Passive Income Report November 2015 (with traffic and metrics)

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Welcome to my monthly income report for November 2015!

Every month I try to publish a detailed report with all the accounts for my online businesses. On them I include the earnings and expenses, I tell a little bit about my personal experience and what new things I have been trying during this period of time.

I will explain as well what my future targets are and if the previous ones have been achieved or not. Why doing this? Because it helps me to keep track of my personal finances with my online business.

I also want to show you that I am a real person starting from the first step. There are many amazing bloggers out there reporting their incomes of thousands of dollars, but I found very little bloggers reporting low amounts of money like me.

I think this can help to starters and to people who are not decided yet to start their own online business.

Recommended: Check all my income reports

All earnings here reported are coming from Passive Income sources. I am not including any kind of outsourcing because the intention is you show you how far I can go with only passive income sources.

This is my second month reporting my accounts and I need to say that it is kind of addictive. I couldn’t write the report before because I’ve been in an unexpected trip to Rome, but all these last few days I’ve been so impatient to come back and publish my passive income earnings.

IMPORTANT STUFF IN NOVEMBER 2015

Many things have just happened this November. This is the first month I’m trying ShareASale in my Niche Site 1. I’ve been promoting some products related to my keywords and I got some sales, yai! ShareASale is good because they have many products and merchants and the commissions are pretty decent. I didn’t find many reviews on the internet and that is why I decided to try to create my own client-based-experience. If you want to join the ShareASale affiliate program it’s very easy, just simply create your username and introduce your email and password. It’s very easy to be accepted and it takes less than 24 hours.

I also have created a step by step guide explaining how to start with ShareASale which will make your life easier.

This November I am so happy to share a small milestone, a total of 1,000,000 ads displayed in my Niche Site 1. It took around 10 months to reach it. It’s quite motivational that Google Adsense send you this kind of notifications.

Although it has been a busy month I have been able to start a new project. In fact, it is an old project that I had in mind time ago but it never materialised. And as you perhaps are guessing, yes! it’s the creation of a new Niche Site. From today we will call it Niche Site 2 (NS2).

CREATION OF NICHE SITE 2

The keyword research was done a few months ago using 3 easy steps to select the right niche site. For it I have been helped by Market Samurai, Google Adwords and Long Tail Pro (the 10 Day-Free Trial version). In total I spent like 4 hours for it, however, it should take less time because at the beginning I chose a wrong keyword which I realised a few days later. Luckily I rectified before I created the domain.

For the creation of my Niche Site 2, I used Bluehost, my top first recommendation for online hosting because of the service they offer (speed, backups, no shutdowns and fast service) at a very competitive price. So for only $3.95/month, I got my host and domain name. Amazing, isn’t it?

My strategy here is to follow the same steps than for Niche Site 1, which can be resumed in the following points:

1. Create amazing content related to the targeted keyword.
2. Make the posts SEO friendly. Thus, making them easier to be found with Google.
3. Focus in long tail keywords with the help of Google Adwords.
4. Monetize with Google Adsense.

As a side I will include an email list and social media channels, however, the main traffic source should be Search Engines like Google or Yahoo. For the keyword targeted I found a total of 800,000 monthly searches including long tail keywords with CPCs as high as $2.55. The competition is medium-low. There are many websites about the selected keyword but none of them SEO friendly and most of the content outdated. So I think I found a gold mine! Let’s see how it’s going. So far I’ve created only 4 posts and my intention is to publish around 5 posts/month to don’t burn out myself.

CONTENT CREATION

For the purposes of this section I will include the posts/pages created for each of my Niche Sites and then for the PIW blog:

Niche Site 1

I published 2 new posts, one with 1,000 words and the other with only 300. The first one is already performing well because it has been indexed in Google and it has received 208 visits from Organic Traffic. The second one a little bit less, 116 visits. I am very happy because they are articles targeting long tail keywords, and taking in consideration that I have more than 400 posts if you do the maths you will realise that as long as all the other articles perform similarly, the traffic would be really high.

