First Month Income Report – January 2011

Well the website has been live now in its new format for a month. As well as re-vamping the content, we also carried out all the search engine optimisation work described in the previous posts. So what impact has this had on the income results for January 2011 our first month with the new site.

In order to consider how the site is performing we can compare it against the old non-optimised site averaged out over 2010, using the Google Adsense data for that year.

Here are the basic metrics:

We also know from Google Analytics that the number of visitors to the website in January 2011 was 5197, of which 4354 were unique visitors (i.e. they had not visitied previously in Jan). We are unable to use the 2010 figures from Google Analytics for comparing visitor numbers because for some reason they are shite. Therefore we will just track them through 2011.

Key Points

1. Earnings have increased in January 2011 by 22.14% over last years average month with nearly 100% increase on the January 2010 income.
2. Daily income has increased from an average of £1.14 last year to £1.36 per day in January 2011
3. Numbers of pageviews and clicks on Google Ads have both increased by about 20% in January 2011
4. To reach our target of earning £1000 in 2011, the site will now have to average £2.98 per day from 1st February to 31st December 2011

Clearly then, the website has grown income and traffic by around 20% in a month – not too bad. However unless we can increase this quite significantly, the site will fall short of it’s monetisation target. Therefore we are going to look next at 2 areas where we would hope to increase traffic and improve earnings:

• Link building
• Utilising affiliate advertising

We’ll start describing these in the next post…