Enters the January 2015 reports.<\/p>\n
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What’s going on<\/h2>\nThe\u00a0new website<\/h3>\n
In December I met Joe\u00a0from EmpireFlippers<\/a>, a controlled marketplace with pre-verified websites on sale, while in Saigon and I ended up buying a blog specialized in drones and monetized via Amazon affiliates. This means that if someone visiting the blog clicks on a link and eventually buys an Amazon product, I get a commission (affiliate model).<\/p>\n The first changes I made are\u00a0what I call quick wins<\/strong>, things that the previous owner didn’t do such as creating a mailing list (got almost 200 subscribers), and improve social media presence.<\/p>\n For the rest I focused my efforts on two things: content & SEO.<\/p>\n It’s becoming more and more obvious to me that quality is the way to go<\/strong> to build an online business. Plus, those shady backlinking techniques require anyway<\/strong>\u00a0time, money and efforts so I rather invest that in creating good quality content.<\/p>\n To create such a content I needed an English native speaker with writing experience that can carry on researches on drone-related subjects and create\u00a0personal, compelling and engaging articles for an American audience (as the traffic is mainly US). Did you ever read an article about someone passionate about high-tech gadgets? Many times those people know every\u00a0little detail<\/strong> about the\u00a0thing, but are so boring to read or worse they find all sort of negative things. I know because I was one of them<\/strong> few years ago \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I had mixed experience hiring writers from oDesk, so I followed the advise in this NichePursuits podcast<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Spencer and Perrin and checked on my network first… I\u00a0ended up hiring an acquaintance just turned mom, and she provided great material so far!<\/p>\n Search Engine Optimization means everything and nothing nowadays. So for long time I stayed away from off-page SEO (backlinks) and focused on on-page SEO (basically what’s explained in this article<\/a>). This mean that I’ll dedicate time to follow a strategy of outreach<\/strong> and promotion<\/strong> of the website content. I contacted websites owner having pages\u00a0with links to other websites about drones. Another example, using\u00a0SEMrush<\/a>\u00a0I checked my competitors backlinks and found a magazine article linking to one of them. I dropped an email to the author of the article and he immediately added my website too as a reference.<\/p>\n Those are perfectly white-hat (aka legal) way to get quality backlinks!<\/strong> Still early to say something definitive about my SEO efforts, but this is the ranking graph for the main target keyword:<\/p>\n After I bought the website the ranking went down a little and I got very<\/strong> nervous about it, but things now are looking good.<\/p>\n Having said all this… how did the website go in January?<\/strong>\u00a0Not so well, but drones were a hot Christmas gift and now it’s winter in US\u00a0so the market should go up again in spring.<\/p>\n I still don’t know if this was a good acquisition, I’ll stay cool and keep working on this one<\/strong>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n December the 12th I soft-launched the new website: ComeCostruire.info,<\/a>\u00a0the Italian version of ComoHacer, my Spanish blog about manual works and\u00a0DIY.<\/p>\n January traffic was up to\u00a0641 visitors with 1,424 page views!<\/p>\n What’s best is that traffic looks very healthy:<\/p>\n Adsense generated\u00a0\u20ac4.13 earnings in January with 0 work done. I’m very interested in finding\u00a0a “earning per article” and based on that decide if makes sense to\u00a0translate more articles.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n January 20th I released an updated version of my WordPress theme, adding some features that were on high demand.<\/p>\n The most interesting one from a business point of view is that customers\u00a0can now translate the theme in their own language<\/strong>, opening the theme sales to the non-English markets!<\/p>\n Releasing this update took me a full day of work (8 hours) but the resulting digital product can sell for months to come.<\/p>\n In January I had 16\u00a0sales for a total of\u00a0$633<\/strong>, with 0\u00a0refund.<\/p>\n The reason why the image shows 143 sales, is that I changed the workflow for the free version of the theme and now it also goes through the checkout process, even if price is 0.<\/p>\n In this way I can promote the paid version as an upsell, and also build a mailing list that I can use as a marketing tool in the future.\u00a0And talking about upsell, I got my first customer buying the $49 installation service that is promoted as cross-sell on the checkout page.