May 2015 Monthly Report – Things are Starting to Pick Up!

May has been a pretty good month because although there are a few setbacks, growth has been better than ever and in a few months’ time, my blog has nowhere to go but up.

Just like the previous month, I had been really busy on May as I had to handle a lot of company matters outside the blog but still, My Internet Quest never left my mind because I managed to keep my blogging pace for at least once a week.

But enough of that, I’m sure you’re dying to have…

 

A Quick Look at My Stats

At the end of April last month, I showed how my mistake costed me my traffic because it was plummeting down like an airplane falling from the sky.

Which is why the graph on the first few days of May started out a bit rough whereby it keeps going down but several days after, it went up really high all the way above the 200 sessions mark!

After that, my stats went down and continued the steady but slow growth all the way until the end of the month where you can see some huge spikes way up high.

This made me very happy considering all I did was writing content without promoting it through ads and not only that, the results were actually pretty good when it comes to sales because I managed to get more revenue not to mention people asking me all sorts of questions from my website and even on Facebook!

Here’ a quick look on my website’s updates for the month of May 2015 compared to last month…

• Unique website visitors – 2,747 (46% increase!)
• Facebook page – 250 likes (-2)
• Business Twitter account – 85 followers (+12)
• Personal Twitter account – 199 followers (+174)
• Google+ – 25 followers, 5685 views (+1 follower, +281 views)
• Pinterest – 110 followers (+4)

I was thrilled to know that I had a high traffic boost of 46% so I did a little digging on Google Analytics which I barely touched before to learn where are all these people coming from…

According to the breakdown of traffic sources above, Google remains my best source of traffic with 48.20% which is a whole lot of traffic.

I’m really bad with numbers and as embarrassing as it is for me to admit it, I never knew half of what Google Analytics is about so in case you are new to it too, here’s what some of those terms mean…

• Organic Search – Traffic from Google
• Referral – Traffic to your from other people’s websites (Through links)
• Direct – Traffic from your own posts that you direct through internal linking.
• Social – Traffic from Social media.
• Others – Traffic from other sources than the ones listed above.

From the high organic search traffic results alone, this shows that I should really focus on getting my SEO right and speaking of which, I also found out that my posts are getting more visibility as many of them are also getting more comments than I usually do on my previous posts.

I try to maintain my momentum by writing one post per week and in the whole month of April, I only managed to write 5 articles…

• How to do SEO for a Website in 10 Simple Steps
• 30 Websites with Totally Free Stock Photos
• How to Add Background Music on WordPress
• How to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business the Right Way
• Can I do Affiliate Marketing Without a Website? –Top 10 Best Strategies on Doing it Right

Although writing one post a week is good, it is the barest minimum that your website needs in order to grow fast which means only one thing – One post per week is not enough!

2 posts per week would be much better as it can give your site space to breathe and as you can see from my blog statistics screenshot above, my graph shot up high really fast when I wrote 2 posts on that same week nearing the end!

A lot of people will argue that one post per week is enough but that also means all the pressure will be put on that one particular article instead so if you want to play fair with lesser pressure, there’s no harm in publishing at least 2 posts per week as this will help your blog grow at a much faster pace especially for new blogs.

Writing 3 articles a week on the other hand, will help your blog grow much better and faster and although this may sound like a challenge, it is something I will definitely try to do this month to see how much will it affect my site for the month.

Now that we got the stats covered…

 

Onward to My Sales!

Finally, the part many of you are waiting for!

I’m happy to say that my revenue started to kick in much better than it had me a couple of months ago because overall, I made $99.50!

Here’s a screenshot of my earnings…

Wealthy Affiliate is the program that I’m promoting and currently it is my number one recommended program when it comes to learning how to build an Online Business.

Whether you’re new to internet marketing or wanting to grow and existing business online, Wealthy Affiliate is your one-stop center because you’ll get to build free websites if you want to test the water, you’ll get lessons which are regularly updated so that your site is up-to-date with Google’s changes, and there’s a huge community of people from various backgrounds all over the world who are just as enthusiastic as you so you’ll never feel left out!

