State of the Blog: January 2008

January has been a great month for me online, all things considered. I’m glad to see that this blog is on an upward trajectory but I would like for February to be an even better month. January was basically the launching point for this blog; not many people visited the site before this month and in January I made 3 guest posts for Tyler Cruz, two for JohnCow.com, and one for Israel at FatManUnleashed.com. Guest posting put me in touch with a very wide audience and it gave me a chance to sound off some of my ideas on more successful bloggers. January put me on the map, so to speak; RSS readership tripled and visitors were coming in regularly.

Before I tell you how much I made this month, let me first give you a bit of background. Last year I managed to earn approximately $400 total online by promoting a health-related affiliate product. That website is still ranking reasonably well on Google, has great potential to rank in the top 10, but has not been converting any sales in the last 3 months as I have not had any time to work on it. Reworking that site will be priority number one for me in February as that site brings in commissions ranging from $20 to over $100 when sales are made. I believe that this product is capable of helping make even more money this year and I’m looking forward to working with a friend and talented writer to help turn that site from a dud to a stud.

This website is continuing to grow; comparatively speaking this site is still very small. Averaging only 50 or so visits per day and 34 RSS readers, I would like to double or triple those numbers in February and I’m cooking up some strategies and more guest posts to help me achieve that goal.

This is how things turned out in January:

In January, I earned $212 online. This is a combined income consisting of a paid review and private ad sales on this website and my recently built “made for eBay” sites. The eBay websites can be optimized further by applying a few more SEO techniques and I think that the numbers in February will be even better. In addition, I am planning another 3 or 4 “made for eBay” sites in February so that alone should help bump up my monthly income.

As you can see, I also had some expenses. The advertisement expenses were to promote the site in addition to my search engine marketing scheme that I’m working on. The search marketing campaign is still on going and I’m tweaking it with my friend and business partner so that we can figure out what works and what doesn’t really work. So far we’re down a few bucks but we’re on the rebound. In addition, I purchased the phpBay Pro API that lets me get eBay auctions on hand-made sites, not just Wordpress sites. The API is pretty good, but after working with both I prefer the flexibility and options of the Wordpress plugin. It’s definitely worth my while and as you can see I’ve already made my money back on that investment.

So, this is where we stand. January has been a decent month with $212 revenue. I expect that February will be an even stronger month and look forward to reporting what happens in the month to come!