It Was The Best of Times, It Was The Worst of Times - March 2011 Income Report

March was a very interesting month for me.

The Best Of Times

A lot of good things happened to my niche site in March.  After finally realizing that I needed to invest more in my niche site in order to see some positive returns, I purchased Blog Blueprint to help me with backlinking and I could not have been happier.  It's easy to use and gets results.  I purchased it on March 6 and by March 15 the traffic started creeping in:


Before Blog Blueprint I was maybe seeing 2 visitors a day, but after 9 days of use, adding no more than 10 backlinks a day, the traffic started to shoot up.

I peaked at 27 visitors a day.  And my highest rank was 22.

Now that may not sound like much but it was clear that I was attracted highly targeted visitors:

(Gratuitous pat myself on the back moment)  Looking at the usage stats, visitors were spending a decent amount of time on my site, reading at least one review.  That could only increase my chances of someone clicking through one of my links to Amazon.  At that point the potential transaction is out of my hands, but I was attracting hungry buyers, who needed only the slightest of nudges to make a purchase:
Amazon did its job, converting almost 8% of the visitors coming through via my links into happy, paying customers.  So without further ado....there is REVENUE to report!

Yay Earnings!

I can finally type, "Earnings for March"....$20.52 (of course I haven't turned a profit, but you have to start somewhere)

I'm rich!  Well not quite. But most of those sales occurred over a 4 day period and considering I never ranked higher than 22 for my main keyword I would call this a success.  Now just imagine if I was ranking #1 for my main keyword!  I still wouldn't be rich, but I sure would be happy.

For now that's all I can do.  Imagine.

The Worst of Times

If you scroll back up and take a look at the traffic graph you will notice a little downhill thingy happening.

Yea, Google had to fook with my head.

So after feeling like the world's beset internet marketer, the Big G decided to de-rank my niche site.  I went from the top of page 3 for my keyword, seeing traffic, converting, all that great stuff, to some nether-world otherwise known as page 79 of google search results!

Once I got the crying under control I sought out some advice in the Twittersphere and Warrior Forum and found that this is to be expected with a site that is just about 3 months old.  So now I continue to use Blog Blueprint to backlink, but am varying it up a bit by creating product review videos (thank you Fiverr), profile backlinks, and also blasting mass article submissions to some of my existing articles on Ezine to see if that will help too.

Right now the site is dancing (with two left feet).  It's gone much higher, a little lower, higher again, and just a tad bit lower.  I want to add two more product reviews and I want this dancing to stop (I hate dancing, always have.  I was that guy who thought he was too cool for it, but in reality, I'm just terrible at it, so I pretended to be too cool instead).  My friend Michelle of My Passive Income Online Blog said to give it about two weeks or so and the site should emerge from this dance in a stronger position than when it started.  So, we'll see what happens.

In the meantime I am looking to start two more niche sites (one of which will be monetized only via Adsense).  I guess we just gotta keep on keeping on!