Oh YES! This year is starting of niiiice ;-)

This is the first Income Press Report of the 2012 year. Very stoked and excited about it and I hope you are too.

For those new to the IP Blog, I started the Income Press Blog back in Nov of 2011. And every month since I share everything that’s going on with this blog.

Everything from the traffic, income, split tests, and any other things I might be up too.

I do this to show the growth of this blog and if there are any improvements to do, then I go ahead and do them. I’ll try new methods and tactics and document them here.

This allows my peeps reading this blog to see exactly what I do and if you’re going to try them out, then at least you’ll know exactly what worked for me and what didn’t.

As I said many times before, my hopes for this blog is to motivate and inspire many of those wanting to get started online and for those that have been online for a while and still struggling, to finally get out and start making some kind of money online.

Now I must stress that this thing of ours isn’t all as easy as it may look or made out to be. It may look easy at times but trust me, it wasn’t always like this. The reason it looks easy is because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

I’ve been through the learning curve, I’ve gone through the struggles. I’m not saying I know it all. This is an ever going learning process. And yes, there are still struggles.

It’s how you react to those struggles that make the difference in the outcome, in the end results.

So with that said lets get this thing rolling baby ;-)

Biggies in January

January was a huge month for the IP blog. From traffic, income, subscribers, the whole nine yards.

Worked on a ton of split testing ideas. Some worked and some didn’t. But man, the ones that did work, I ran hard ass with it.

As you’ll see by the results below, it paid of big time.

Split Testing #1 – Header Banners

Ok so as I mentioned in my 2012 Screw New Years post, lol. A few of my goals are to increase:

• RSS Subscribers

• Facebook fans or likes

• Youtube Subscribers

I first had a social widgets plugin on my sidebar. That was doing ok but really wasn’t producing the numbers I needed.

So then I moved the widget to the top right of the header.

That totally bombed on me. The numbers actually decreased to almost nothing. Went from an average of 20 clicks per day to 1 – 3 clicks. Sometimes even zero.

At first I thought it was the header. Maybe people just didn’t like it there or just missed it.

Then I did some back tracking and realized that when I had that social widget plugin on the sidebar, the numbers actually dropped from when I first changed it from it’s original form.

I use to have 2 separate widgets for the RSS and FB links.

Since I found out what the problem was, I decided to try something else. I opened up my photoshop and whipped up some quick banners with a call to action text and added my picture on it.

Since I only had one space to work with and I really wanted to split test all my subscription options. The only way to do this was to have the banners rotate. I used a plugin called Max Banner Ads to do this.

An old plugin I had stashed away and haven’t used in a long time.

This worked like a charm. I mean I went from less than 20 RSS subs to over 1,200 and about 15 likes to just over 400. Awesome numbers.

My guess on why it worked so well is this:

1: Bigger banner – Now people can see it.

2: Straight forward Call to Action – Tells people exactly what to do.

3: Big huge picture of me – What can I say, I’m just good looking ;-)

If you notice, out of the 3 banners one does not have a call to action. This is for my YouTube channel. The numbers on this sucked big time. Hardly any clicks.

I purposely did this to see exactly what was it that brought the numbers up. Obviously having the bigger banner made a big difference.

But I truly believe that what made a huge impact in the numbers was having just ONE option at a time and giving a CLEAR Call to Action.

You must let the visitor know exactly what you want them to do.

Another thing was that it did not have the word “YouTube” in it. No one knew what the hell that banner was about or what they was suppose to do. From a glance the banner just looks like part of the IP blog logo.

Again, just as you have to let them know exactly what to do, you also have to let them know what the hell the banner is and what it’s for.

Split Testing #2 – Hello Bar

I’m a frequent reader to some of the top bloggers out there and one day after reading a few of them, I noticed that they were using this floating bar across the very top of the header.

So I asked one of them about it, they gave me the link, I got it and I split tested it.

It’s called Hello Bar. I placed it on both my old JKDC blog and on the IP blog. From the old blog I drove traffic back to the IP blog. Got about a 20% increase of traffic just from my old blog.

Then on the IP blog I split tested driving the traffic to different posts, my FB page, RSS page, ect. I have a post dedicated just for the Hello Bar so I’ll save some of the goodies for that.

Income Sky Rockets

Literally the income that IP generated last month just shattered December’s numbers. Going from $73 to well over $4k. AMAZING! Simply AMAZING!

Let me tell ya that this happened with out any hard selling what so ever. About 60% of it came from the resources page. About 10% of it came from the free ebook I give away. And the rest came from my Youtube videos.

Now obviously the income that the ebook generated was from outside the blog. However, they got the ebook from the IP blog so this blog is responsible for that income. It’s highly relevant.

Here’s the breakdown:

The Resource Page – This give people a chance to see what you recommend and what kind of tools you currently use or have used before.

The key here is to show people what you currently use or have used to run your business. This is important. Only recommend stuff that you personally use or have used. Don’t just put things there just cause you would get a commission for it.

If you like to read then show people the kind of books that inspire you. You’d be surprised at how many will actually want to read what you read.

Make about 80 – 90% of the recommendations affiliate links and the rest free stuff. You don’t want to seem like you’re shoving shit promos down peoples throats. People hate that.

Free eBook – If you have a blog, site, or whatever, you should always have some type of eBook or report to give away FREE. A step by step process on how to do something that worked for you.

My eBook shows people how I made $1,805.18 in seven days. I show them all the tools and resources I used to make that happen. Some of them are affiliated and some not.

Again the key here is to show people exactly what you used and what you did with it to achieve results.

Truly passive income that eBook right there.