<\/p>\n WP Tube has still lots of potential to explore. Current conversion rate is around 0.28%, meaning that out of 300 visitors one will buy. How about grow that to just 1%?<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Back in June I got my article ‘how to buy a house in the Netherlands<\/a>‘ translated to Spanish<\/a>. Seven months later, the article is getting an average of 80 views a month and in January I got the first contact interested in buying an house \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Another thing I want to mention is that I dedicated a whole day to write a comprehensive article in Italian about how is to live\u00a0in Amsterdam (Vivere ad Amsterdam<\/a>).\u00a0The article got more than 500 views in a week and I got lots of positive feedback about it. This is not generating any income, but it’s a nice confirmation that if you create high quality content that people like to read, traffic will come.<\/p>\n Last thing I’ve to brag about, is that my article about\u00a0Some reasons to visit Pristina and Kosovo<\/a>\u00a0got picked up by\u00a0KosovaPress, a national newspaper! They deliberately translated my article in Albanian<\/a>, without informing me but giving credit. The best part is the copyright information at the end, where they say that redistribution is strictly prohibited without prior written authorization \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Let’s get down to the numbers!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Note: some links to products and services may have affiliation. This means that if you’ll buy I’ll get a commission. Never the less, I’m only mentioning here services that I use myself<\/strong> to operate my websites.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/h4>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Just an additional note, the EUR crashed to the lowest value of the last 11 years and most of my transactions are in USD. <\/p>\n Any remark about this report? Thanks for reading!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\nContent<\/h4>\n
\nThe affiliate websites with a bounce of poorly written articles stuffed with\u00a0specific keywords are something from the past, and the ones still around are supported by some shady backlink building technique (such as PBN)\u00a0that can be cracked down by a Google update anytime.<\/p>\n
\nI don’t need a drone expert, but rather someone that can create interesting content.<\/p>\nSEO<\/h4>\n
\nI got burned very early on my online career buying 500 backlinks for $20 on the WarriorForum four years ago. Soon after my website got de-indexed by Google and traffic dropped to null.<\/p>\n![\"Bad](\"https:\/\/www.danielebesana.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/bad_seo-1024x510.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nBut for this website I’ll focus more on white-hat SEO techniques.<\/p>\n
\nWhat’s that? Here a couple of examples.<\/p>\n
\nOut of 10 email sent I got two replies: one person added the link to my website, and another asked 150$ per year to place the link (which I didn’t pay).<\/p>\n
\nAgain quality, of course they take time and effort, but this is how I want to proceed with this website.<\/p>\n![\"Main](\"https:\/\/www.danielebesana.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/ranking_main_kw-1024x231.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nUpdate on ComeCostruire.info<\/h3>\n
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\nThis website was launched only in December so it will take few months to rank well and I’m curious to see how far can go.<\/p>\nWP Tube version 5.2 released<\/h3>\n
![\"wptube_earnings_jan\"](\"https:\/\/www.danielebesana.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/wptube_earnings_jan-1024x354.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nMy next step is to change the sale website itself, that now sucks, with a more modern sale page… really curious to see how this will affect the conversion!<\/p>\nUpdate on this very blog, danielebesana.com<\/h3>\n
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Income Breakdown<\/h2>\n
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Total Gross: \u20ac 2,106.91 (last month 2,239.08)<\/span><\/h4>\n
Expenses Breakdown<\/h2>\n
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Total\u00a0Expenses: \u20ac 377.61 (was 397.01)<\/p>\n
Net Total January 2015: \u20ac 1,729.3\u00a0(last month \u20ac 1,842.07)<\/strong>
\n<\/span><\/h3>\nConclusion<\/h2>\n
\nThis means that my expenses in USD are more expensive, and my earnings in USD are more profitable.
\nAnyway, this report is not an exact financial account and I do convert the totals using today’s exchange rate, that won’t be the same when I’ll transfer the money out of Paypal, for example.<\/p>\n
\nAre you making money online?<\/p>\n