Monthly Income Report: October 2012

The most successful investor was Noah. He floated stock, while everything around him went into liquidation.

The most successful female investor was Pharaoh’s daughter. She went to the Nile bank and floated a prophet.

I saw a bank that said if offered 24 Hour Banking. But I didn’t go in. I didn’t have that much time.

A long term investment is a short term investment that failed.

Always play with other people’s money!

The market is weird. Every time one guy sells, another one buys, and they both think they’re smart.

If you can count your money, you don’t have a billion dollars.

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Now that we had a laugh about money (sometimes, that’s ALL we can do, right?), let’s get down to business.

How much has Traffic Generation Café made in October and what do I need to do to increase that income in the future?

As you’ll see, traffic and perceived popularity doesn’t always automatically translate into cash.

I’ll show you:

• my traffic stats,
• what I’ve done in the previous month to improve them,
• what worked and didn’t work,
• and how much action my bank account saw in terms of earnings as well as expenses.

Monthly Traffic at a Glance

Did you know that green is

“…a color, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 520–570 nanometres.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_(color)

Wow, I have no idea why I just spent about five minutes looking up the definitions of green color and the emotions it evokes…

No wonder I don’t get anything done…

For the purpose of this post, green is the color of MORE TRAFFIC; and that alone makes it my favorite.

There was a lot of green in my Google Analytics in the month of October.

It looks like all the metrics improved significantly.

I got a healthy amount of search engine traffic, great amount of direct traffic, and a surprisingly low percentage of referral traffic.

Speaking of referral traffic, it might be so low because my direct traffic happened to be high in October.

Digging further into my referral sources, they all show great improvement across the board.

FACEBOOK

I’ve done several things to improve my traffic from Facebook.

• Tried to post 2-3 times per day.
• Used more photos and fewer links (like this).
• Started discussions on various topics (like this).
• Emailed my list about those discussions once or twice, asking them for feedback.
• Tried to have more fun with it (like this).

I also finally added the Facebook widget back into my sidebar, which of course significantly increased the likes.

On top of it, I got this great plugin that’s making it shake every once in a while, drawing readers’ attention.

I’ve been inundated with “What do you use to make it shake?” questions since I started using it, so here it is:

It’s a simple plugin called “Sore Thumb“.

It allows you to make all kinds of elements within your blog (sidebar, posts, pages, etc) move in whatever manner you’d like them to.

Last time I checked, the price was still about $7.

Get yours here.

Things I’ll be working on in November:

• creating better tabs to increase traffic and conversions;
• exploring new ways to increase likes;
• increasing my EdgeRank, which will allow my posts to be seen by more people.

I am also thinking of returning Facebook comments to TGC – in addition to the CommentLuv enabled native comment system, of course.

TWITTER

The most important thing I did to increase my Twitter traffic in October was becoming more active at Triberr, JustRetweet, and ViralContentBuzz.

You can read more about it in 3445 Words on How to Promote the Ish out of Your Blog Posts.

There have been many requests for me to do a Triberr tutorial; I’ll see if I can do it in the near future.

VISIBLI

Just published a post about this strategy; read it here or watch my video on How to Increase Traffic with Visibli.

If you followed comments on that post: I did ask Visibli team if the outgoing links could be opened in a new tab. Still working on getting the answer.

Thumbs Up to These Blogs

I really appreciate everyone who mentioned me in any shape or form last month.

The following 10 blogs were my top blogging referral traffic sources:

1. Lisa Irby | Blog.2CreateaWebsite.com
2. Ileane Smith | BasicBlogTips.com
3. Kim Roach | BuzzBlogger.com
4. Kristi Hines | Kikolani.com
5. Yaro Starak | Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
6. Francisco Perez | IBlogZone.com
7. Ian Belanger | IMGraphicDesigns.com
8. Kenneth Byrd | BlogBasics.com
9. Mitz | LetsBuildWebsites.com
10. James Hussey | TheAverageGenius.net

Special THANK YOU to Lisa Irby and Ileane Smith for giving me some tips on getting my new YouTube channel off the ground – you rock!

Last Month Bottom Line

Let’s get on with the best part.

By the way, as I write this post I have no idea how much I made, so I am in anticipation as much as you are.

Note: these are all paid earnings, meaning I might’ve actually made those sales in the previous month(s), but got paid for them just before publishing this income report.

Also my new goal for Traffic Generation Café is to focus on developing passive (relatively speaking, of course) income sources ONLY.

I am not trading my time for an hourly or fee-based wage, in other words.

So things like consulting or freelance writing are completely off my list; whereas, affiliate marketing, banner advertising, etc. are in.

My Income

Here are my income sources for the past month:

Affiliate marketing

• Acme Traffic Plugin Pack – $410
• Market Samurai – $211
• TweetAdder – $202
• Aweber - $40

TOTAL: $863

Difference from the previous month:

↓$245

My Expenses

Posting gross income doesn’t really do us any good – what if my expenses put me in the red no matter how much money I made in the previous month?

With that in mind, let’s see how much running Traffic Generation Cafe cost me:

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links to the products I love and use for my own business.

I appreciate your patronage, should you choose to purchase any of them through me.

• SEMRush.com (my favorite SEO tool) - $50
• Aweber -$69
• Fiverr.com (outsource tedious tasks I don’t have time for) - $10
• Hostgator (hosting) - $10
• VA help – $50

TOTAL: $189

Additional Purchases

October was the month of testing, testing, testing.

I purchased quite a few plugins to see if I can boost traffic and conversions.

Some of them worked. Some didn’t.

Here’s the breakdown:

• Acme Traffic Plugin Pack – $10 (worked)
• Anchor Text Assassin – $8 (not bad, but I don’t think I’ll be using it)
• FB Review Engine – $18  (you can see it at the end of Empower Network post; it’s currently conflicting with something else on my blog – the jury is still out)

I am in the process of testing a few more.

TOTAL EXPENSES $225

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NET INCOME: $638

Oh, Boy…

Now I am not so sure I want to publish this income report…

Two reasons:

1.   I don’t want to discourage any of you who believe that you can turn blogging into a full-time income career.

Because you can.

However, it does take time. And there will be many ups and downs.

This is my down.

For instance, last year about the same time, I made around $3,000 per month.

BUT…

2.   I don’t want to hear any more well-meaning “You should do it this way” comments from people who haven’t made a dime themselves.

I know there are many ways I can increase my income.

Unfortunately, we all have to do with what we have (or don’t).

In my case, the problem is time.

I’ve got about 3 hours per day to work on my business and it’s not nearly enough.

Not much I can do about it at the moment though; so I am trying to turn lemons into lemonade.

Anyone’s got a great recipe for that?

Marketing Takeaway

There’s no such thing as free bacon.

Making money blogging is entirely possible, as I was surprised to learn from my own experience.

Just takes time, determination, and a lot of work.

If you feel that Traffic Generation Café provides great value for your money (he-he), you can do three things to keep me going:

1. Read Traffic Generation Café with friends: like it on Facebook, join me on Twitter, and other networks, and SHARE, SHARE, SHARE!
2. Mention my blog posts on your blog. You’ll provide your readers with value and get a visit from me.
3. When shopping for any marketing tools, please take a look at my internet marketing tools page. If you don’t see the product you’d like to buy, send me an email and I’ll let you know if I am an affiliate. You’ll also get on my good side doing that.

Off to squeeze some lemons,

If you like this post and think it would be valuable to your followers, share the ish out of it for me, would you?