November 2007 Report

Overview

This month I changed the title from “Income Report” to “Report” because, well, this site didn’t make any money and my other sites only brought in a combined total of $28. That’s a lot less than I was expecting considering that my previous two months I had been earning around $250 a month.

The cause for this decline in income is mostly due to my Google Dance. On Monday, my top earning site was ranking in at 773 for a given keyword. Yesterday when I checked it was up to 35. Hopefully it means that my site is earning its stripes, but I really don’t know what causes it to be on the top 10 and then to drop off the face of the planet. I’ve checked the supplemental index for my site in early November and the site was doing very badly with roughly 90% of the site in the supplemental index. I’m still not sure how to make the site have more content in the “real” index, but I’ve spruced up my robots.txt file and changed some things around with the site and now it’s at 87% in the supplemental index.

I am still not happy with this 87% and would like to achieve 40% or less in the supplemental index and will focus my efforts this month into making provisions for this. Additionally, this month I want to start monetizing this site by selling ad space or by including more affiliate links on my nearly daily posts.

Traffic

Even though this month I brought in less than 30 bones, I would have say that this month has been a success. That’s not the optimist in me, but the fact that while working full time and working on a dual master’s degree and doing all kinds of other things, I still managed to write nearly daily for this site and saw traffic grow by leaps and bounds. For the month of November, traffic for this site nearly doubled from 297 unique views in October to 540 uniques for November. Growth is good and I must say that December is already off to a rockin’ start.

From this month on, I will include a snapshot of my traffic in order to compare growth on different metrics. Here is a quick snapshot of my statistics, according to http://www.xinureturns.com/:

As you can see, this site has a Google Pagerank of 2, not bad for a site that is less than 3 months old! . Secondly, this site has a Technorati authority of 10 which I think means that there are 10 other blogs who have “favorited” me and added to my street cred.

I submitted my site to DMOZ at the time of inception, but I still have not been indexed nor do I expect to be indexed. Apparently you have to pay money to be included in DMOZ although it’s supposed to be a free site.

The rest of these stats deal with how different search engines index and track this website’s progress. Yahoo! gives me a whole lot of backlinks while Google only gives me one. Strange that there’s such a big difference but I guess that’s just the way it is. None of the other stats really matter all that much other than the Technorati number so I’ll conclude this section at that.

Future (i.e. December’s) Plans

This month has already been busy. I’m in the midst of finals at school (my last one is due Monday by 5pm on “Categorization and Organization”…if you know anything about facets leave me a comment! ) so after then I’ll be able to focus on my 3 new websites that I’ve launched! These sites are eBay stores, but I am going to be branching them out to include non-eBay items. I won’t give anything away yet, but these sites have been fun to make and I hope that promoting them will be easier than my health site.

Conclusion

After it’s all said and done, I think November has been good. Visits to the site nearly doubled, I got 3 new sites ready to roll, purchased a few domain names and made nice progress on figuring out how to monetize this site. John Chow continues to be a rockstar but I guess I can be one too if I had 297,000 visitors per month. I’m chasing you John, and I hope that next year I can be closer to you in terms of traffic and income!