blog report Archives - The At Home Couple

Blog Report For October 2008

Yes indeed – I’m back from the dead! The end of October marks the three month anniversary of our beautiful blog, and all you beautiful people who actually read what I type into this little window every now and then. I’m still amazed by that! For those of you who I don’t talk to outside of reciprocal commenting, October has been an insane month from every angle possible. I’ve faced some of the hardest challenges online over the last 31 days and it’s really showed with the lack of posting – and for that I want to apologize.

On the same token, October showed a trim down of posting on the majority of blogs within my social network, which means that all my ninjas in The Bloggerhood have been super busy either preparing for Christmas traffic, or just trying to end the year with a real bang! Everyone I talk to on a daily basis has multiple projects going on simultaneously, and let me be the first to say that some of these projects I’ve been hearing about are absolutely groundbreaking!

The blogosphere is about to change my friends, and there is a serious movement happening right now. A movement of Average Joes and Simple Suzies that are about to knock all the high ranked bloggers out of the park. I am seeing this movement form right before my eyes everyday, with every email I read or every phone call I get. Things are starting to click and it’s an honor to be a part of this.

October was a pinnacle month for my career online – and I’m now calling it a career because I’ve officially made enough income to report on, so I don’t see myself getting a day job any time soon providing things continue as planned (which they will if I have anything to say about it!) Now I don’t plan to report my earnings every month, but with this month being a milestone I felt it would be appropriate.

Traffic

Now unfortunately due to my severe shift in posting, link building and commenting during October, there has been a decline in traffic compared to last month. I’m not worried at all because I know why our traffic didn’t continue to rise and I also know what needs to be done to bring those numbers back up. Here’s the breakdown not including today:

1379 unique visitors
3527 number of visits
11171 pages viewed
113.77 average daily uniques

Subscribers

As always, Feedburner is fucking up right now and giving me an error 500 when I click on sign in, so I won’t be able to report the exact sub numbers for October. What I can tell you is that last time I checked, which was about 2 days ago we were at 103 subscribers which is a huge increase from the 67 subscribers reported at the end of September. You people are all amazing and I want to make sweet love to each and every one of you. Dudes can substitute the sweet love making for a cold beer and a high five.

Earnings

Time for the bread and butter. As I’m logging into my respective money receiving accounts I can’t actually believe I just typed earnings into my blog, within a blog report post. To think 12 months ago I didn’t even own a blog, or know what an <h1> tag was – it’s a beautiful thing! For the month of October my main focus was developing, establishing and selling start up niche sites. Most refer to this process as Site Flipping. The whole movement of flippers online is really amazing when you think about it – rather than people writing ebooks that teach people how to make money, they’re building niche sites that make people money! I also had a record month with Adsense, by fluke, because a gentleman whom I sold a site to has refused to change the Adsense code out of apparent laziness! This can happen with site flipping, and can be rewarding!

Site Flipping – $1021.00 (6 websites)
Adsense – $16.73 (getting closer to my first Adsense check!)
Clickbank – $27.00 (1 sale)
Amazon – $0.00 (some assmunch returned something)
Pepperjam – $0.00 (because I haven’t earned anything, I get rejected for every decent campaign. Doesn’t make any damned sense!)
Neverblueads – $1.00 (got one lead!)
Prostitution – $13.74 (some old lady paid me to tie her shoe and touch her boob)

Upcoming Projects

I can’t be too specific on my ninja projects for November, but sources tell me that SutieJ likes to talk, especially if you bribe him with coffee and Hip Hop. So find him on Skype and send him a Tim Horton’s gift card (Canada’s equivalent of Dunkin Donuts) and the new Nas album via iTunes, and I’m sure you’ll have no problem finding out what I have up my sleeve for this month. Even better, visit ImWithJoe.com and tell Dready Kruger that you’ve sent, via FedEx, a steaming hot Philly Cheese Steak sammich, and built a giant goldfish out of pop tarts that you will give to him in exchange for my detailed November ninja plans. All it takes is food and Hip Hop to bribe my friends. Assholes.

In short, I have two sites that I will be developing for my own portfolio this month. One of them will be a review/conduit style site that covers various niche markets – chasing after long tail keywords to catch consumers in the “buying” stage for maximum conversions. This is also known as the Conduit Method by some. The second site, which I’m super hyped up about, will be an extension of my blog/ninja skills in the form of providing my services to the webmasters/MMO market.

So expect at least one site launch in November if things go as planned!