I recently just found out that you can host unlimited domains there too so I quickly terminated my HostGator plan and moved my websites to WA. I did a video and blog post on how to do this on one of my blog posts here.

Basically what I experienced after moving my site is that my ranks went up much better and my page loads a bit faster too and this is simply because at Wealthy Affiliate, you get a whole dedicated server for your own which if you apply outside would costs at least $97 so I guess that’s a bargain.

The reason why my website was so slow while it was on HostGator was because my hosting was a shared hosting which means that the server was basically cramped up with loads of other websites which is why it was so cheap.

But enough of my ranting!

I just got pretty excited since it has passed my one year anniversary as a member so I’m even happier to share my experiences and help out more people.

So you might be wondering, I only earned $83.50 from Wealthy Affiliate, where is the remaining $16?

I’m glad you asked because the program I earned that from is Jaaxy!

Jaaxy is a keyword tool and one of the best one in the market right now and I’ve never actually promoted it because I wasn’t a member so I had nothing to show.

But now that I’ve tried it out and managed to rank most of my content on the first page of Google, I feel much better sharing it with others because now I can show screenshots of how I did it.

I was quite happy that I managed to get a 50% conversion even though I only promoted it on a few of my pages because this shows that I am on the right track.

So that’s basically my income for the whole of May 2015! It still isn’t much but this shows that my work is starting to pay off because now that I know my revenue can grow, I can start taking things more seriously and start deciding on using paid ads in the near future.

 

Some Minor Setbacks I Wish Share On

There are always setbacks because nothing in this world will ever go as planned and for me, I seem to get them a lot but I love sharing them anyway because that helps me keep track of things plus it helps you get an insight too if you were about to do the same thing.

As I was a little busy last month, I did not have much time to focus on my blog but there are still some setbacks that happened and those are…

Setback #1 – Guest Blogging Gone Wrong

Last month I stated that I wanted to do guest posting and I even showed my conversation with Work Awesome, leaving you curious for the results.

Did I get the job? Am I a pro guest contributor now? I think you should take a look at this…

Unfortunately, my article was rejected and I spent some good 2-3 hours writing and researching on that particular piece.

Guest blogging is much harder than I thought because although you only need to write articles between 800-1,800 words (This isn’t much because my blog posts are at least 2,000 words long), the application can take a very long time.

Work Awesome isn’t the only blog I sent my application too, here are several more…

As you can see from my guest blogging schedule above, I applied to other blogs too but the only one that replied me is Work Awesome which means that if you want to have a better luck at scoring a guest blogging opportunity, you need to write to as many as you can because you’ll never know which ones might accept you and chances are very slim.

There are thousands of bloggers applying for guest blogging every day and because of this, you need to keep on pushing in order to get noticed because editors will have loads of emails to go through every day.

I may have not get much luck on May 2015 but for this month, I’m planning to apply to many other blogs instead and hopefully get lucky.

Setback #2 – Food Festival Planning Messed Up

Another thing I discussed about last month was on a food festival I was planning to host on August.

Things were going on smoothly – I managed to secure an investor to fund the capital, I managed to collaborate with an experienced event planning company which agreed to share the risks and I managed to secure a local chairman who agreed to be the face of our event.

I was that close to hosting it until somewhere in the middle, the partner company that I was supposed to be working with bailed out on me because he said that the profits aren’t as high as he thought.

I was really disappointed by his actions because as an event planner himself, he should know that fist huge events aren’t supposed to make a lot of money because you will need to be spending most of your budget on marketing to let people know of your brand new event.

Only after you’ve successfully nailed it can you reduce your marketing costs in the future because people already know you.

But it was my mistake as well because we didn’t have any agreements on paper which is something we always need to do when it comes to dealing with projects or anything at all that involves money.

My food festival will still go on as I have spent a month writing my event but it will be postponed to November instead as I need to finalize and restructure my planning as well as look for more investors to fill in the remaining capital which was supposed to be handled by my partner company.

But I have a pretty good idea on how to move and look for the budget so let’s just wait and see for next month when I can update you 😉 .

