August 2015 Income Report

At this point last month, I was worried that I'd be able to keep up with my income numbers in August, mainly for two reasons: 1) I thought my niche sites may have been affected by the Panda update, and 2) I wasn't sure that I'd be able to keep up with my Custom Niche Site orders.

Well, it turns out, those fears were pretty much unfounded.

First, I had another record-breaking month with my niche sites, totaling $4,431.58 in Amazon income, which barely edged out last month's $4,414.07 figure. This was aided slightly by me finally geo-localizing my Amazon links using a service called Geniuslink, which I'll get to in a moment. 

Additionally, the income generated from this blog's products and services also stayed relatively steady, bringing in $3,673.37 of revenue, due mostly to my Custom Niche Site offerings and PBN. 

So, combining the Amazon affiliate income with the revenue generated by the blog, and my total income for the month of August comes in at $8,104.95.​

More...

First, though, a screenshot from my Amazon account showing the combined income from my four niche sites for August, including a screenshot from my Amazon Canada account.

I also made a few dollars from my Amazon UK account, so when we add everything together, I earned $4,431.58 in Amazon affiliate income for August!

​

August vs July: NS1 & NS2

Here's a top-level overview of a couple of basic metrics that I like to track with Niche Site 1 and Niche Site 2. (Since my other two sites do not earn nearly as much, I decided not to track their numbers here in these reports).

Click on each of the tabs to jump from one metric to the next.​

Niche Site 1

Niche Site 1 was pretty much on par with how it has been performing over the previous five months, hovering right around that $2,400 mark.

Income​

I also earned a few extra dollars, as I mentioned, with the Amazon Canada/UK accounts by geo-localizing my links for the first time ever.

Google Rankings

The keywords have been jumping around a bit, but mostly holding steady. As I've mentioned before, I have not done ANY linkbuilding to this site for several months, and am going to wait for the next Penguin update to see if the site gets hit before making any decisions.

Traffic

You'll recall that last month I was worried about a potential Panda update to this site. So, how did we fare with August traffic?

First, here are the traffic numbers from July.​

And now, traffic from August:

So you can see that traffic in August was indeed down compared to July, by more than 9%. Whether that is the result of a Panda update, or just less people searching for this particular type of product in August, is tough to tell. 

Amazon Traffic and Revenue Per Visitor

Of the 12,363 people that visited NS1 in June, I was able to get 5,717 of them to click on over to Amazon from one of my affiliate links.

This gives us a click-through-rate of 46%, which is a 3% increase from July.

As for revenue per Amazon visitor: NS1 did $2,359.11 total revenue in August, with 5,717 visitors to Amazon. That gives us an average revenue per visitor of ​about $0.41 each. 

Niche Site 2

Niche Site 2 continues its march toward the $2,000 per month milestone.

Income

Again, this screenshot is for Amazon U.S., but I earned a few more dollars from Amazon Canada as well.

Google Rankings

NS2 has close to 25 PBN links pointing to it at this point, so I've scaled back on building any more to it for now. I'm trying to diversify the backlink profile now, including doing some guest posts like I mentioned in my last post. Right now, I've been able to snag three decent guest posts, all relevant to the niche.

I've also started to experiment with doing a little outreach, specifically using this method from Brian Dean called the guestographic technique. It involves creating an infographic relevant to your niche, and then reaching out to bloggers and basically asking them if they'd like to post it on their site.

I plan on writing an entire post about my results, but so far they've been pretty promising. ​

Manual outreach is not easy, and it's not exactly scaleable. It takes a lot of time. So far, I've sent about 65 personal outreach e-mails, and have received only three links. But one of them, as you can see above, was from a DA85 .edu domain, and another a DA76.

So while the volume may not be there, it is possible to score some high-DA links. I plan on sending at least 200 e-mails total for this one infographic I had created, so hopefully I see some additional results.

Again, I plan on making this the topic of my next blog post, so stay tuned for a lot more detail.​

Traffic

Last month, I was also somewhat concerned that NS2 (though not as much as with NS1) may have been slightly affected by Panda.

As a reminder, here are July's traffic numbers.​

And here are August's numbers:

As you can see, those Panda concerns were completely unwarranted, as traffic actually increased 10%.

Amazon Traffic and Revenue Per Visitor

Of the 3,685 people who visited NS2 in August, 1,468 of them clicked on over to Amazon, which amounts to a very impressive CTR of 40%.

In terms of revenue per Amazon visitor, of those ​1,468 people who clicked one of my affiliate links, I was able to generate a revenue of $1,735.48, which gives us an average revenue per visitor of $1.18, which is excellent.