I included a new page in the website in which I promote products from ShareASale. Of course, these products are related to the keywords targeted in the niche. It only took a couple of hours to do this, and so far it is perfect because I got some sales which you will see below in the income report.

Nothing else, in particular, a little bit of maintenance here, some comments reply there… and that’s it! A total of less of 5 hours spent on my Niche Site 1.

Niche Site 2

Most of the time spent here has been with the layout of the site and adding some plugins which I use on my other websites. In the coming days, I will include a list of the WordPress plugins you shouldn’t miss for your website. If you want to be notified once published subscribe below.

As said before I published 4 new posts:

• Post 1 with 514 words
• Post 2 with 164 words (very specific issue that some people have and how to solve it, that is why it’s very short)
• Post 3 with 536 words
• Post 4 with 964 words (this one will be one of the fundamental pillars of the website)

On top of that I created the basic pages of the blog like “About”, “Contact” and a small introduction and welcome page.

Even it looks like it’s not much, it took quite a while to figure out the best Theme, structure and layout of the website, and I know for sure that I will do some more changes later.

Passive Income Wise

Since Passive Income Wise was created in November all you can see in the website has been done in this month. I will list the posts and pages included during this time so you can have a look to the beginning of this site.

• Passive Income Report October 2015 (with traffic and metrics)
• Why Passive Income can change your life
• How To Choose The Right Niche For Your Blog In 3 Steps
• It is possible to generate Passive Income as a part time
• About: Who I Am And What I Want
• Famous Bloggers Income Reports (this one is very interesting and I recommend you to visit)
• My Top Resources used to earn Passive Income

Again, it doesn’t look like much but I am focusing more in quality rather than quantity, that is why I prefer publish less but better. However, I have in mind at least 50 new posts related with Affiliate programs, Google Adsense, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media promotion. I wish I have more time to write about it.

INCOME REPORT

Google Adsense (from niche site 1): $99.77
Google Adsense (from PIW): $0.51

Google Adsense (total): $100.28

• Previous Month: $66.23
• Diference: + $34.05

Another excellent month, beating all records with an increase of 51% on earnings! This means that the 21st of December I will get another transaction from Adsense. If I keep earnings above $100 I will receive money every month which is super cool. When I started with this Niche Site at the very beginning my initial target was to obtain $50/month just to cover the hosting fees and buy some giveaways. Now it’s double! I am quite impatient for the next month already because each month I can see an increase of around 50% in Adsense earnings.

Out of the income earned with Adsense, $43.69 are directly from clicks (with a CPC of $0.15), $43.26 are from Views, $8.60 from Active Views and $4.94 from Engagements. The CPC has increased a little bit however, no so much, from $0.14 to $0.15 which is a good signal that Google is giving more trusting to my Niche Site 1.

YouTube: $1.60

• Previous month: $1.78
• Difference: – $0.18

Satisfied! Last video I updated was in September. I am not giving much importance to YouTube now because I realised its performance for the Niche Site 1 is quite low, but still is generating some little income, good!

Amazon Affiliate Program: $6.78

• Previous month: $7.90
• Difference: – $1.12

Last month was the first one in trying Amazon Affiliate. This month I sold more items that the previous month, however, the price per item was cheaper and therefore the income lower. One good thing about this month is that I reached the threshold to have a 6% of commission instead of the initial 4% that Amazon gives.

ShareASale Affiliate Program: $8.95        Click here to read my post about ShareASale

• Previous Month: Not included.

First time tried, success! The merchandise that I am promoting has a 10% commission. There are some of them with higher commission rates but they don’t fit with the needs of my Niche Site 1 readers.

Whatever above $0.00 worth for me, and with ShareASale I found another way of earning Passive Income. What I most like about ShareASale is that it is very easy to use, you just need to use their banners or create your personalised ones, put them into your website and forget about it.

Bluehost: £0.00 ($0.00)         Click here to register your hosting with Bluehost

• Previous Month: £0.00 ($0.00)
• Difference: + £0.00 ($0.00)

Another month with zero earnings from Bluehost. Hopefully one day I will get anything from it because it’s a really good service to promote and for somebody trying to start it would be an amazing purchase.