 

My Plans for June 2015

June seems like a bright month as I have many plans to cover and I’ve made many connections with people from various different backgrounds but first, I am happy to tell you that I have finally graduated!

I have mixed feelings on this, mainly because most of my friends are all over the world now working in various countries within the hospitality industry which means it’s time for me to face the real world and never turning back, leaving my old life behind.

I will miss my university a lot as I have to turn back on all those sweet memories and speaking of which, here’s a picture of me and my friends at Taylor’s University, Malaysia where I studied…

I managed to find opportunities to grow my event company Kamira Event Management and although I’m not that active website-wise, I do run some small events to grow my name and build traction.

I’m having one medium scale seminar on 13^th of June and this will be my stepping stone to bigger events if I managed to pull that off. I’ll update you guys on that next month 😉 .

As for my blogging routine, I guess that I’ll be having more time to write since Ramadhan starts at 18^th June and in Malaysia, it is a month where all businesses slow down.

If you’re unsure what Ramadhan is, it’s simply the fasting month for all Muslims around the world so even if Malaysia is secular, the whole business ecosystem will be affected as the majority of the citizens here are Muslims.

Not only that, Malaysia is currently undergoing a super heat wave since last month and it is getting hotter and hotter so much so that many people are getting heat stroke.

In Shah Alam where I live, it is around 40 degrees celcious and believe me, that is super-hot because if you go out just 2 minutes outside, you can already sweat like crazy.

I literally had to bring deodorants and spare shirts whenever I’m out for a meeting just because of this intense heat but I guess it is still bearable because India actually has worse heat stroke of over 50 degrees celcious and over a thousand people died due to that extreme heat.

So with the fasting month coming as well as the super heat wave getting hotter and hotter, not many people will come out of their house or building which means I’ll have some spare time to at least write more articles than I did last month.

I also have another website coming to life this month and it’s called Qlucase.

As you might have already known from the cool name, I’ll be selling phone covers which I have been thinking of doing for a while but never had the chance until I managed to collaborate with a local Celebrity called Altimet.

I only have one iphone case design as of now and I’m planning to create my Qlucase website as an eCommerce store so that I can showcase more of my other upcoming designs.

I’m planning to achieve this by manually creating the eCoomerce site through Woocommerce and since this is my first time using that plugin, I am having a very hard time trying to figure things out.

There are a lot of things to worry about – Tax rate, international shipping, policies, terms and conditions and many more!

It is much harder to run an eCommerce store compared to a blog such as this but hopefully I can achieve all of that within one month.

Here’s a quick look of me excited with a whole box of my covers…

I want to start my mobile phone case with a unique angle so the case isn’t just made of any other plastic material – It is actually made of enhanced epoxy.

It is a new design which is a rising trend in the USA as well as the UK and there are only a few companies actually selling these and they are charging them at very high rates somewhere from $40-$120.

My advantage is that there isn’t any companies doing this yet in Asia so hopefully I can be the first one to take advantage of this opportunity and grow my brand fast.

I also have this feeling that I’ll be getting more sales from western countries as well because even though my currency will be in the local Malaysian Ringgit (RM), our currency is really dropping low while countries like UK and USA have higher currency strength.

For example, $1 is around RM3.30 so if an American were to spend $40 in their country for the same case, they could buy even more from me because for the price of RM40 that I’m charging, it should be only $12 more or so!

Still, there are a lot of things to consider and I am more to a practical person rather than planning so we’ll see how it goes and I’m looking forward to updating my progress the next month!

 

Conclusion

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Previously, it took me almost a year to get my first $100 and now just in one month, I managed to get $99.50.

Though that’s very small amount, my blog is in fact a business so I need to put in more effort and spend more time here if I want it to grow even more.

There were many setbacks and mistakes I did which have hindered my progress but at least I learned how to overcome them and by sharing my pitfalls here, I hope many of you could avoid the same mistakes I did.

My website has officially been over a year old now and I’m seeing healthy growth even though I wrote very few posts and this can only show that I’m on the right track so I believe that some good perseverance will eventually pay off.

You guys are awesome for following me this far and I hope to share more good stuff with you the more I learn so until then, happy June 2015!