Before I dive too deeply into the income report, if this is your first time on my website let me explain why I write a detailed income report each month that outlines the money I made (or lost) each month.

I’m doing this for a number of reasons:

1) I strive to be transparent about what it takes to make money online.

2) These reports help me keep track of my own progress.

3) These reports hold me accountable.

In short, I don’t create these to gloat about my earnings. I create them to help you understand the true “earning curve” of online business. Now that we got that out of the way, let’s dive into the report.

This Month’s Income Outliers

Every month I have income that streams in from multiple sources and quite frankly, a lot of that is pretty regular. However, each month I tend to see a few line items that are drastically different from the prior month. In this section, I only discuss the items that have increased or decreased significantly.

There were two items that jumped out to me this month:

• Website 3 Earnings: The earnings of this website jumped quite a bit in the month of March and I think it’s a result of all of the guest posts that I’ve been doing lately. For the month itself, I was able to secure 15 new guest posts and this allowed me to grow the backlink profile of the website. As I did this, I saw a nice increase in traffic and earnings.
• Website 1 Earnings: There was a pretty big spike in earnings this month and a lot of that is related to one of our partners and an increase in AdSense revenues. This is mostly because I’ve been revising content, which I’ll cover the results in later in the report.

This Month’s Expense Outliers

Similar to the income I make every month, there are certain expenses that I consider “fixed”.  As I did in the income area, I’m only going to discuss the outliers or new items added as expenses.

There were two items that jumped out to me this month:

• Freelance Writing: Though I still had a significant amount of writing done in February, the overall cost was down.
• Freelance Development: Though there were still some development projects to complete in February, development costs were down significantly as well.

Website 3 Update: It was nice to see a jump of about 23% in traffic to this website in the month of March.  I think some of this has to do with seasonality, but I think a larger part of it is because I’ve been focusing a lot on guest post link building.

While I can’t say with 100% certainty that this is the cause of the traffic increase, I think it’s pretty apparent that the more links I get, the better this website does.

Like Website 1, I’m going to look at some of the content here that has lost positions and try to revise it to increase my rankings in search engines. 

Beyond that, I’m going to also look at how to further increase earnings on the website.

Per 1000 visitors, I’m making about a third of what I do on Website 1 and I think that’s because I just haven’t thought hard enough yet on how to monetize the website. 

Here’s a graph of the last 12 months of progress:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• I didn’t actually increase the referring domains to this website by 68 this month. For some reason, I’ve been seeing a lot more spam links to this website and though I submitted a Disavow report to Google, they keep on coming. I have no idea why, but I intend on staying on top of this and will continue to submit these files if need be.
• Earnings had a nice jump of 23% this month, which is pretty solid considering I did very little to make that happen.
• This website continues to grow but it’s going to take a lot of backlinks to make that happen. It’s in a very competitive niche and though I’m doing okay, I think it could get much bigger.

Website 4 Update:  I was pleasantly surprised to see the earnings for Website 4 this month.  I really haven’t done anything at all to make it better, but I almost hit $1000 in earnings for the month which is the target.

I don’t really have many plans for this website right now other than letting it run on autopilot, but I may consider content revisions here as well if it makes sense.

Here are my statistics for this website in the last 12 months:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• If you compare this year’s earnings versus last year in the month of March, there’s a pretty significant decrease. That’s only because the physical product that I sold last year was put on to Amazon in the month of March. This year I was able to get it up earlier which is why I made significantly more in December and January.

Website 5 Update:

It’s possible that the writing is on the wall for this website.

Everything I’ve tried to do isn’t working and it’s getting to a point where I don’t know what to do any longer.

I’ve been in this Internet marketing space for over five years and haven’t had a serious failure since year two.

However, at this point in time, this website is looking like a huge failure.

It’s a real shame to and it was really defeating because I’ve put so many hours into this website and so much thought. I genuinely feel like I have a good thing here, but Google doesn’t agree with me and hit the website pretty hard in the month of March with the new algorithm change.

My traffic to the website dropped 43% MoM and my earnings decreased by about 50%.  The only good news here is the fact that this was a small website in the first place and never really provided me with a lot of income.

If you’re wondering what the issue is, so am I. 

The only thing I can come up with is the way in which I did link building.

For quite some time I talked about how great database link building is and it may have worked against me here. 

This is essentially when you create a directory on your website, and then you have multiple people link to you because of said directory.

While this did work for Website 4 without any issues, I think it crushed Website 5’s potential. 

Google was only sending traffic to these directory pages on Website 5.  Because of this, it was really difficult for me to create affiliate content that would get seen in search results.

I actually think that Google felt my website was mainly a directory vs. a general resource for people who are interested in the main topic of the website.

This meant that even at its best, the traffic to the website wasn’t going where I wanted it to and the revenue generating component of the website was pretty weak.

