Income Report – September 2014

Once again I am back with another income report, September has been a good month for my sites in terms of earnings but I have taken a small hit in my traffic. I think that I have good idea as to why and I will explain what I think later in this article. There has been a lot of chaos this month from the PBN de-indexation to Panda 4.1. I will cover all of the above and let you know how it affected me.

PBN’s Are Dead!!!

That is the exact thought that I want everyone to think.

Why?

Because this means Google will think that they have gotten rid of the PBN problem and will leave people like me alone. Also means other good things for me such as lower expired domain prices and now people don’t have a easy way to rank, or so they think. Little do they know that PBN’s are alive and well. They continue to help me and many others rank on the first page of Google.

I got 4 out of my 45 site PBN de-indexed and I know why. These were domains that I bought a long time ago before I learned how to check the sites history and I found out that each one of these sites were used as a spam site at some point. All of my other sites are clean expired domains and none of them were hit. I took great precautions when setting these sites up and did everything possible to cover my butt from Google. That means no spun content, no SEO hosts, no sites on multiple hosts, and other easy footprints that Google used to track other PBN’s down.

The best advice I can give you all about PBN sites, make them look as close to a real site as possible.

I will continue to grow my PBN and use it as a main way to rank my sites. I am looking into other ways of getting good links but PBN links is still going to be the main way that I rank in Google, Enough about that, let’s see how my sites did this month.

Niche Site TZC

Last month I talked about the potential of this site, I said that with an increase in traffic that this site bring in around $300 a month and you will see that I was very close to this. I was digging into this niche a little more and I found a sub niche that could bring in a ton of new traffic and there is a great way to monetize this new traffic. I am working on ranking for these keywords in this new sub niche and so far it is looking promising. This new sub niche is no joke either, the total amount of monthly searches for these keywords is upwards of 30k monthly searches. This could turn this site from a $200 monthly earner to easily $500 a month.

Traffic

 

The traffic has been pretty consistent but you can probably see the slight drop off of traffic around September 22nd. This is when Panda 4.1 came out and it looks like I didn’t get hit by any penalty but what I think happened is that some sites rose in the SERPS and pushed my site down just a tad. I am still getting a good amount of traffic but right before Panda 4.1 came out I had 295 visitors to my site and now I am around 240 daily.

Not bad at all but I will keep adding links and content to see if I can regain some of the rankings that slipped.

 

From the table above you can see that the site averaged over 200 visitors a day and saw a huge increase in traffic from last month. The site is looking good and I am hoping the traffic continues to go up!

Earnings

A record braking month for this site in terms of earnings. The site earned $333 and is by far the best month for this site. Last month it only earned around $180 so ti saw a huge increase in earnings this month. The burst of traffic this month has a lot to do with the earnings and this goes to show: more traffic = more earnings

 

This site has now earned over $1,000 since it was created back in April. This is some awesome progress and I couldn’t happier about the results so far. I am very excited to see how the earnings will look when I am able to rank in this new sub niche that I found. Overall this site is looking and doing awesome so far!

Site Overview

I have recently started to track all sorts of different stats about each one of my niche sites in hope that I am able to see where the site is struggling and where I could improve it. I am using a spreadsheet that I downloaded from Dumb Passive Income, you can read the exact article where I got this spreadsheet from here. Scroll down into the comments and one of the top comments will have a download link for it.

My spreadsheet is a little modified as I wanted to add some other trackable stats. Even though I just started to utilize the spreadsheet I was able to get my stats from all of the previous months and add it to the spreadsheet.

The picture below shows you a lot of data from my site and you can see how it compares month after month. You can see that September was a great month it the site has improved in many areas.

 

The gold row at the bottom is what I see as most important, which is the RPM. The RPM is the revenue per milli, or how much money you make from 1,000 visitors. You can see that September was the best month yet topping $55 per thousand visitors. This spreadsheet allows me to see quickly how the month did in all aspects of it. It also helps me keep everything organized in one place.

Future Plans

The main focus for me next month will be to try and start ranking for the new sub niche that I was talking about earlier. I need to get some content written and start pointing some links at it. If I am able to start ranking for these keywords in this niche I could see a huge boost in both traffic and earnings.

Niche Site WP

Last month we saw some awesome earnings from this site as we continued to add content and links. This month I did the same thing but this site was hit slightly in the Panda 4.1 update. The site as a whole wasn’t hit but one page was. I will talk more about this below and what I think needs to be done to recover.

Traffic

 

You can probably see the dip in traffic pretty easily on the picture above. Around September 23rd I took a decent hit in my traffic and after some investigation in Google Analytics I found out that one of my pages that was bringing in a good amount of traffic got hit. You can see the dramatic loss of traffic that this page went through below.

 

Ouch…

That is a pretty big hit, actually over a 20% loss in traffic, but the good news is that I think I know why this happened. I have been close match and partial match PBN links to this page for around 6 months and the problem is that I never sent any brand links to this page to dilute the anchor text. I am pretty sure that this page was hit with an over optimization penalty due to the anchor text. I think that if I send brand links to this page and dilute the anchor text that I could see this page pop back up into the first page for all of the keywords that it used to rank for.

The page didn’t get penalized heavily as it is still sitting on the second page for all of the terms it was previously ranking for so it isn’t too far away from the first page. Google can also see that the people are liking the content when they reach the page as the average time on page is almost 6 minutes. With some brand links and time I think that I regain this traffic, I will make sure to keep you all updated on the progress of this.

 

Even with the traffic hit I still averaged more visits this month than last month. So overall a pretty good month for traffic but I am hoping to get that one page back to the first page and then the traffic will really take off.

Earnings

 

The earnings dipped a little since last month but still a solid month at over $360 in September. The  main reason for this drop in earnings has to be because of the one page being penalized, the page converted really well and a lot of items were bought from this page. So losing that income really hurts. That is why my main focus will be on getting that page back onto the first page!

 

Even though the earnings took a hit September was still the second best month ever for this site. It also brings the total income to over $1,600 which is awesome.

Site Overview

 

Some things to note from the site overview is that the RPM for September was only at 63 compared to 98 in August. This is a big gap hopefully in October this will bounce back. Another thing I noticed is that the average sale price was $70 which is the lowest ever for this site. Overall still a good month and I am excited to see how it will look after next month!

Future Plans

My main focus and effort will be trying to get the penalized page back to the first page for all of its terms it was previously ranking for. I will start slow by adding around 20 brand links but I am sure I will need more. I will see if that helps the rankings or not while I still continue to add PBN links and maybe more content.

By Month/Comulative Earnings

The charts below will show you the overall progress that the sites are making in terms of income each month. It is a quick and easy way to see how they performed month vs. month.

 

Even though site WP took a hit in earnings site TZC picked up the slack and the total income for September was very close to last months.

 

The comulative earnings come in at exactly $2,800 since these sites were created way back in March. We are nearing the $3,000 mark and next month we will be passing this milestone. I am very excited about the progress of these sites and they have exceeded my expectations.

Conclusion

Another really solid month in the books with close to $700 made from these two sites. I am still looking for my first $1,000 month and maybe next month will be the month. If I am able to get that one penalized page back into Google’s good grace then I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to bring in over $1,000 next month. I hope that you have enjoyed reading this months income report and have found something useful from it! Thanks for reading everyone 🙂