EXPENSES

No expenses, $0.00. The initial investment for the hosting and domain name was done the last month and this one is already running for free. So there are not expenses. For the next month is likely that I make some small investments with perhaps a new theme for one of my Niche Sites.

Net Total Balance: $117.61

• Previous month: $75.91
• Difference: + $41.70 (+ 54.9%)

Pretty impressive November. This is my second month reporting my income report and the good news is that the earnings are growing considerably comparing with October. Obviously, it’s nothing to compare with other famous bloggers (which you can find in my Favourite Bloggers Income Reports), but for a starter like me, it’s considered an important milestone. I am above the $100 and this is starting to be very exciting.

TRAFFIC AND METRICS

Last month I only included the traffic metrics from my Niche Site 1 because Passive Income Wise was recently launched. From this month I am reporting all my websites separately so you can have a look at different strategies and different sources of traffic.

Niche Site 1

As you could have read before I didn’t work much in creating content for Niche Site 1 and/or social promotion. The only article I promoted in Reddit went viral like crazy. If fact I really knew that could happen because this article is one of the master ones I’ve been working on from time ago and I finally finished this month.

Page views: 249,812 (+24,461 compared to October 2015)

The traffic increase compared with October is good enough to continue growing the niche site and even more considering that I did less social media sharing than last month. This month Niche Site has been dancing between ranking 17 to 20 for the targeted keyword (last month was between 20 to 23) so it’s going up and up.

Average Session Duration: 2min 39secs (2min 26secs on October 2015)

Little by little this metric is increasing, this shows the engaging of my readers, almost 3 minutes is pretty nice!

Number of new people visiting the site: 41,223 (-1,664 compared to October 2015)

I calculated it doing the following calculation: (Sessions) x (%New Sessions).

Last month I was astonished by this number and I was kind of afraid that in November it could drop, but it didn’t much =) I feel so positive about the scope of this number which is converting in new email subscriptions.

But now, let’s have a look at the different types of traffic we’ve got.

The aim of Niche Site 1 is to generate organic traffic so it doesn’t need a high maintenance. Every month the difference between organic traffic and social is bigger. This is something good because every time I need to promote less often content in the social media channels in order to get traffic and now most of those 18,096 sessions are coming from real people sharing posts they like. The best thing is the 55,250 sessions from Organic Searches which compared with the 41,281 from last month is impressive.

Social traffic is mainly coming from Reddit and Facebook, however, some visitors are directly coming from Twitter.

This month it has been an increase of 25% in the referral traffic. This is because during this month some new backlinks have been created by real readers and doing some research two of them are from pages with a high Domain Authority.

Google Adsense Metrics

I would really like to share more data from my Adsense account but since the politics of Adsense are very restrictive I will post the maximum I can.

• Cost per Click (CPC): $0.15
• Clicks: 421 with a total of 321k ads impressions
• Page RPM: $0.42

Now you will wonder why this low CPC and RPM. The explanation here: Niche Site 1 is in a niche that is not lucrative, however as you can see it is easy to get a high volume in traffic. When I first created Niche Site 1 the idea wasn’t making money out of it but with the time I realised the potentiality of creating a small business with it. Still, I’m happy with the numbers, sounds like a good beginning.

Join my email list for free to receive more content and guides about Google Adsense metrics and how to increase your CPC.

Passive Income Wise

The first month of Passive Income Wise and below you can find the stats. It has started really well from my point of view. However, 50% of the traffic is from Social Media as you can guess. When a website is starting it needs promotion and the best way to do it is with Social Media. I am quite happy that 128 sessions are coming from Referrals, this is because I created My own personal list of Favourite Bloggers and their Income Reports. What I did is to send comments to those bloggers added to the list telling them that they are part of it.

I will not comment much more about the traffic in PIW because it doesn’t much to talk about yet.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I will try to separate the social media activities corresponding to different websites. So far I have only two to report: Niche Site 1 (NS1) and Passive Income Wise (PIW).