YouTube Videos – Every video I’ve made talking about a tool or service I’m using and have an affiliate link for it, I say that they can get this tool or service through my affiliate link.

I’m being totally transparent and cool about it. Plus I always give great value by providing some kind of tutorial on the actual product.

I’m not hard selling or pitching anything. I simply just say … Hey if you’d like to get this, here’s my affiliate link.

People will respect you more for not shoving stuff down their throats.

Niche Sites – Not much to say with the niche sites as far as income goes. Only made about $12 bucks with adsense and the majority of that was with my Youtube ads.

Kind of disappointed with those numbers but there’s still room to grow. I got plans to improve those numbers and of course I’ll be sharing them with ya.

I spent most of the month focusing on ranking which worked out pretty well. I made a video about it. You can watch it here <==

For February I’m gonna focus on implementing and split testing some Amazon product to see if I can bring in some more income that way.

iPhone Apps

I’m going to include my iPhone App business here from now on. I use to give detailed reports on my old blog but since I no longer update that blog, I figured I’d bring it here.

Some of ya guys are asking for it so why not right.

I really haven’t done much with the app business. Actually I haven’t done any type of marketing. The money it makes is totally 100% passive income. Not much to brag about but still, it all adds up.

Traffic

I’ll keep this one short mainly because I’m over 1300 words deep right now. Plus I have a post dedicated on January’s traffic and how I was able to increase it ten fold.

Just to give you an idea, the IP blog went from 254,950 to 157,918 ranked in Alexa as of today as I’m writing this post. That’s awesome. I’m sure I’ll break the 100k very, very soon.

Here’s a pic of the total traffic stats for January.

Crazy stats huh, lol. I’ll get into even more deeper details in a post coming soon. So much to go over that I don’t wanna overwhelm you here.

Ok I think we’ve gone long enough here, lol. Let’s get to some income reporting.

Disclaimer: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links. If you do purchase any of the products or services, I would love ya to death. I really do appreciate it. And if ya need a hand with any of them, just hit me up and I’ll do my best to help out.

Ranking:

• Alexa Ranking: 157,918
  • Last Month: 254,950
  • Difference: +97,032

Income Earnings:

• Adsense:
  • YouTube: 12.87
  • Niche Site: $0.06
  • Total: $12.93
    • Last Month: $12.57
    • Difference: + $0.36

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Safe Swaps: $714.50
  • Market Samurai: $272.16
  • Aweber: $23.10
  • 5 Minute Fanpage: $336.60
  • Master Resale Rights: $11.01
  • Max Ninja Affiliate: $170.95
  • Amazon: $0.64
  • Content Professor: $205.93
  • Studio Press: $8.73
  • Easy Video Player: $134.88
  • SEO Pressor: $346.84
  • Pop-up Domination: $86.68
  • Optimize Press: $90.00
  • My eBook Funnel: $1,581.43
  • BlueHost.com: $520.00
  • Total: $4,503.45
    • Last Month: $60.96
    • Difference: +$4442.49

• iPhone Apps:
  • Total: $126.62 (including in-app purchases and ads)
    • Last Month: (didn’t have it here on the IP blog so it would be zero)
    • Difference: +$126.62

• Gross Total in January: $4,643.00
  • Last Month: $73.53
  • Difference: +$4,569.47

• Expenses: $466.81
  • I decided to add the expenses cause last month I had several people email me asking about it. They wanted to know roughly what I spend a month to run my business. My overhead is minimal. I’ve always kept it low.
    
    The majority of this are just the regular stuff I need to run my online business. Hosting, Aweber, other tools and services that allow me to automate most of the things I do. For years I ran my business with less than $50 a month. That was just for hosting and Aweber. It’s really all you need to start.

• Net Total in January: $4,176.19

Pretty sweet month ;-)

As you can see by the numbers that there was a huge spike in income and traffic generated from December to January. But as I said before, I’ve been doing this for a while and in between there were a ton of split testing done.

And that’s the key here. SPLIT TESTING!

Through out this post I’ve talked about split testing this and split testing that. If I had not done any of that I doubt very much those number would be where they’re at today.

The Big Lesson Learned

Split test everything you do. Even if you think you’ve reach the maximum results, keep split testing. There’s always room for improvements.

Another lesson learned. Don’t be afraid to use some of your old tools. If you’re like me, you probably have a library of tools you’ve purchased just cause you thought it was cool or wanted it just in case you need it one day.

When I was thinking of the rotating banner idea, I remembered that I had the Max Banner Ad plugin stashed away in one of my external hard drives.

I whipped it out and BOOM, worked awesome for me.

Before you go out looking for the next big thing or tool and spend tons of time and money looking for the right stuff, take a look at what you have already.

You might find that you have exactly what you need stashed away somewhere.

Things to look for in February

For Feb, I’m gonna focus more on split testing with Amazon products to try and bring in some extra income other then Adsense.

Now that I’ve got my niche sites ranking good and getting ok traffic, I can start implementing product sales and other ways to make more of an automated stream of income.

I’ll also be implementing list building tactics to see if the market’s good for some email marketing.

It’s always a good idea to build a list in any niche you’re in just in case your other methods don’t bring in any income. You can try to market via email.

A quick note. Not every niche is a good market for email marketing. Some niches simply wont respond to it.

To find out just simply do a quick promo. If it doesn’t work out well then you’ll probably want to stop building that list cause you’ll just be stuffing your aweber with unnecessary leads.

It cost money to maintain a list, whether it be a live active one or a dead list.

Ok so that’s pretty much it for me. Hope you enjoyed this months report. Till next month.

Peace and I love ya for free ;-)