Income Press Reports – Dec 2011

Alright so this is kinda weird but cool at the same time, lol. This is the last IPM Reports for 2011 and the first post on the 2012 YEAR! Very exciting stuff. I’m anxious and very stoked about the new year and I hope you are too.

Ok so let me start out by saying, Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you had a blast this past holidays. For me, I’m kinda glad it’s over, lol. It was fun hanging out with family, but after Thanksgiving, 3 birthday parties, X-Mas, and the New Years Eve party, I’m ready to get back to work.

So with that said, lets begin…

This section section of the Income Press Blog is the IPM Reports, (income press monthly reports). My aim for the IPM Reports is to give you detailed info on the growth and progress of the IP blog.

I’ll start with some of the highlights for the month. Things like traffic, earnings, case studies I’m working on, and even things I’m just split testing to see what happens. I’ll break down what I did and let you know if it worked or didn’t work out and if I’ll be doing it again.

Then I’ll end the report with some of the things I learned during that month and some of the things I’d like to work on for the following month.

Lets do some reporting ;-)

Highlights in December

I wanna start off this report with the FIRST DOLLAR made on the Income Press blog. Now this is very exciting to me. Cause with my old JKDC blog, I have no freaking idea when or how or what made the 1st dollar.

But since I’m documenting everything here, I get to see exactly when, where and how it’s made. Totally fun and very exciting.

The first sale came in on December 12, 2011 for $60.96. It came from the resource page and it was through my Market Samurai affiliate link.

As you can see I got 59 hits, 5 people signed up for the free trial, and got 1 sale.

Those aren’t bad numbers. I’m looking at 1 sale per 60 hits. To early to tell but we’ll see as the traffic gets bigger.

The “Resource Page” is probably the most under utilized section of any blog or blogger. A lot of bloggers think it’s a waste of time and space.

I’ll be honest, I thought the exact same thing. I tried it years ago and it just didn’t work. But after talking to a few real” professional bloggers, I found out what was wrong and why I needed to implemented on my blogs.

• First – Your readers want to know what tools, services, and resources you use to make your blog successful. They want to model after what you’re doing.

• Second – Why keep it a secret. Tell them exactly what you’re using, how you’re using it, and why you’re using it.

• Third – Don’t make it a freaking Billboard. That’s what I did before and that’s why it didn’t work. I’ve learned a long time ago that “Recommending” sells more than “Selling” does. If you recommend something, people are more willing to actually check it out and give it a try. If you sell it, then they will feel like they’re being sold to and we all hate to be sold to.

If you haven’t yet implemented the resource page, I highly suggest you start. You don’t need to have a ton of stuff there.

You can start off with the tools you use. Like hosting. Where you got your domain. Some recommended products, books, tools and services you currently use or have used in the past.

You can add more to it as you grow your blog and you try out new things.

Traffic Stats and Alexa Rankings

My Alexa rankings are cranking baby, lol. As of January 1, 2012, the Alexa ranking for the IP blog is sitting at 254,950 and climbing. Freaking AWESOME!

At the beginning of December it was at 567,673. That’s a huge increase. I’ll hit the 100K mark by the end of the month which is my goal for January.

The traffic continues to climb. This month IP hit a high of 2,776 visitors with 1,200 of them being unique. And one thing I’m totally loving about the GetClicky tool is the Actions feature. It lets me know exactly what my visitors are doing once they’re on my site.

As you can see there was a total of 5,679 Actions taken on my site. 5,118 of them were Page Views. This means that most of the visitors were viewing my other pages and post with in my site.

It’s nearly double the amount of visitors which means that most of them viewed more than one post or page. This is some really awesome info. I’m doing something right here.

Only 307 were outbound links which means that once they hit my site and left.

The average time per visit is over 6 minutes. That right there is amazon. To have such a high amount. People are really digging my stuff here. This here really lets me know that I’m doing something right.

The bounce rate is even more amazon. 27%. That’s crazy. I mean a good number is like 50 – 60%. Maybe 70%. You definitely want to keep your bounce rate on a “Brand” blog.

If your bounce rate is to high, it usually means people don’t like your content or it’s not related to what they’re looking for.

Traffic Sources

As you can see by the image below that the main source of traffic comes from Direct traffic. This is just how many visitors got to my site with an empty referrer string. This usually means they typed in the URL by hand or used a bookmark to get to my page or just have it as a favorite.

Email still continues to be a huge factor as far as traffic goes. But in December I hardly emailed. One thing that really stands out is the increase in Social Media, Links, and Searches traffic. The green numbers at the far right represent the increase percentage. Huge numbers as you can see. 303%, 528%, and 600%. that’s huge.

More Money!

