Welcome to the 3rd update of my $10K Challenge. If this is your first time reading, check out what this challenge is all about here.
Below is what happened in December 2015.
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Key Successes
- Published an infographic which turned out to be a massive success (results below).
- Earned 3 backlinks from big online magazines (DA80+) and a dozen of smaller sites.
- 170.31% traffic increase.
- 476.04% income increase.
- Bullet Point 2
Key Failiures
- Tracking is still not in place.
Website Stats for December 2015
Domain Profile
I use Ahrefs (paid) and Open Site Explorer (free) to help measure the effectiveness of my promotion efforts by tracking these metrics:
- Domain Rating: 40
- Domain Authority: 15
- Backlinks: 667
- Referring Domains: 40
- Organic Keywords: 9,500
Traffic
Total traffic almost tripled in December as a result of a successful infographic promotion campaign.
Organic traffic also hit a new record averaging at 550 sessions a day in the last 7 days.
Income
To my surprise, the site earned $589.35 which was a 476.04% increase compared to November.
This significant jump could be due to 2 reasons:
- Holiday season - December is always the best month for Amazon affiliates and income is likely to double or triple.
- Increase in organic traffic - With new powerful backlinks earned, the site is ranking on page 1 or even #1 for some main buying keywords.
Some people may wonder if I’d see a dramatic earning drop in January but I think it’s not likely to happen.
At least it will do $600 and if things go well I may even hit my first $1000 month with the site.
Content & Promotion
In this section, I’ll share more details on what I did last month to get that significant growth.
New content published = 1 post
Only 1 post was published last month because all the effort was spent on creating and promoting the infographic.
Now that the site has acquired some decent links, I’m going to apply a content calendar and produce new content every week.
Promotion
It took me a while to figure it out but now I’m pretty confident with my ability to produce powerful white hat backlinks efficiently.
The core strategies I focused on were:
Blog Commenting - This is more of an effective way to build relationships in your niche rather than a link building tactic. It also keeps your site safe from penalties by adding diversification to the backlink profile.
My recommendation is to make a list of 150 - 200 relevant blogs and pick 5 a day to comment on.
Guest Posting - Guest posting has gotten a lot of bad rap over the past few years, but the truth is that it’s still working very well. Just need to make sure that your posts are published on high quality sites only and avoid any site that looks spammy.
Here’s a free guide on guest posting by Jon Haver at AuthorityWebsiteIncome.
Gael Breton has just published a step-by-step guest posting blueprint for his Authority Hack Pro members as well.
Infographics Outreach - Also called Guestographics by Brian Dean from Backlinko, this was the main driver of my site’s significant growth last month.
The strategy sounds so simple yet so effective. Here’s how to do it:
- Step 1: Create and publish a really good infographic.
- Step 2: Find people that are interested in your infographic.
- Step 3: Reach out and see if they’re interested in your infographic.
- Step 4: If yes, offer to write a custom intro.
- Step 5: If they like the idea, write a quick 200-word intro with a link back to your site.
- Step 6: Send them the intro and get your link.
Here’s a quick video I put together to explain the process in more details:
This is my first video so I’d love to hear your feedback in the comment section. There are still some glitches in the video, but I decided to just put it out there instead of trying to make it perfect.
Conclusion
As always, I’m happy with the progress we’ve made in December.
The results proved that it’s still very possible to grow a new site quickly using only white hat promotion tactics in 2016. (I'm going to cover all of the strategies in details in my upcoming course AMZ Affiliate Bootcamp).
Here’s what I’m going to focus on in January:
- Launch a systematic guest posting campaign following AH Pro’s Blueprint
- Work with my content manager to apply a content calendar posting 3 articles a week.
- Work with my technical support to set up proper tracking in Google Analytics
That’s it for update #3. I hope you learned something new that could help you grow your own site better.
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.
PS: There's a new FB group exclusively for Cloud Living readers. Come join me at CloudlivingCommunity.com