Geolocalizing with Geniuslink

It's pretty sad to admit this, but in the over 18 months with my niche sites, I've never once taken advantage of localizing my links so that I can earn additional revenue with the other Amazon countries, such as Canada and the UK.

Part of it was simple laziness, but the main issue is that all the other localizers out there that I've tried were simply not compatible with Elf Links. And regular readers of the blog know that I consider Elf Links to be a must-have plugin.

But then I found Geniuslink, which does a whole lot more than simple localization, but for our purposes, that's what I'll focus on.

I did have to change all of my links on my sites, but the process couldn't have been easier. I simply created a unique Geniuslink by pasting in my unique Amazon links, and then I plugged those Geniuslinks into Elf Links, and it worked perfectly. Yes, it's a two-step process, but the combination of localized links + Elf Links is a great combination that was well worth the effort.

In terms of results, for my sites at least, Canada was the best performer. In August, I received an additional 426 unique Amazon visitors from my sites that I normally wouldn't have had, resulting in 16 sales and about an extra $50 in revenue. Not a lot of money, but it was money that I was otherwise throwing out the window.

Again, Geniuslink does a LOT more than simple localization, including some really nifty reporting capabilities, so I do encourage you to check out all their features on this page.​

Niche Site Azon

In terms of income generated from the blog, I continue to be pleased by what the site has been able to earn, both for products & services, and affiliate sales.

Income

Thrive Themes ($87.00)

Regular readers of the blog know that I'm a huge fan of Thrive, both with their Thrive Themes and their amazing Thrive Content Builder. If you're going to invest a little money making sure your niche site looks well-designed, then Thrive is a great choice.

The Hoth ($14.26)

The Hoth is my go-to link building service for when I'm just launching a new niche site. I use it to build tiered Web 2.0 properties that gives you a nice set of initial links that get my sites started out in the right direction.

 I highly recommend ​the service for use on all kinds of niche sites.

I actually got a decent amount of sign-ups last month, but they way they do their payout cut-offs resulted in a low payout this month.​

You can read my full review of the The Hoth here.​

AmaSuite 4 ($148.50)

AmaSuite 4 is the software I use to identify best-selling and highly-profitable product categories on Amazon.

You can read my full review of the software here.

Elf Links ($0.00)

Elf Links is a plugin I use with all my affiliate sites, as it truly and fully hides your affiliate links from Google. Yes, it actually hides the links, it doesn't just "cloak" them like most other plugins.

I wrote about Elf Links as part of this post here.​

PBN Lab ($112.40)

PBN Lab is the service I use to find all of my expired domains, which I use personally for my own PBN, and also for the PBN Service I offer to my readers.

PBN Service ($1,143.43)

My PBN Service is continuing to do well, and I'm glad to that so many people are getting value and results from it. The best sign that it's a good service to me is all of the repeat customers I've had so far.

The below screenshot also includes payments from my Custom Niche Site service.​

To read more details about the PBN service, just check out the sales page.

Custom Niche Sites ($2,167.78)

I haven't been promoting this service too much (I don't even have a sales page yet, just this Google Document), but last month I personally built out five custom niche sites for my readers. The service includes all the niche and keyword research, a hyper-targeted mega-homepage of 3,500+ words, and five individual product reviews of 500 words each. It also includes some other goodies like a premium Thrive theme, Thrive Content Builder, and 1 free PBN link.

I originally had tried partnering with a reader of mine who would be the person who actually built out the sites, but he became too busy at work, and so I ended up doing all five sites by myself.​ The sites do take quite a bit of time to build out, and doing five in one month is about the most I could reasonable handle.

But I do think it's a good selling point to my readers, having them know that it is me (and not some random person), actually building the sites. If you're interested in having one built, just send me an e-mail.​

Traffic

Here are the traffic numbers for the blog in August.

So a nearly 10% increase from July's traffic numbers.

Expenses

Net Income

So a total profit for the month of over $7,300, which is just $100 off of July's total.

Considering that this blog was only launched toward the end of April, I think these are pretty good results, and something I'm quite pleased with.

As for September (I'm typing this on September 5th), I'm not sure if it's the Labor Da​y Weekend effect here in the States, or something more concerning, but my Amazon traffic has been down considerably so far this month. It's early, of course, but something I'll be keeping an eye on.

I'm also curious to see if I receive any rankings/traffic increase to NS2 due to the guest posting & outreach I've been doing.​

Any questions, let me know in the comments below.​