Passive Income Report October 2015 (with traffic and metrics)

THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE READ MY DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO

Welcome to my monthly income report for October 2015!

Each month I will try to publish a detailed account of what is happening in my online businesses, including earnings and goings on a month by month (as well as lessons learned).

My intention is to keep track of my own progress and to make it public so people like you can learn from my successes and failures. 

This is my first month, and I decided to do it because I believe this is a great success for my first month blogging. Hurray! I started with zero experience and I’m already making money. I’m so motivated! 🙂

If you feel like you want to follow my blogging journey from today, you can subscribe below and I will send you updates every month about how I’m progressing with my blog.

IMPORTANT STUFF IN OCTOBER 2015

October has been the best month so far since I started in January 2015, and even more considering it has been my most busy month since then. Busy in terms of personal stuff. My wife got a job near London and since we are living currently in Cambridge we have been kind of busy looking for houses to move in.

Due to my previous experience gained during my last 9 months, in October 2015 I decided to create Passive Income Wise (PIW). I didn’t really know much about how I am gonna do it or what kind of content I would include. Inspired by some people like Pat Flynn from SPI,  Matthew Allen from Dumb Passive Income or Alexander from Cash Flow Diaries I decided to start my own path to spread to the world my experience with Online Marketing. So yes, I consider this a big deal and it deserves to be included in this section.

I took $159.38 from my savings and I created this website with the help of Bluehost. I have previous experience with other hosting companies but I was very curious about Bluehost, and that is why I tried this time. Zero problems so far. Click here if to learn how to start a blog with WordPress and Bluehost.

INCOME REPORT

Google Adsense: $66.23

• Previous Month: $44.39
• Difference: + $21.84

This is a big jump for me. When I first started I told myself that I would be satisfied if I can reach a threshold of $50/month, but now that I reached it I know it is not enough, that I can do much more and I will put effort on that.

Out of the income earned with Adsense, $32.05 are directly from clicks (with a CPC of $0.14), $27.34 are from Views, $5.26 from Active Views and $1.60 from Engagements.

YouTube: $1.78

• Previous Month: $1.55
• Difference: + $0.23

Considering that I didn’t update any video during October I consider $1.78 a good amount for doing “nothing” new.

Amazon Affiliate Program: $7.90

• Previous Month: Not implemented.

October has been the first month I tried Amazon Affiliate and it resulted to be pretty good. Money not expected at all, I like it. I have one banner on the right side of the website with a product from Amazon that I consider useful for my readers. I sold 4 items, however, none of them are the recommended product.

Bluehost: £0.00 ($0.00)

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

I totally expected this. I only have one banner and it’s by the end of my niche site in a place that very little people scroll down. Plus it is not an interest based advertisement since my niche is an Adsense site. Let’s see if in future I get lucky with it.

EXPENSES

Bluehost hosting service (for 1 year): $159.38

• Previous Month: Not included.
• Difference: £0.00 ($0.00)

Includes Domain name. I don’t include this in the Net Total balance because they are considered as start-up costs and they will be included in the year balance.

Net Total Balance: $75.91

October was a great month, with a large jump due to an increase of 50% on Adsense revenue and the incorporation of Amazon products. I didn’t expect to have any earnings with Amazon that early, but it is a nice surprise.

TRAFFIC AND METRICS

Since Passive Income Wise was launched one week ago there is not enough data to report it. Therefore, the reported here correspond to my niche site.

Page views: 225,351 (+122,544 compared to September 2015)

Wow! Double than last month, that is incredible! I need to recognise that many of them are due to a couple of posts that went viral, but every month I have some posts going viral so it is a real improvement. 

I believe this increase in traffic is due to the hard work put over the last 3 months. I thought it would never happen. Now I am satisfied and I know what is the path to follow to continue improving: create amazing content.

Niche Site 1 is ranking 20 in Google for the keyword targeted but 99% of the people accessing is because of Long Tail Keywords. Lesson learned? Focus long tail keywords, they are the key!

Number of new people visiting the site: 42,888

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

42k new people who visited Niche Site 1. Can you see the scope of these numbers as I do? 42k new people means 42,000 potential permanent visitors if what they found satisfied their needs. That’s amazing!! 

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

Since the beginning, I have been targeting Organic Traffic because it’s the one that gives you real passive income. Is the permanent traffic that will be always there no matter if you continue creating content or not. Of course, I will continue creating content but October has been the real example of a month which I didn’t publish a lot of content and still it generated tons of traffic.

Social traffic is mainly coming from Facebook and Reddit and a little bit from Twitter. I found some months back the importance of sharing your posts in matching Reddit communities as people can give you good feedback and comments.

11,680 of traffic from Direct looks promising, most of them are coming from Bookmarks meaning they liked those posts. Really satisfied with this number.

Referral traffic is important as well, but I didn’t work in creating backlinks since several months back, so I believe it’s fair the low amount traffic coming for referrals. 

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): $0.14
• Clicks: 341 with a total of 301k ads impressions
• Page RPM: $0.47

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 of 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.

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: 1,230 (+168 New Likes)
• Group Members: 480 (+31 New Members)
• Friends: 1,367 (+50 New friends)

What I did to increase this numbers is just sharing my new posts and reply some of the comments. The increase is very low due to the low content added in October.

Passive Income Wise (PIW). Like Passive Income Wise on Facebook

• Likes Page: 0
• Group Members: 0
• Friends: 0

Just started, 0 friends and likes. Hoping that next month will be some more.

Twitter

Niche Site 1 (NS1)

• Followers: 294 (+13 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).

• Followers: 0

Not created a Twitter account yet.

YouTube

Niche Site 1 (NS1)

• Subscribers: 295 (+39 New Subscribers)

I only uploaded one video during October. 39 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: 351 (+14 New Subscriptions)

During October 2015 I deleted the registration form because it was giving some problems. The 14 new subscriptions are coming from the comments box that has a click to register. Currently, my email list is with Mail Chimp but I would like to change to Aweber or any other more professional service.

I didn’t create an email list for PIW yet but it will come soon.

FUTURE WORK AND TARGETS

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

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

I’m sure you realised that most of the work is related to this blog, it’s because from today is my One Thing and I’m 100% focused on improving PIW right now.

Did you like my first 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.