Ylliks

It’s been a while since I started with my experiment in online income so it’s time that I share some information on it. This post will consist of 3 topics: how I set up the experiment, the results and especially the things I’ve learned.

The set-up

Increasing my online income consisted of 2 parts: 1) increase my earnings from Squidoo by creating more articles and building better backlinks to them 2) create a new income stream with a blog with affiliate marketing and ads.

The Squidoo part was pretty straight forward: during the last couple of months I’ve created more articles on a number of topics I’m interested in and optimized the ones that already were doing pretty well. Squidoo has a ranking system where a higher rank means a higher share of the ad revenue of the site, so you’re looking to get as high a rank as possible. Also, you’re able to add affiliate marketing to your articles, either by using your own links or by using Squidoo’s own affiliate modules.

The blog had some startup issues. Choosing a topic was pretty easy: it was something I’m passionate about and have quite an extensive knowledge on. So starting a blog on traveling light or one-bag travel seemed only logical. I did my keyword research and it seemed there was an audience and not so much competition. A domain name (lightertraveler.com) and hosting was quickly arranged, but I had some wishes when it came to the theme used on the WordPress backbone. I have to admit that I was a bit cheap when it came to this, because I opted to re-code an existing theme instead of buy one which was tailored (which to be honest, is not that big of an investment). I ran into a few snags when it came to my knowledge of HTML and other WordPress theme related coding, so I asked a friend, who’s a website designer himself, to help me out. He did, but it took more time than I anticipated so the blog took a bit longer to launch on November 1st. By that time however I had created 10-12 articles that could be published and created an accompanying Twitter account and news letter through Mailchimp.

So figuring I was off to a good start, I started further researching the subject (there had to be some things I didn’t know) and publishing weekly updates to the blog and newsletter and daily updates to the Twitter account. The Twitter account gathered some followers pretty soon (+100 in 3 weeks), I started building more backlinks to get higher in my Google rankings which helped and plotted along. Then I ran into a few bumps in the road.

For one I had a following on Twitter, but they weren’t actively engaged with my account, meaning they didn’t share the stories or links I put out there. Also it seemed that I had all the knowledge there was on the subject and there were just a relative few things you could say about it. It was like this: traveling light was to travel what dribbling is to basketball: it’s an (integral) part of it, but once you explained the mechanics, there’s not much more to say. Also, the audience I thought was there really wasn’t. Yes, there was a group of people out there who were as passionate about this way of travel as I was, but it was just a small group. The keywords I used in my initial research were also used for an unrelated topic with a much larger following.

So me running out of topics to write about without rehashing content (something I wasn’t willing to do after just 5 months of running a blog; competition didn’t seem to mind so much), the smaller than anticipated audience and not creating share-worthy content made me reevaluate the blog and I decided to stop with it. As an experiment is was educational (see the things I’ve learned below) but as a revenue generator it wasn’t.

Results

Since this was all about earning/increasing my online income, let’s see how I fared from the months august 2011 to february 2012.

Month:   Squidoo:  Amazon:
Feb-12    24.94        0.04
Jan-12   19.97         49.40
Dec-11   26.11        1.53
Nov-11   11.42        1.20
Oct-11   14.07        0.00
Sep-11   18.42        2.16
Aug-11   18.68        0.41

Totals: 133.61        54.74      

Grand total: $ 188.35     Average per month: $ 31.39

All the income I had was from my Squidoo pages. So not exactly the $100 a month I was aiming for, but all in all not bad from starting from about $5 a month. I still want to reach that goal at some point so there’s need to grow. In conclusion sextupling my income on Squidoo is something I’m pleased about, not getting any revenue from my “money-making” blog of course was something of a letdown.

As for traffic, in the those months my articles on Squidoo had 34.734 visitors with 40.631 pageviews (about 80% of that coming from my top 4 lenses). This has been an increase of 142% over the traffic I had in the 6 months before that, so I’m very pleased about that. The blog had 1042 visitors with 1106 pageviews. One article (a review of my favorite travel bag) had 40% of those visitors. Overall I guess not bad for a blog starting out, but since most of the visitors were gone in a matter of seconds and didn’t interact or read the articles is a telling point. So is the fact that I gained 1 RSS subscriber in 6 months and no subscribers on the newsletter.

What I’ve learned:

So what have I learned from this experiment?

• Research upfront is key: making sure you use the right keywords for your topic, that there’s an audience out there for the topic you want to talk about and you have enough topics to talk about is extremely important. I have to say I erred on that part in my initial research which lead to the demise of the blog. Of course you can always start a blog about something you care about and not worry about visitors, but if, like me, you’re setting out to make money from it there are different parameters.
• Having friends/followers on social networks is fun, but if they’re not engaging with your content or click your links they’re of no use to you. Having 1000 true fans is far better than having a million followers that do nothing to enhance what you try to achieve.
• Even when you optimize your SEO, getting traffic to your site takes time. There are no shortcuts, at least if you want to do it the right way and not use black-hat SEO tricks (which ultimately you will get punished for in your ranking when Google makes an update to their algorithm again). It takes at least half a year to get a) a good ranking in Google and b) build an audience. This may be different for you when you’re already a well-known entity, but when you’re starting from scratch that’s the way it is (although there are ways to increase your exposure such as guest posting)
• Never be cheap on your design. Design attracts your readers, content keeps them there. You may be the best writer in the world, but if your websites turns people off, it will hurt you visitor-wise. Make it user-friendly and nice to look at. If, like me, you’re not a designer, make sure you either buy an attractive theme or have it custom build for you.
• Promoting your content and make sure your readers understand what you want them to do (subscribe to the newsletter or RSS feed, click a link etc. etc) is something I still have much to learn on. Design of the blog can help but tone of writing is more important.

