March 2nd, 2010
Everything is quite steady at the moment. The traffic to my site is similar to that reached least week and I have also earnt about the same too. Most of the money earned has again come from affiliate leads and a lesser amount was made as a result of clicks on Google Adverts.
It is tempting to want to make more money at the moment, by filling the site with new adverts and affiliate programs, but I know that if I am greedy now then it will hinder my progress in the long run. As normal I am concentrating on optimising the site for search engines and promoting it as best as I can. I am still doing some submission to web directories for this and have used the social bookmarking site Digg. My search engine traffic was also similar to last week but once again the search terms are becoming ‘more mainstream’ which is good.
Adwords
I have also received an offer in the post from Google which gives me £50 worth of advertising with their Adwords scheme. Everytime you search Google you will see your normal search results and ’sponsored’ results. These sponsored results are Google Adwords and are paid for by website owners who only pay when their advert is clicked on. I will aim to try the Adwords scheme later this week and report back on my progress with it.
Total: £71.70
(Note – I have added an option to subscribe to this blog via RSS feed and email which will help you follow my progress. This is also a basic but important example of internet marketing. If you can directly contact visitors to your site then you can keep them coming back.)
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February 23rd, 2010
Last week I mentioned that I had some concerns about links to my site (backlinks) disappearing. I have since questioned some SEO experts about this and have been told that it is not something to worry about.
Basically, the counting of links is a ‘pointless task’ to the search engines and although Google’s webmaster tools and the use of ‘link:yoursiteurl’ will count some links to your website, not all results will be returned. For now, this is not something which I will worry about – as long as my traffic increases then I should be happy.
Traffic Progress
Traffic this week has been at a similar level to last week. It wasn’t as consistent last week though because most of that came in one day where I had over 80 visits from a link. This week I have had much more success with traffc from search engines – double the amount in fact. Many of these visitors came from search ‘The Online Money Test’ – perhaps because of a forum post which mentioned the name of my site, but many were also for fairly short search terms like paid article writing, cashback sites and in text advertising. These are the types of results which I am very pleased with and hope to see an increase on in future.
As always, I know that the future success of this site will depend on getting more traffic from search engines. As long as I continue to strengthen my content and stick to an SEO/site promotion strategy then I am confident that The Online Money Test will achieve greater success.
Money Made
In the last week I have made another £8.63, taking me to a total of £62.02 in total. Money in the last week has come mainly from affiliate leads with very few Adsense clicks.
Total: £62.02
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February 16th, 2010
This week there has been a slight increase in the volume of search engine traffic to my site and the search terms which bring visitors to my site is getting shorter for some pages. Some in particular are doing very well with my cashback sites page on the 5th SERP (search engine results page) of Google.
My conversion rate
One of the links which I posted on a popular UK website brought me my highest ever number of visits in one day; 86 to be exact, and this gave me a good idea of how much I could be earning from this site when I am getting a much higher level of traffic. At the moment, my conversion rate (% of visitors that make me £1 in this case) tends to be around 10%. That is, if I have 50 visits to my site then at the moment I can expect to earn around £5.00.
Importance of Targeted Traffic
This rate is only an estimate though and it all depends on how ‘targeted’ the traffic is. “Targeted”, for me, means traffic that is interested in making money online. It will do me no good to get visitors who are interested in news about golf because they are unlikely to stay on my site and take the actions required to make me any money.
Once I have a greater amount of traffic which is targeted, then I can start working on increaseing this conversion rate. For now, my goal has to remain to get as many search engine visitors as possible.
Money earned this week
As for money earned, I have made around another £9 this week, both from Adsense clicks (which increased dramatically this week) and affiliate leads. I am still very happy with this as it more or less covers my hosting bill for the whole month. Time will tell how much I can increase these earnings by.
Some positives
- Search engine visits are slowly on the increase.
- Making more money than before and have now broken £50.
- I hav had a few new sign ups to my site so soon I will be able to use this list to create a newsletter with my updates.
My only slight concern is that in Goole’s webmaster tools, the visible backlinks to my site has decreased slightly. I am hoping that this is not a bad sign but will try to find out and post an update on this later in the week.
Thanks for following The Online Money Test.
Total: £53.39.
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