Facebook

Niche Site 1 (NS1)

• Likes Page: 1,316 (+ 84 New Likes)
• Group Members: 496 (+16 New Members)
• Friends: 1,362 (-3 New friends)

I only shared the new 4 posts I created and that is the reason for these poor numbers, in particular, my friend’s number is going down. I believe it’s because some people lost interest in the Niche Site 1 topic.

Passive Income Wise (PIW). Support Passive Income Wise Liking us on Facebook or with a Friend Request.

• Likes Page: 52 (+52 New Likes)
• Friends: 213 (+213 New Friends)

This month I’ve been trying to promote Facebook by sending a Friend request to people with the same motivations as me and then inviting them to like the Passive Income Wise Facebook page. I found it somehow hard because most of the groups and pages related to Passive Income are full of Spam and people trying to sell useless things. I believe I need to leave it to grow by itself.

Twitter

Niche Site 1 (NS1)

• Followers: 309 (+15 New Followers)

I don’t really use Twitter despite I know how powerful can it be, but for my audience, Twitter is not very common so I don’t put much effort on it. I have the auto share every time I publish something new.

Passive Income Wise (PIW). If you don’t want to miss any of my new tweets follow Passive Income Wise on Twitter

• Followers: 704 (+704 New Followers)

I put a lot of effort on Twitter this month by following people and hoping they follow back, commenting, liking and sharing content. I believe 704 is a high number for the first month but I barely get any traffic from it so far.

YouTube

Niche Site 1 (NS1)

• Subscribers: 333 (+38 New Subscribers)

I didn’t upload any video during November. 38 new subscribers look cool. Each video takes quite a lot of time in comparison with what I take from it but still I will continue creating some more.

I don’t intend to create YouTube channel for Passive Income Wise, at least not now, we’ll see in future.

Email List

Niche Site 1 (NS1)

• Subscriptions: 376 (+25 New Subscriptions)

By the end of November, I added again the registration form which wasn’t active for some time due to the problems I got with the plugin I was using originally. Now I have a plugin call PopupAlly which it’s performing so good to show pop-ups and registration fields to join my email list.

Passive Income Wise (PIW)

• Subscriptions: 9 (+9 New Subscriptions)

Everything which grows big at the beginning grows small. Little by little I hope this number will increase. To join my email list write your email address below:

TARGETS FROM OCTOBER 2015, COMPLETED OR FAIL?

• Create al kind of social media for Passive Income Wise (Twitter, Google+, etc). COMPLETED
• Start building an email list. COMPLETED
• Create content for Passive Income Wise. COMPLETED
• Organise and structure this website. COMPLETED
• Generate traffic through the creation of content. COMPLETED
• Implement Shareasale affiliate in Niche Site 1. COMPLETED

I have been very motivated this month to complete all my targets, despite the reduced number of hours I could spend on it. Let’s see what are my aims for next December.

FUTURE WORK AND TARGETS

As a future work for December 2015 the followings are my targets:

• Earn $150 from Google Adsense (Yes, this is a 50% more than last month)
• Create 5 posts for Niche Site 2.
• Create 5 to 10 new posts for Passive Income Wise
• Update content in Niche Site 1 and create at least 3 new posts.
• Double the traffic in Passive Income Wise.
• Create an “in depth” guide about how to create a blog step by step.

I don’t want to be very greedy with my targets so I can complete them. If I have any extra time I will spend the time on my One Thing, this blog, Passive Income Wise.

Did you like my November Income Report? Are you interested in earning income online?

If you are thinking about starting your own blog, I created a tutorial-guide that will help you start your own blog for cheap, You need very little investment, starting at only $3.95 per month (this deal is only through my link) for blog hosting. Additionally, you will get a free blog domain (valued at $12-15) through my Bluehost link, only if your purchase is for at least 12 months of blog hosting. My recommendation is for you to be self-hosted. This is important if you want to monetize your blog because your website will look more professional.

This post contains affiliate links. These products have helped me to grow my blog and to generate more passive income from.