By the way, if you’re unfamiliar or have never heard of the Conduit Method, you absolutely need to stop by TheLazyMarketer.com and take a peak at his VIP reports – no bullshit, straight to the point make money techniques that work.

There you have it. I really hope everyone had a great October, and if not, keep pushing forward! I know everyone tells you the same fucking things online “don’t give up” “keep your chin up” “keep testing things out” “it will eventually click” and the fact of the matter is that this is all true. If October was a shitty month for you, and you can’t make a penny online, it’s time to stop sleeping and get desperate. Whore yourself out at the old folks home so you can grab a few domains, and get cracking. Steal ideas from those around you, while pretending to enjoy their virtual company and talk shit about them behind their backs.

Or… Work hard and realize that nothing happens over night. Destroy that dream of getting rich quick and reach out towards like minded people. Discard your insecurities and put your ass on the line, and you’ll be surprised to realize that once you have nothing to loose things start to come together. I promise.

Cheers,

Elijah

Blog Report For September 2008

Another month, another stats report to add to the blogosphere! September was a weird month from several different stand points for TheAtHomeCouple.com – weird not being a bad thing, as growing up my mother always told me weird was good. The first thing that really caught me off guard was that the original 25 subscribers from our August blog report decided to stick around for another month despite my several attempts to be as inappropriate as humanly possible. Secondly, I’m still trying to grip the fact that I built and sold my first website in September.

Website flipping is talked about quite frequently on the Internet, and when I decided I needed to stop being afraid and start making money I had no idea that selling a website would be how that money was made – but it was! Lastly, in September I realized after hours and hours of sleepless nights that more work doesn’t always mean better work. When I heard my man Joe say that he’s thinking about taking weekends off and only posting on his site Monday through Friday, it was on! What a great idea…

September was also a big month for Veronica in the sense that she finally admitted to the fact that I’m not loosing my mind, and I actually know a thing or two about making money online. She has also taken on learning about blogging and WordPress into her own hands and came home one day with a “Blogging For Dummies” book! I’m not going to lie and say that I wasn’t turned on slightly – because I was.

Stats & Screenshots

Once again, I’m not going to report how much money I made online because this blog is about our adventure trying to quit our jobs, not our wallets. I will let you guys know that I did have a record month with Adsense and made almost $12, with TheAtHomeCouple.com contributing $4.44 to that total! Time to get me a movie ticket.

As I’m typing out this blog report, and infomercial popped on the television titled “Internet Shortcut Millions” with two busty young ladies talking about how if you can send an email you can make millions on the Internet using Jeff Paul’s 3-click system. I really wish you guys could see this… I’ve written down the number and plan to call and start asking the representatives about click through ratio and bounce rate – who the hell is Jeff Paul? lol.

As you can see in the screenshot above, there was a sexy increase in unique visitors to our blog in September. According to AWStats we had 2175 unique visitors with 16, 049 page views and an average of 3.49 pages per visit. That’s 805 more unique visitors than August!!! Sweet victory… The downside is that the page views and pages per visit had a slight decrease – but that could mean several things, and having a more established regular flow of readers probably contributed to that decline.

This is really blowing my mind right now – the above screenshot shows an average of 153.23 visits per day, with the most traffic on September 16th which brought in 519 visits! Who the heck are you people, and where do you come from? I know one of my strengths regarding website development is traffic generation, but 3 months ago I couldn’t even tell you what technorati does (I’m still not 100% sure, lol). Blogging rules, and that’s the end of that!

Here is my favorite number, and what ties everything together in the blogosphere – Our subscribers! We haven’t held a single contest, or posted anything insanely ground-breaking or controversial, and yet we’ve somehow increased our subscribers from 25 at the end of August to 67 at the end of September! I really don’t know what to say except thank you. I can only imagine what the response would be once Veronica has the time to get her crazy, beautiful, insanely smart ass up on here more often to mix it up with you guys and gals – I can’t wait!

Elijah, how did you get these numbers in 2 months?

