Niche Site Project 2: Income Report and Podcast for January 2014!

The January income report for aPennyShaved.com is here!  This is one that I know a lot of you have been anticipating, because of how well the site did last month.

After earning over $650 in December, the big question was whether December was so big mostly due to Holiday shopping.  The clear answer is NO!  January was a much bigger month, and Perrin and I attribute that to simply getting more pages indexed and ranking in Google.

Newer sites can take a few months before Google starts ranking all the long tail possibilities.  And January was the month that aPennyShaved really started to do well in Google.  Below, you can see the full income report along with Perrin's thoughts.

However, this is a special occasion because in addition to just the normal income report, Perrin and I also recorded a podcast to review the entire project!

This is meant to be the final official coaching call for Niche Site Project 2.  This podcast/coaching call is the culmination of the entire project…so we hope you listen!

On the podcast we cover many things that are not covered in this post.  Overall, we review:

• How well the site had done in January including income, traffic, and more.
• Why the site is doing so well
• What Perrin thinks about the whole project
• Details on where traffic is coming from
• Rankings of keywords
• Coaching going forward
• The strategies that have worked for this project
• And much more…and overall in-depth discussion of aPennyShaved.com and why its so successful

Overall, I'm excited that we have well exceeded our goal of earning $500/mth from the niche site.  The niche site project 2 has been a huge success, and this post and podcast are a bit of a celebration of that fact.

I'm going to let Perrin take it away from here and share all the specifics for this January income report.

Perrin's January Income Report for aPennyShaved.com

Howdy, friends. It’s that time again: time to share how many greenbacks aPennyShaved brought in this month. And I think you’re going to be pumped about this one because I had a record month!

Let’s get to it.

Earnings

In the December income report, I shared that I’d made $659.41. I was totally blown away by the success in December; remember, in November, I’d only made about $40. However, I knew that Christmas helped a lot, so I was very curious to see how (or if) the site would grow in January.

I figured there would be a slight dip in January – in both traffic and earnings. So you can probably imagine my surprise when I started to see a hockey stick in my Amazon Associates account. The sales just kept going up. Eventually, I was average $30-$40 per day. And, around the third week of January, I hit the 8% Amazon Associates commission threshold, which gave me a significant boost. So what did I end up with? Take a peek.

In January, I earned $1,391.97! That came from 872 items shipped, and my commissions are 8% of $17,706 of revenue that aPennyShaved brought to Amazon. That’s totally insane! I more than doubled my money, which I certainly did not expect.

Needless to say, I’m super, super happy. If you’d told me four months ago that I’d have a site making over $1,000 per month before Valentine’s day, I would have told you that you were crazy. But here I am. So that’s the good news.

Traffic

So what about traffic? If you’ve been following the project, you’ll know that I set a rather lofty goal for this month. I wanted to get to 1,000 unique visitors per day. As it happens, I hit that pretty much right after the post was published, and I’ve been averaging 1,000+ visitors per day since. Awesome, right?

Here’s the data.

The spike you see there was the last income report, which usually gives me a bit of a boost for the rest of the week. After it died down, however, I was very happy to see my traffic even out and settle into the normal ebbs and flows of weekly traffic trends (slightly more traffic on Monday and Tuesday, etc.).

I was even more encouraged by the data from Google Webmaster Tools. Last month, I’d gotten 90,000 impressions from about 1,400 queries. This month, that’s increased substantially. Check it out:

That’s a pretty sharp increase in numbers. I’m now getting 248,000 impressions from 4,437 queries. So, the site is definitely settling into a very good rhythm, and it seems obvious that Google really likes the site. I mean, that is a lot of long-tail traffic. It also goes to show you that long tail keywords really do end up making up the bulk of your traffic.

All of this has come totally naturally, of course. I didn’t target 4,000 keywords. That traffic is just part of the natural writing process. It’s really cool to watch, really. As a site matures, it starts to rank for all those little longtails. And that’s when it really starts to grow. Still, I’m very excited to see these kinds of numbers. It’s super, super fun to watch the site grow!

Rankings

Like I said in my last post, I’m not too worried about my rankings – except for my two primary keywords: “best safety razor” and “best electric shaver.” So, I have been keeping an eye on those, and both have seen a bit of movement.

In December I was ranking #2 for my primary keyword, “best safety razor.” Shortly after I published that report I jumped up to #1, finally beating a LifeHacker article I’d been trying to beat forever. I was so pumped! But not for long…

A few days later, I dropped to #3 – ha. I was like, “huh?” I talked to a bunch of colleagues about what could have possibly caused me to drop like that. What we finally decided on was that a few of my Rank Hero posts dropped off the front page of their blogs, giving me slightly less authority (but still a lot).

Weirdly, this was kind of encouraging. Why? Well, mostly, it re-affirmed the strength of both my site and of the Rank Hero network. It means that pairing a well-built, well-written site with a ultra-high-quality, ultra-safe network like Rank Hero works very well as a long-term strategy. Remember, I didn’t even have a lot of Rank Hero links. I only had five. So, even though I dropped, I was pleased.

There’s some good news, too! For my other keyword, my rather lofty one, “best electric shaver,” I moved from #12 to #10. So I’m on the front page! I haven’t noticed tons of traffic or anything, but I’ve noticed a bit, which is very cool. This is probably the product of the site’s age, we think. So, it’s also an awesome sign that the site’s doing well.

What have I been doing? What’s boosted the site?

Most of the site’s revenue and traffic increases have been related to the new content I’ve added, I think. I hired my brother to write a bunch of new articles (we added 15-20 articles last month or something), and we’re coming up on 40 pages of content total, which I’m really excited about.

As a very, very rough estimate, each new piece of content seems to bring in around 20-25 new visitors per day once it settles in and Google decides to rank it. This is just keeping with the same old strategy: getting to 50 pieces of content before stopping and letting the site ride.

Other than that, I haven’t been doing much. I haven’t been link building at all, and I don’t plan to do any more. However, I did get another link from my previous round of link bait a long, long time ago. Remember that? It’s still working for me!

What’s the plan now?

After I get to 50 pieces of content, I’m going to take a bit of a break. I’ve already started on my second site, and I’m just kind of barely almost starting to see it rank, so I’m throwing a little more of my weight behind that one.

I did, however, add a Facebook like box to the site. Building an audience on social media is something I’d really like to get better at. So, I’m starting to experiment with Twitter and Facebook. I have very little to report on that, but I’ll certainly keep you guys in the loop.

That’s it for me! Thanks again guys, and this time, please indulge me: How are your sites doing?

Listen to the Podcast Here: