, it’s less of a loss than October which was a Net Loss of $32 and it’s only my third month. I’m just glad I’m starting to see my site’s traffic increasing!
SUMMARY
It’s been an busy month and I don’t know what else is in store for me but I’m so looking forward to my fourth month to see what else happens. I have a few things I want to implement in December and I hope that will add to my bottom line. We shall see.
I hope this has been informational to you! I do this and explain as much as I can so others who are at the same stage as me can compare and see how they are doing. Or, for those who are just starting from the very beginning, they can learn from my mistakes or take suggestions I have to improve their websites. I’m here to help and hope you can learn something here.
Please do not hesitate to ask me anything about this 3rd income report and 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!
Great article but, if you don’t mind me asking, what is Massplanner exactly,? Also I don’t really know a lot of people on Twitter so do you have any advice on how to get a bunch of followers? (keeping in mind that when I say I don’t know a lot of people on Twitter I mean I literally don’t have any followers at all.)
Hi Matthew,
I have a little more summary on my “Best Tools” page on MassPlanner, but what it can do is automatically:
* Follow, Unfollow users
* Like, comment, post on your accounts
* Share Facebook Page posts to Facebook groups
* Share on Pinterest boards and post to them
* Schedule future posts
* block users
* Join, unjoin Facebook groups
The list goes on and on, and it’s for all these platforms: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram. I hope you will click on the MassPlanner links above and read more about it.
For Twitter – I don’t use any people I know for it. What you do is interact with people in your niche… so you would follow, like, retweet people’s tweets who are in your niche. A lot of them will follow back when you interact with them. Use hashtags to find the people in your niche. This can be a lot of work, that is why I use MassPlanner.
Thanks!
Grace
Thanks for the great info, Grace! You really know your stuff:)
Aww, thanks Matthew! Appreciate your follow up here!
I love that you share your results, this helps the average person like me. My expectations are more realistic now. Let me ask you, how many hours per day would you say you spend on your online business? What is the number one thing you focus on that’s yielding you the most results?
Thank you Jheri! Having an affiliate marketing business takes time, I would really give yourself a year to see how things will go for you. I’m a stay-at-home mom, so I’m able to put in anywhere from 2-8 hrs a day on this business. However, I need to also say I spend a lot of time on the Wealthy Affiliate site during those hours helping others as well. During those hours, also include my time with social media. I’m still learning the MassPlanner software and that takes time too. There are many factors to this business, not just the website alone.
The number one thing to focus on is always quality content creation, which I wish I did more this month. VERY closely behind is social media. Without it, I would not have this much traffic to my site or the referrals that I’ve received so far.
I’m just one person… some others in a different may have different results. Some use paid traffic and may make more money faster but I don’t want to pay for traffic, I want to organically gain traffic like its taught in Wealthy Affiliate. 🙂
I hope this helps, please let me know if I can be of more help!
Grace
Hi Grace,
It looks like you are ticking along nicely. I also have started an online business but I’ve been struggling to get any kind of following on my social media sites so your recommendation of Mass Planner is just what I needed.
I have signed up with them just now and look forward to boosting my following across all platforms.
I look forward to your next income report and hopefully more great tips!
That’s great Craig! I’m so glad that you were able to learn from me on this post! There’s a lot to learn in MassPlanner, so if there’s anything I can help you with, please ask. I still have to write my MassPlanner review so I can’t forward anything to you yet but you know where to find me. 😉
Thank you so much for stopping by!
Grace
Hi Grace. it’s great to see your progrees in this business. Puts a lot into perspective. I’m just starting so I’m still learning the basics. I’m opposite to you, I started with G+ and it’s the only one I have so far. I’m waiting to decide on a logo to then move to more social media.
I wish you a great next month!
Luis
Hi Luis, any kind of social media would be good for your site at this point. Starting with G+ is good because as your account ages, it will rank well in the Google search engine, so your links on your site will eventually get ranked faster when shared on your G+ account.
Yes it think branding is important, so do that first before expanding into more platforms.
Thanks for your thoughts!
Grace
Ok Grace, it sure does look and sound like you’re making excellent progress! Congratulations on all that you are achieving! I’m curious about “Massplanner”, does it help users control followers on all/most social media platforms or just the Mainstream social media sites. Like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn?
Hi Linda, Thank you for your kind words! I really appreciate them because it’s been a lot of work! 🙂
What do you mean by “control followers”? You can use MassPlanner on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram, these are the only platforms I believe that they use. So you can build a following on all of these.
I hope that’s what you were asking, if not, please ask more!! 🙂
Thanks for stopping by!
Grace
Hi Grace,
So proud of you accomplishing this income within 3 months – Well done you. Thanks for posting as this does provide incentive that determination to writing posts regularly does pay off. Keep up the great work.
I’m finding that Twitter is the slower of the Social Media links through to my website but it is early days for me.
I find I receive more traffic through Facebook yet conversions are very low.
Google+ however is my favourite as I’ve got my mind focussed on receiving organic traffic through the Search Engines in a years time and I have achieved quite a few Google+ links on page one of Google Search so far. Powerful links can be obtained here as these links beat you posts to the top of Search Results.