For me this experiment has been partly a success. I haven’t reached my goal of $100 a month, but my online income saw a substantial increase. And as a learning experience it has been very valuable. Since I’m planning to keep on trying to increase my online income, the things I’ve learned here will come in handy once a new project comes around. Maybe that experience is worth more than money.

Ever since the new design of Twitter came out I’ve been using it as my main app to read tweets, moving away a bit from Hootsuite. I think the design is crisp and easy to navigate and has some features that I like such as the discover feature. However, one of the things I despise is the way Twitter has changed (quite some time ago I have to say) the way it handles retweeting.

For the ones not in the know: retweeting is reposting a tweet by someone else in your own timeline because you think it’s worth sharing. This used to be a sort of copy where you would put RT (= Re-Tweet) together with the @-name of the original tweeter in front of the tweet you wanted to share. If you had the characters available after that, you could still add something yourself if you wanted to. That’s the way I prefer it. Now Twitter just puts the original tweet in your timeline, without you having (as far as I know) the opportunity to add something. Reasoning behind it is that this way the original tweeter gets the credit for the tweet. Although I agree with that (give credit where credit is due) I think there’s a fundamental flaw in that way of thinking. Let me tell you why.

Yesterday a guy I follow called Erik Bras shared this tweet which I thought was hilarious. So I retweeted it almost immediately. So it was displayed in my timeline as given which gives credit to the original tweeter. Nothing wrong with that. However, I think it’s only fair that I would have the opportunity to acknowledge where I got the tweet from and add that to the tweet. Again, credit where credit is due. But with the way Twitter handles retweets I can’t. And let’s just say you find a tweet that just has a link in it. The link might be worth sharing and thus worth retweeting, yet, in order to provide some clarity to what it is, with the way retweeting is done now, you cannot provide that clarity by adding some explanation what the link is about, which may lead to some thinking my account is hacked and some spammer just uses it to send out links to malware sites.

Of course you can always c/p the tweet in your own tweet-window, add the appropriate @-name and add what you want, but that’s a bit of a hassle. And I understand the reasoning behind the way Twitter handles it, because with the old kind of retweeting many took credit for some funny or informational tweet that wasn’t originally theirs and sometimes the tweet itself had to be shorted to fit the RT and @-name. However in this case I think the cons outweigh the pros. But that’s just what I think….

Ever since my teen years I’ve been interested in statistics. Being a basketball fan I could list stats from NBA players at that time. After getting into coaching I wanted to know the defensive and offensive efficiency of my teams, so I (had) tracked deflections, offensive rebound percentages, turnovers made and produced and so on. And in my new job I’m dealing with statistics all the time.

Of course I’m also running Google Analytics on this blog and the blog of my online income experiment. When it comes to this blog those numbers don’t matter much to me, but for my experiment I want to know what works and what doesn’t, how people come to my site, how long they stay there and what links they do or do not click and so on.

To me it’s just interesting to see how a bunch of numbers can tell you a story. But not always the whole story.

One of the things you can interpret are posts that are shared on Social media. But as far as I know with todays tools you can interpret the amount of likes or retweets, but not the, I believe, most essential information. Because what you want to know is how your stories are perceived, not just the amount of times they are shared.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s an important statistic to know how many times your content is shared, but it’s even more important to know how people feel about it. A blog post can be shared hundredfold, but if the reaction to it is negative it hurts more than helps. And you want to know how people react to your content. Then you’ll truly know what works and what doesn’t.

So new social media metrics tools should not only measure the numbers, but also the type of buzz content is generating. Then the numbers tell you the real story.

Not so long ago I wrote about how I thought a company went about it all wrong with their communication so it’s only fitting that when I have an experience that is completely satisfactory I should write about that as well.

For a while now I’ve ordered items from Avanti Sport which is a large online sporting goods retailer. Orders I’ve placed in the past have been shipped as confirmed and I haven’t had any trouble whatsoever. So when it was time for a new gym bag, since my heavily used one of 3 years was beyond mending, I ordered one from the site. To be honest, I didn’t really look at the specs, just the dimensions. That was a mistake. It proved to be one of those football players use with a hard bottom and spinning wheels. Not what I wanted, but my mistake. Still, I wanted to see if there were any option to return the bag. And there were plenty.

First I had a choice of returning the bag with a full refund or exchange it for another product (for both, items had to be in original package and unopened, which mine was). I choose the latter and picked another bag. The system immediately recognized that the newly picked bag was cheaper than the original one, so it gave me a choice to either order something else to make up the difference or have it reimbursed to my bank account. Again, the latter was my choice and then it was just a matter of picking the shipping method. I could either bring it to a Kiala point and shipping would be free, have it send to their postal adress and have a few euro of administration costs or have it send to their shipping address and have the shipping costs on me. Since the Kiala point was close by I opted for the first. I confirmed the new order and received an email confirming the exchange. I dropped the return parcel at the collection point, got a receipt with a tracking code and went home.

With the tracking code I could see the parcel had arrived at Avanti a few days later and that same day I received an email with the shipping tracking code of the new order and the amount difference was transferred to my bank account. Next day, new bag arrived.

As positive as I was about them before this, I noticed that I turned into an advocate for them, telling friends and family this story and how much I’m impressed with their service. Perfect example how a customer experience like this can create great word of mouth. I will surely order from them again.