The Month In Review
With 80 articles under my belt, I kept plugging away at creating more content. I set myself a goal of 60 new pieces of content by month’s end. I came up three short adding 57 articles for a total of 137. This number does not include index pages, contact info, etc., etc. This is purely the total number of blog posts.
And that’s pretty much ALL I did last month. Remember how I said affiliate marketing is a grind? It really is. And I cannot stress that enough. I am not at the marketing part yet. I am still “creating a product”. After all, what good is marketing if you have nothing to sell?
You know the saying a good product sells itself? Well, that is true of websites too. Think back to your favorite websites. They add value to your life in some way that keeps you returning time and time again. Whether it’s just appeasing a curiosity, providing a laugh, or even prompting a nostalgic memory, the key is value and I cannot stress this enough. Value = Money.
So why the big effort on creating all this content on a new site? The answer is really simple. Because we are years late to the party. How many websites do you visit that only have 50 pages? Literally none. They have been growing a helpful library of information over many years and you have to play catch up. The good news is that none of these sites are infallible. The larger a site gets the more difficult it is to update and keep current. Even monsters like consumer reports are having their market share eaten up, more often than not by affiliate websites like ours.
If you have been building a site with me and following along each month it is now time to stop for a second. And once again compare your site to your direct competitors. Are you adding more value in a way that your audience has been waiting for? Does your site look better? Does it load faster? Does it answer questions that your audience is searching for? If yes then disregard this. But if you come up short or even say “It’s about equal” then you have to up your game. Good enough just won’t cut it.
So with the addition of more reviews, my website is slowly starting to form a cohesive theme. It’s going to take another 100 or so posts before it really gets there but it’s all starting to shape up nicely.
As you can see I am 100% focused on content right now. Whether this is the right decision we will have to see, it may very well be that I am leaving outreach too late in order for it to give the website a big boost. But at the same time I want my site to be completely cohesive and as a finished product before I start heavily marketing.
Ranking
This month traffic got a little odd. It started flowing in from Canada. Through Organic search nonetheless. It appears that for some reason Google has decided my website is Canadian, even though the proper geotargeting has been set up in Webmaster Tools.
Check it out:
Going back over my backlink profile it does appear that the vast amount of backlinks I have are from.CA domains. Whether this had anything to do with it is beyond me, I have not experienced anything like this before. But I will be building out more links from American sites and see if this has any effect.
I am ranking for the same keywords as before, but instead, they are appearing in the .ca search results instead of .com. It’s almost as google literally shifted everything I am ranking for over to .CA
No biggy. These things happen and at best it is a minor setback.
Earnings
I’ll be honest, I was expecting earnings to be higher this month. This is likely to do with my .CA problems, however, I still managed to sell a few items. Turns out Canadians also use the .com amazon. This is not something I was aware of.
As I stated, next month I will be reverting to classic reporting. I just don’t like the new reporting panel.
Expense Report
No expenses this month. That has allowed the full earnings to go towards bringing me out of the red. Not there yet though.
Past Expense, carried forward: $591.77
This month’s earnings: $90.95
Earnings to date: $151.38
Total: -440.39
While this still looks remarkably discouraging for three months’ work let me remind you that website growth is exponential, not linear. It will happen all at once and knock your socks off when it does. For the most part, I expected to be here.
Next Month
For April I am going to spend a little more time building links and outreaching but for the most part, it will be creating more content.