Thanks again for posting Grace,
Simon.
Hi Simon,
Thanks for your kind words on my progress! SO appreciate this! I’m not even writing as much as I want to yet, but I hope I get there soon.
That’s great to hear about Google+, my account is brand new, so I’ll see how it pulls in traffic as the months past. I can’t wait to see it’ll help my site rank better! I appreciate you giving us this insight as well. 🙂
Thanks again for your thoughts, and revisiting my site!
Grace
Grace,
Looks like you are making great progress. I will look into the MassPlaner as my social networks do not give me much traffic. This is one area that I think I can do a lot better. I will look at your article on this. Does it have any cost, you did not list any cost for it.
john
Hi John,
Thank you for your kind words! If you go through my links for MassPlanner, I will personally consult you via Skype on how to work it. You have a 5 free day trial, and then it’s a $9.95/month or if you sign up for the 6 months plan it’s $44.95/6 mos on the Standard Plan (which I have), then they also have other modules for extra features which will cost more but I haven’t needed them.
Thanks for stopping by John, please let me know if you have any other questions!
Grace
Hey Grace,
wow, you’re really hammering away aren’t you? 🙂 Your progress report looks great and It actually motivated me, while I was reading through it all. Your take (and advice) on the social segment was priceless for me as I’m a fresh website owner myself. I’ll be definitely coming back to check on your progress!
Keep up the good work,
JT
Thank you JT!! This is exactly why I show my results so others can learn too. I’ll be gladly to help if you have any questions on anything. Thank you for checking out my post and hope you will visit again soon!
Best of luck to you!
Grace
You inspire me always Grace. You are doing justice with your site and time. Mass planner is the best idea, I am also stay at home Mama , So things and tasks overlap so much. I am having tough time to focus on single thing. As it’s two months gone and did not make single penny. but still hoping for good. Best of luck.
Hi Arooj, Thank you so much for your kind words! I know what you mean about doing tasks all at the same time. It’s hard to juggle sometimes but you will get there. You will have success soon if you just keep at it. Everyone goes at their own pace and if you’re consistent, you will see results soon.
Best to you,
Grace
Do Massplanner charge anything?
Yes they do but you have a free 5 day trial…. Their plan is less than $10 a month if you can do the six month subscription. Click HERE to learn more.
First off, those dolls are adorable!! Great job!
I love this income report. It’s a great way to follow along and get a taste for what’s coming. I can’t wait to see what this site will do in a few months… Now I’m getting a head of myself :).
Great job creating content this month, consistency is key! You also made some money, that’s awesome! Hopefully next month you will see you first green month!
Thank you!!
Vicky
Thanks so much Vicky! Appreciate you stopping by and your kind words. 🙂 It’s great to hear from someone I look up to and want to learn from!
I’m definitely trying to be more consistent with my content creation. I hope to continue and do more in December!! Need to keep churning and churning out great content. I hope to see my site grow every month but also hope to see a spike in traffic where this site will take off. 🙂
Best to you!
Grace
Wow Grace, I love this post! It really gives a clear picture of your progress! Who wouldn’t follow your work when you provide all the details needed for start?!
Now I would like to share my experience regarding yours:
1. My Twitter account is active almost 2 months and I have no followers at all 🙁 I don’t know what to do with that
2. I can’t find a way to understand the Google Analytics (some numbers are changing there but still cannot catch what’s going on)
3. Google+ active – no followers
LOL
It looks like I am way behind you. I am on my 20 days off after the Phase 4 and focusing on getting comments, creating new pages and videos. I hope this will gain organic traffic since Social networks don’t like me yet lol
Hey, I found Instagram very good source of visitors. You might want to try it too 🙂
Best,
Sunny
Hi Sunny,
Always a pleasure to have you here. 🙂 Thanks for your kind words, that’s why I do these reports, so people can get a realistic picture of what a young blog can do.
With the two social media you mentioned, you need to engage with them. Like, Follow, Share…. but it’s a lot of work and I recently just got banned on Google+ and I don’t know why. Anyway, Twitter has been awesome for my site, and I use MassPlanner to do all this engaging for me. I set it and leave it. 🙂 I’m actually about to do a post on this so watch out for it. Yes, I know about Instagram, I have 4 other accounts on there, my biggest one have almost 60,000 followers on there. 🙂 I just haven’t started one for this site yet on there.
You’re doing an amazing job on your training! I need to catch up. 🙂
Grace
Great read! There is so much info! I’m going to check out the MassPlanner immediately! Thanks for being so transparent! And staying positive! Love how you celebrate your success!!
Hi Paula, appreciate you visiting, thank you! You’re so welcome on the MassPlanner info, please give me a shout if you ever get stuck or want help with it. You don’t want to get banned using it, so there are required settings to make sure you’re implementing slowly.
Best of luck to you!
Grace
Hi, Grace!
Very nice analysis and statistic.
It keeps you organized and focused.
Congrats for the good work.
Keep it up!
Br,
Igor
Thank you Igor for visiting! Yes it sure does keep me focused and know where I need to work on next month. I appreciate your kind words and hope you come back to check on my progress! 🙂
Best to you!
Grace