I stopped caring about what the Guru’s are doing
I stopped reading and commenting on blogs where the favor is not returned
I stopped reading 37 ebooks a month
I stopped worrying about what to write
I started swearing in my blog posts
I started leaving demented comments on all of your blogs
I started linking to anybody or anything that I thought was cool
I won a Rastafarian plush doll at a carnival and made a dance video with it
I started sending questionable emails to Alan LeStourgeon, Paul Piotrowski and Mark Hansen regarding brown paper bags and dog poo
The most important factor that contributed to the quick success of this blog is that I stopped being afraid and started kicking ass. I stopped thinking about how I’m going to accomplish things and started to take action based on what I already know, and what I’m good at

We love you guys and can’t wait to have dinner with each and every one of you sometime within the next 25 years. I’m sure we will see some of you sooner, but that’s besides the point. I strongly believe that there’s a new wave of uber-talented, top-bloggers that are about to take over and kick some of these gassy Guru’s off their comfortable ladders. I can take a look at my blogroll and say, with confidence, that you’re all going to be big in your own way and we will all be around 12 months from now – whether it’s launching products together, or building a selling businesses online together. The future is being molded as we speak, and Veronica and I feel privileged to have the chance to be a part of this.

Cheers,

Elijah

Blog Report For August 2008

Wow, I’m having trouble accepting the fact that TheAtHomeCouple.com is already 1 month old – and what a productive month we’ve had! If you remember back when I posted our goals at the beginning of August, we had 5 main objectives which were fairly attainable. Our top 3 was to post everyday, increase our presence online via social media, and to connect with like-minded bloggers by actively commenting. Mission accomplished.

We actively created profiles and have begun participating on all the major social networking and social bookmarking sites as you can see in the newly added “Connect With Us” section in the sidebar. I also spent the month rabidly commenting on some of my favorite blogs, and discovered some sparkly gems along the way – which is always nice. Somehow I managed to convince Alan from AffiliateConfession.com to grace us with an off-beat interview and he gladly accepted, which was awesome, and I pretty much posted everyday minus 3 or 4 times that I needed to disconnect and let the laptop cool down. As Borat would say, “Great Success!”

If you’re reading this post expecting to see an income report of some kind, it’s not happening just yet and here’s why: a) We have been focused on building the foundation – which is the content and the community, and b) I hate seeing 2 month old blogs that are full of ads and top 10 lists. If you think no one will notice that you’re rewriting content from authority blogs, or polluting your site with 125×125 ad blocks in an attempt to attract buyers for your ad space, think again. It’s blog suicide and unless you’re already established and have social proof of your status online do not pretend to be something you’re not – because you’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Be yourself and you’ll do just fine!

Even though I’m not going to let you know about the $7.85 we made from Adsense, I do have some screen shots I’d like to share with you guys and gals relating to our traffic, subscribers and search engine presence from our Hostgator cPanel admin. As you can see below from our AWStats report we had 1370 unique visitors between 08/01 and 08/31, with 16,855 page views and an average of 5.79 pages per visit.

On a per day basis, shown below, our lowest was on 08/03 with 8 unique visitors, and our busiest day was on 08/08 with 324 unique visitors – which was when I did the first post discussing SocialMarker.com and how to use it for efficiently submitting your posts to social bookmarking sites. Our overall average bounced between 75-100 visits per day, sometimes higher and rarely lower, which could only mean one thing – you guys rock!

In regards to subscribers, as of Saturday we have 25 wonderful people who have locked in with their favorite RSS feed reader to keep up to date with our Internet marketing adventures. I’m still not 100% sure on how to read the statistics provided within the Feedburner dashboard, but as you can see below it says “25 readers” so that’s what I’m sticking with!

For those of you who don’t know, I’m really big on keyword research, backlinks and getting organic traffic from the search engines using Wordtracker, to find kick-ass key phrases for post titles and content. Out of curiosity I opened up Google and typed in “the at home couple” and was pleasantly surprised with the results I received. There are approximately 833 listings for this term, and tons of them are links coming from other blogs as well as social media services that we belong to.

I think that’s enough screen shots for now. I’ve absorbed quite a bit of information in the last 8 months, and even though it’s easy to get overwhelmed it’s becoming apparent that I might actually know what the heck I’m doing – which is comforting. I can remember a point in time when Veronica actually thought I was loosing my marbles with this “Internet” stuff and she would just sit and nod when I’d start rambling about affiliate marketing this, and click through ratio that… Poor girl!

We just want to say how awesome each and everyone of you are. We’ve hit some sort of nerve within the blogosphere and it’s comforting to know that there are other people just like us who lay in bed each night dreaming of working from home or traveling to distant places without breaking the bank. It does seem far fetched until you actually go out and do it, and with the power of the Internet at our fingertips there is no reason why a twenty-something couple or stay at home mom can’t improve their situation and bring freedom and excitement into their life. It really is a beautiful thing.

Cheers,

Elijah