Because of this, I took some pretty drastic measures and have essentially destroyed hundreds of hours of work that my virtual assistant put in.  Side note, for those that needs it, here are the reasons to hire a virtual assistant.  Trust me when I say it’s worth it!

At this point in time, I’ve unpublished all of the different directory listing pages that I have on the website. My hope is that Google is going to understand I no longer have a directory on the website itself and instead attribute all of the link equity that I built to the pages that still exist.

If this happens, Google will begin giving higher rankings to the informational content and affiliate content that I’ve created on the website.

If Google does that, then I’ll be able to still make significant earnings.  If not, then I have to think about a new direction.

I pulled down all of the directory pages on May 18^th and to my surprise, I’m still seeing quite a bit of traffic getting sent to these pages by Google. Again, this is after I pull down the pages and resubmitted a sitemap to Google.

My plan is to wait another couple weeks and then republish these pages with noindex/nofollow tags so that Google doesn’t index them at all.  Truth be told, I still see a lot of value in what I’ve created but I don’t want Google to think that this is all that the website focuses on.

If I don’t see an increase in non-directory content from these efforts, I’ll try to build a few more links to the website in hopes that Google will understand what’s going on.

If none of this works, I may just try to sell the website for the domain authority rating and let someone else figure it out.

We’ll see what happen, but so far it has been a VERY rough ride for this website.

Here are my statistics for this website so far:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Don’t overdo directory link building. I made that mistake with this website and I think that this is what is hurting it so badly.
• If your website isn’t showing positive signs after 6 months, be concerned. I don’t know that this is a hard and fast rule, but Website 5 has been struggling for a very long time and I think I should’ve paid more attention at month six to see if I needed to change my approach.

Lessons Learned

Every month, I’m going to reflect back and tell you a few different lessons that I’ve learned. My hope is that the lessons each month will be a cautionary tale for you that makes it so that you don’t make the dumb mistakes that I do along the way.

• Failure is always possible: No matter how long I’ve been in the internet industry, I need to remember that failure is just around the corner if I rush things. Website 5 attempted to get a lot of links very quickly in an effort to rank on Google. I was able to get the links just like I had planned, but Google didn’t seem to like that. It’s a humbling moment for me and was a great reminder that life isn’t always rainbows in the world of websites and SEO.
• Content Revisions are Legit: I’ve been hearing about how content revisions help websites for at least a year but I continued to put it off. That was, until Website 1 started to show a loss in rankings and then I decided I had to try this. Thus far, it’s been incredibly successful and now I’m just trying to figure out how to implement it across all of my websites.
• Make Great Websites, not a lot of decent websites: I think one of the things that has happened to me is I’ve been focused on so many projects that my quality has been slipping. The fall of Website 5 is difficult to deal with, but it’s allowed me to refocus on what is already very successful and try to make more revenue from those sources. So far, it looks like a blessing in disguise.

Did I Meet my Goals for March?

Complete all Development Projects (SUCCESS)

I was able to complete my development projects for the month of March. I’m going to be opening up a few new rounds of development projects in the month of April and my hope is that they move pretty quickly. This will probably be my last round of development updates for some time, which is good because I’ll be able to retain some more of the revenue that I’ve been generating.

Launch PI Officially (SUCCESS)

I’m happy to report that I was able to launch this website near the end of March. I still haven’t finished all the design of the website itself, but I’ve been able to publish 60 different articles and have started putting content out there.

Revise Website 1 Main Keyword Page (SUCCESS)

As I mentioned in my report, this was a very successful test and something that I want to do across more websites. It’s increased my traffic and earnings and seems to be something I should’ve done a long time ago.

Outsource Skyscraper Link Building Process at Scale (FAIL)

This task was going to be for Website 5 and now that things have gone south, I don’t think it makes sense to spend my time and resources here. For now, this is a no-go.

What Are my Goals for April?

Revise 50 Pieces of Content on Website 1

I use the Pareto principle when it comes to my websites. This basically means that 80% of the traffic and revenue comes from 20% of the effort. I think this is true and my goal is to edit the top 50 pages of content on the website and republish them.

Finish Design of Website 7

Though I’m already publishing content on this website, I’m doing so without a properly designed homepage. I really don’t think it matters at this point because I have the Minimal Viable Product out there, but I need to build out some category pages and make the website look more respectable.

Make My Guest Post Outreach Better

Though I’ve been able to secure a number of guest posts, a good friend of mine told me how he was able to land about 40% of his pitches for guest posting. How was he able to do it? He just said there was a lot more touch points than what I was currently doing. So, in the month of April I’m going to revise my outreach process to try to secure more guest posts.

What are your goals for the month?  What questions do you have?  Let me know in the comments below!