Money and Mind

My experiment to see if my site can survive on free traffic alone, continues. It’s been three days now since I switched off the adwords campaign. The initial drop was much greater than I expected. Having analysed my stats through Google Analytics I had estimated that about half of my traffic was coming from sources other than pay per click but I was wrong.

As it turned out, my traffic has fallen by about 90%, which was such a shock that I almost turned Adwords back on again. However, I decided to hold my nerve and interestingly, it looks
like my signups have only fallen by about 50%, which proves the theory that organic and/or article traffic is much better quality than paid for.

After the initial sickening drop, daily traffic has held steady, so I’m going to stick with this for a while longer and hopefully shortly I’ll begin to see it slowly rising as more articles gain wider distribution.

My Alexa ranking also continues to rise. Well it falls really but the lower the number the better. It is now at 1,074,136  It may fall through the one million mark soon which will be an excuse to crack open a bottle of mineral water (well, it’s a pretty small milestone). However,
there is a big BUT here as it’s based on one week and 3 month averages - so the traffic drop won’t have been reflected yet and I expect it to start to move out again in the next couple of weeks.

This is my Mission Statement. I declare it here, so that it is not just something that I mumble to myself and therefore don’t have to back up or achieve in anyone else’s eyes. I want to look back in exactly six months time and see how far I have come.

I will create a web based business which generate a revenue of $10,000 per month.

It will be based around Money and Mind my existing site, but will have additional content and sites added on, to build multiple income streams.

I will complete and market my first e-book.

My sites will be based around the two main areas of my interests: self development and small business marketing.

I will derive the majority of my sales from zero cost traffic building methods, particularly blogging, article marketing and viral traffic.

I will be able to support myself and my family from my web marketing efforts alone.

This is my mission.

Signed Andrew Grant – July 23rd 2007.

My Alexa ranking has now jumped from 2 million and something to just over 1.1 million, in a few days.  This is due to the averaging over three months that Alexa applies, I know, but it’s really great to see progress in return for effort. I have now also taken the decision to turn off my paid advertising for a while and rely solely on organic and referral traffic, so that I can track the effect of the activities that cost me nothing.  Just before I turned it off, I was getting about 60% of my visitors from Google Adwords and the rest from articles, stray searches and e-mail links. 

So of course, the immediate effect is that my daily traffic is down by 60%, which feels a bit like somebody cut off most of my oxygen, but I am challenging myself to get the daily stats back up to the pre cut off level in one month’s time. My aim is to deliver something every single day, including the days when I’m away on holiday for a week.  Deliverables including submitting an article per day to the major sites and a blog post every day at least, as well as any activity that creates additional links 

By the way, if you haven’t checked out the new Special Content sections on my site covering Goal Setting and Positive Thinking, then do so now.  (That was a sneaky way to get more traffic by the way). I’m also going to publish a mission statement – which you are welcome to read – in fact it will be my next post.  I figure if I put it out there, then I have to work harder to live up to it.

What a very interesting day it has been. I have been concentrating on learning about how to drive traffic from Hub Pages and Squidoo.com.

I’ve been reading about using the latest websites to help you build a viral loop.

Check out my efforts at my new Hub Page and my Squidoo Lens to see what I’m talking about - I’ll let you know how much traffic this begins to generate over the next few weeks.

By the way, what do you all think of the new header graphic on the website?

The front page revamp continues. I have now completed and loaded up the new e-course  7 Easy Ways to Have A Great Day.  It is available to anyone who subscribes to the newsletter and it is completely free.

Phase 2 of the redesign is also complete, now that I have uploaded the new header design. I’ve gone for visually stating the obvious by including a graphic of a stack of dollar bills and a brain on the right hand side; Money and Mind, see?

Simple, but effective.   I like it anyway.

The Adsense revenue continues to rush in! Well, OK, trickle then. It’s up to $1.90 now and as I said in an earlier post - that’s at zero cost to me.  As the traffic builds, so too will the money I’m assuming.

I’m off now to study some more on increasing blog links.

I’m excited to find that my site Money-and-Mind has finally registered on Alexa and I now have a traffic rank for the first time! OK, OK I’m only ranked at number 2,245,649 but there are plenty of other sites out there with lower traffic than that and, hey, Money-and-Mind has only been online since June 21st - so Im pretty pleased with myself.

Phase 1 of the front page revamp is almost complete and I’ll be rolling out my new sign-up bonus later today. It’s a 7 part e-course that I’m really pleased with, called ” 7 Easy Ways to Have A Great Day”

I’ll be posting again later when it goes live.

Hi Friends,

I have lots to write about today, but I’ll save some for other posts.

 I have decided to revamp my homepage because I believe that I could be getting a higher conversion rate.  I’m happy with the way my traffic is building, but I’m sure that more visitors would sign up for the newsletter, if I make a few changes.  At the moment, my average conversion rate in the last month has been around 8%, which considering that I’m giving something away for free is pretty low! I reckon I can do way better.

The first change is going to be a new Sign-up bonus.  I’m in the middle of writing a new e-book called, Have a Great Day and it’s all about how to ensure that each and every day is better than the last.  As soon as it’s done I’ll let you know and even if you’re already a subscriber, I’ll make sure you get a copy.

Keep smiling. Andrew

Although I’ve been dabbling in the web for quite a while now, I have so far steered clear of Adsense as a means of making money, but recently I put up some pages as an experiment just to see whether I could generate a few clicks and see how the whole thing worked.

That was a few days ago and to be honest, I had forgotten about them and it was only when I was editing something else that I remembered them.

So I was pleased to find when I logged into my Adsense account that I had actually earned my first money from some Adsense clickthroughs. Now I’ll be honest, it’s less than a dollar and equates to only around 10 cents a click, but the really exciting thing to me is that it cost me nothing apart from time. I built the pages for free using a little of my own existing contant and a few articles from other authors (all fully accredited) and then I linked the pages into my existing domain and just left them waiting for Google to spider them. You’ll find the pages here.

Now I have a click-through rate of 3.5% and a tiny bit of money in the bank. So what will I do next?  Learn how to really make them sing!

To do that I’ve just downloaded and I’m working through Joel Comm’s brilliant guide to Adsense Google AdSense Secrets 3.0 ebook

I’ll keep you posted here as things progress.

To our success - Andrew

I got an e-mail this morning from a guy called Jon Davies. I had never heard of him before today, but this man is a genius of viral marketing and he has made me some money already!

It was a well written e-mail offering me a free e-book.  Nothing particularly different about that, I hear you say - yes you’re right but there was something about the message that intrigued me enough to want to follow the link.

 You can always tell when a marketing message is well written when it twangs your curiosity cord and a little voice says “Hmm, I wonder what that’s about”. 

You should make a mental note to yourself to always try and waken that voice in your prospect’s heads.

Anyway, the link took me to a simple but very effective site where I could download the e-book.  The sales copy was equally well written and by this time my Curiosity cord was twanging like crazy.

I jumped.  I downloaded the e-book and did exactly what it said.  Less than one hour later, I had made a sale and since then I’ve made a bunch more.

You have to check this out!  Click Here

The guy has done it so cleverly and it’s so easy to get involved even if you don’t have a website, a product, an affiliate account or anything - you could be making sales tonight.

Try it!! Click here  and you’ll see what I mean