If you haven’t been following along on my case study (code name The Cosmo Project), then this post probably isn’t going to make a whole lot of sense to you. So first, take a second to get caught up with everything I’ve done so far here. Don’t worry, I’ll wait right here for you to finish.
Ok, now that you’re all caught up, let’s dive in. In this post, I’m going to give you all an update on the site (traffic numbers, work done, and even INCOME!). Hopefully I’ll be able to make these updates on a monthly basis or at least once every few months. I’ve still decided not to reveal the site quite yet, sorry folks! But here’s where we stand so far with the Cosmo Project.
Traffic
I’m happy to say that Cosmo’s traffic picked up pretty nicely in January. I added almost 20 new pages of content towards the end of December and they’re starting to get rank in Google and bring in traffic too. There were some slight drops in the bounce rate and pages viewed per session, but they’re so small it’s not a big deal at all.
First, here’s a comparison of January’s traffic compared to last year. You can click to enlarge it.
And here’s the comparison of January’s traffic vs. December’s.
As you can see, the traffic for December started to die down towards the end of the month, most likely because of the holidays. But we picked back up in January and I’m feeling really confident about February!
Email List
Something I haven’t mentioned so far with the Cosmo Project is that the site does have an email list. However, I haven’t been actively doing anything to build the list aside from putting up email capture forms (using SumoMe) and offering a free eBook download as an offer/bribe. But the list does pick up a few subscribers every now and then. Here’s what the list looks like now.
I’ll be ramping up my efforts to build the list more in a couple of months. I’m currently running an autoresponder series for new subscribers so the list isn’t getting completely neglected.
Income
I’m basically rich from this site already. Just kidding!
Right now, there are two monetization methods on the site:
- Google Adsense
- Amazon Associates (Amazon’s affiliate program)
I’m not a huge fan of Adsense, but figured I’d place a couple ads on the site to see what happens. I prefer Amazon Associates since it converts better and I have more control. The awesome thing about Amazon Associates is that if a person clicks on one of your affiliate links, you’ll get commissions on anything they purchase through the site as long as they don’t clear their cookies. So even if they don’t buy the product you linked to and decide to get something else instead, you still receive a commission.
The commissions earned so far are from product reviews and mentions of different products in some of the articles. The good thing is most of the products that have been ordered are the exact product being reviewed or mentioned. Now let’s talk money!
Google Adsense Earnings
Google Adsense income for January: $3.52
Amazon Associates Earnings
Amazon Associates income for January: $3.41
Total earnings for January: $6.93
Like I said, it’s not much but it’s cool to see a bit of income coming in even with minimal effort.
Future Plans
I didn’t publish any new blog posts in January, although I have four written and ready to publish. I’ll probably publish two this month and two next month. I’m also planning on starting some blogger outreach in the next couple of weeks to get on the radar of other bloggers in my niche. I’ll walk you through my process in a separate post.
There you have it. Overall there’s been some nice progress despite the minimal effort I put into the site in January. I’m feeling very good about the potential of the site and can’t wait to keep moving forward.
