Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

July 2013 Niche Site Progress Report

I know income reports are a dime a dozen these days. Pat Flynn was really the mastermind behind them.

He brought a new level to trust to the online income space.

I am following in his footsteps and will be creating my own income reports. Not to build trust with readers but to help myself.

I want to be able to monitor exactly how much income I am making and how my websites are progressing. For me it just makes sense to do it in the public eye.

If I’m going to do it I may as well show other people.

Here is my July 2013 website report. I won’t reveal the URL’s of each website, but I will track them with numbers (eg. Niche Site #1 etc)

My goal is 20 profitable niche sites by the end of 2013.

Niche Site Content Progress

I will be tracking the content progress of each of my niche sites. Because after all it is the content that drives the traffic that drives the sales.

So in almost all cases more content equals more traffic equals more sales.

Below is the number of articles I have on each niche site. The goal is for each niche site to have an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM of 10 articles and a home page article. Then I am ‘doubling down’ on the sites that show promise. Giving them 20+ articles.

Niche Site #1 – 127 (goal: 200)
Niche Site #2 – 1 (goal: 10)
Niche Site #3 – 13 (goal: 20)
Niche Site #4 – 17 (goal: 10 – achieved)
Niche Site #5 – 12 (goal: 20)
Niche Site #6- 9 (goal: 10)
Niche Site #7 – 1 (goal: 10)

Visitor Traffic

I will be tracking visitor traffic to see how my traffic overall is growing or declining.

I won’t be tracking pageviews or any other metrics at this stage.

Niche Site #1 – 7,540
Niche Site #2 – 5,157
Niche Site #3 – 7,515
Niche Site #4 – 856
Niche Site #5 – 2,969
Niche Site #6- 85 (first full month)
Niche Site #7 – 3 (just launched)

RyanMcLean.net – 505 (personal blog)
WhiteSummerStore.com – 6 (potential ecommerce store for my wife’s products)

Total = 24,636

Site Income

At this stage I will not be disclosing how I make my money from each site.

I earn income through a mixture of Adsense, affiliate income and my own product sales. Most sites are a mixture of 2 or 3 but some sites do rely more heavily on just one source of income

Niche Site #1 – $781.88
Niche Site #2 – $15.46
Niche Site #3 – $84.43
Niche Site #4 – $5.96
Niche Site #5 – $181.65
Niche Site #6 – $0.18
Niche Site #7 – $0.00

Total Income: $1,069.56

This is not my best month (I think that was about $1,300+) however it is a great month and my 3rd month over $1,000.

I am really excited because in August I will be reinvesting ALL of this money back into more sites to try and grow out my income.

Ideally I would have 20 profitable niche sites each averaging about $100 each. So the goal is to be earning $2000/month in January 2014.

August Goals

July has come and gone and August is here and I plan to do big things in August.

6 new niche sites

That’s right I have done the keyword research, bought the domains and I will be creating 6 new niche sites in August. I already have 3 up and running with at least 1 article on them.

So in my August niche site progress report I should have traffic stats for a whopping 13 niche sites (just 7 short of my goal of 20).

Ideally I would like to have 10 articles on every single website before the end of August but I don’t think that is going to happen. That would be something like 60 articles or 2 per day, and remember I only get a few hours each week to work on my sites.

More Videos

I attribute a lot of my success to creating YouTube videos of my blog posts and then linking back to the site with them. It is the only link building strategy I am currently using.

Eventually I would like to create a video for EVERY SINGLE BLOG POST I have. It can’t hurt after all. However, that is not my goal of August.

My goal for August is to have a video for every single home page article. I will let you know how I go.

The Current Strategy

Previously I was trying to follow “project 10” which was getting 10 articles up on a website before creating a new website. But due to the time lags in getting content I have had to adjust this.

Instead I am using “buckets” – a concept I got from the lean start up.

Basically each stage of a niche site’s development is classified as it’s own bucket

Buckets would be (buying domain, getting home page published, getting 10 articles published, putting images on the posts, creating videos for the posts).

The idea is that each bucket is only allowed a certain amount until it is deemed “full” and cannot be added to. The idea is that this forces you to complete some tasks further than you otherwise would so you can free up space in the bucket for newer projects.

I will be tracking what stage my sites are up to and trying to get as many buckets empty as possible.

Thus concludes my niche site update for July.



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