Welcome to the 4th update of my $10K Challenge. If this is your first time reading, check out what this challenge is all about here.
Below are the things that happened in January and February 2016:
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Key Successes
- Significant traffic & income growth (4x!!).
- Site continued to attract natural links.
Key Failures
- Failed to post 3 times a week.
- Failed to start a guest posting campaign.
Website Stats as of March 7, 2016
Domain Profile
I use Ahrefs (paid) and Open Site Explorer (free) to help measure the effectiveness of my promotional efforts by tracking these metrics:
- Domain Rating: 39 (-1)
- Domain Authority: 22 (+7)
- Backlinks: 1940 (+1273)
- Referring Domains: 74 (+34)
- Organic Keywords: 14,000 (+4,500)
Traffic
Traffic continued to grow steadily week after week without much promotional efforst from my end. Currently, it’s around 2000 hits a day.
Income
Overall, earnings have been really great. I'm at $100/day pretty consistently now.
Here are the numbers, including the past months for comparisons:
- July 2015: $0
- August 2015: $0
- September 2015: $0
- October 2015: $52.89
- November 2015: $103.31
- December 2015: $589.35
- January 2016: $1970.04
- February 2016: $3027.04
Of course, the numbers above are not pure profit as I’ve also invested a good chunk of cash into the site. Here’s the breakdown of exactly what I’ve spent money on so far:
Expenses | Amount |
---|---|
Textbroker | $1,352.64 |
Upwork Writers | $80.00 |
Content Writer / Editor (part-time) | $1,227.51 |
Content Uploader | $118.66 |
Outreach Manager | $576.88 |
Pinterest Curator | $200.01 |
Guest Posting Service 1 | $500.00 |
Guest Posting Service 2 | $105.00 |
Infographic Design | $50.00 |
Total Spent | $4,210.70 |
Earnings To Date | $5,834.63 |
Profits To Date | $1,623.93 |
Note on the guest posting services: I don't include them here because I no longer recommend those services. I'm doing everything in-house now and getting better results.
Jon Haver has a very good guide on guest posting here. But my friend Gael has dedicated a whole blueprint (10+ training videos) for this inside his AH Pro membership. I highly recommend you to check it out!
As you can see, my total investment, so far, is $4,210.70 covering the last 8 months.
The site is profitable now and makes $2,000 a month on average, which means that it’s valued at around $50,000 if I ever wanted to sell the site TODAY.
That’s an incredible ROI which is very hard to find in most offline businesses.
Content & Promotion
Not much work has been done to the site since January as I was busy working on my course AMZ Affiliate Bootcamp.
If you’re looking for the promotion strategies I’ve used, check out update #3.
Conclusion
This is just a quick update to keep you guys posted on my progress since January.
The challenge is going well according to my original plan.
Now that phrase 1 is achieved, growing the site to $10k a month is just a matter of doubling down on posting more content and building more quality backlinks.
What do you think of my progress so far? Do you have any questions regarding my current content and promotion strategies? Feel free to let me know in the comment section.