YES! There’s more money, and more exciting news for the IP blog. In late November I decided to start playing around with Adsense. I was talking to a few Adsense gurus and learned a few things about it. For example, YouTube. I had no idea you can make money with youtube let alone put some adsense on it.

So I implemented adsense on my youtube channels and my Dominoes Info niche site. I began on Dec. 3rd. on Dec. 18th I made my first Adsense money.

You have no idea how this totally freaked me out. I mean I was jumping around and doing cartwheels like if I hit the lotto. It was only like 30 cents, but that’s not the point. It’s that feeling of accomplishment. I implemented something I learned and it worked. Purely AWESOME ;-)

Total Adsense money earned was only $12.57. The majority of that came from my youtube channel. 22 clicks from youtube and only 3 from my niche site. Towards the end of the month I put adsense on my older youtube channel cause I get tons of organic traffic there.

I tried to set up a separate account but google doesn’t allow you to have more than one adsense account. So I was forced to use the same one for both. It’s ok though, it all counts.

Things that didn’t work out

There was only 2 things that didn’t work out for me.

Thing one – The Guest Blogging I wanted to do. In the first 2 weeks I submitted 5 guest blog post to five top blogs. 4 got rejected and only one excepted it. That post wont go live for another to weeks. The others that got declined, well I’ll just have to keep working hard and figure out why it was rejected.

Thing 2 – My Blog Guest. Big disappointment. It started out great, but then it all went down south. There’s this cool feature there that I really like. It lets me know if and when my post was actually posted on their blog. It also lets me know if I received my backlink or not and if there was any changes.

Well there was some changes and for the worst. Turns out that some of these A-holes deleted my post after a week or 2. I could understand one guy doing it. But 2 of them. Two people from 2 totally different blogs. Then on some other ones they didn’t even put my link in the post. This kind of defeats the purpose.

I know I preached them from the roof tops last month. But after that, I wont any more. I’m not saying to totally boycott them. If you’re having better luck than I am, then please stay. Just because I had a bad experience doesn’t mean you will too.

But this is what I love about this. I try something out, and let you know if it worked out for me or not. From that you can make a smart educated decision on whether to use it or not.

OH SNAP!

Just realized I’m over 1,400 words at this point. WOW! Sorry about that. Just so much that happened. Anyway, lets get to some reporting yeah…

Income Press Reports

Ranking:

• Alexa Ranking: 254,950
  • Last Month: 567,673
  • Difference: +312,723

Income Earnings:

• Adsense
  • YouTube: $10.27
  • Niche Site: $2.30
  • Total: $12.57
    • Last Month: 0
    • Difference: + $12.57

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Market Samurai: $60.96
  • Total: $60.96
    • Last Month: 0
    • Difference: +$60.96

• Gross Total in December: $73.53
  • Last Month: 0
  • Difference: +$73.53

• Net Total in December: $73.53

Pretty cool huh?

My first dollar earned with the Income Press Blog. Awesome stuff. Now it’s hard to really pin point whether the sale came from new visitors or my existing readers coming from the JKDC blog.

Either way, it counts and I’m sticking with it, lol.

Another cool thing was the YouTube Adsense money. Now that really got my juices flowing. I’m gonna go all out with that this month.

I’ll be writing a post here soon on YouTube Adsense tactics I learned and will be using. I know you’ll like this one cause it’s like easy money. And this you can definitely optimize for maximum results.

Things I learned in December

This December I hardly did any real work. I took it a bit easy since it was the holidays. I usually take off the entire month of December to hang out with family and all that good stuff. But this December I had some unfinished projects I needed to get done so that took most of my time. I’ll talk more about that in another post.

There was one thing I did a lot of though. And that was monitor and analyze. Since I took it some what easy, I spent most of my free time monitoring and studying patterns with my traffic. Like where it was coming from, and how often. When and where some of the organic traffic and income was coming from.

And if there was anything I learned, it was the importance of monitoring and analyzing. It’s the only way to really optimize for maximum results.

Things to look for in January and the New 2012 Year

This year I’ll be looking to generate more of a passive income stream. I want to work less and make more money. After reading The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, I’m applying a whole new strategy and mindset to my business.

In 2011 I spent most of the year working my butt off to make my money. This year will be different. Now that doesn’t mean I’m gonna be slacking off. No. It means that I’m gonna work my ass off the first quarter of the year to make sure I work less and make more money the rest of the year.

I’ve got a post dedicated on this topic coming in the next few weeks. I think you’ll enjoy and get a ton of value from it. So look out for that.

I’m also gonna be focusing hard on this Adsense stuff. It’s way to easy money. Especially with Youtube.

Anyway, that’s it for me here. It’s gone long enough and I’m sure you’re about tired of reading now, lol.

C-ya in the nex IPM Reports.

Peace!