July’s brought about my most successful month with i-grow.net in terms of web traffic, revenue, and site ranking.  A full detail of the advancements are provided in the text to follow. 

My personal focus over the last couple of months has been developing an e-book which is coming along nicely.  At this point I’ve got seven easy to read chapters completed, which is approximately 30 pages in a typical book.  A personal goal of mine is to keep the fluff out of the book such that it packs in the value without a reader having to waddle through hundreds of pages of fluff.  Its direct, to the point, and packed with great coaching.  I expect to complete the first draft of the book in the month of August, then in September I will work on the logistics of getting it posted to the website for people to download.  With this, I expect to make several infrastructure changes to my site, but at the moment I am taking it one step at a time.

Given this focus, I’ve spent little time over the past month updating the physical website itself.  I have added a handful of new articles, but have not changed the infrastructure of the site. 

I’ve done plenty of research on e-book delivery and will share that information with you after I decide the route to go, so for now this is a relatively brief update. 

Summary of Website Additions (and Changes)

Performance Update

I continue to monitor performance personally and I am quite certain there are some challenges with database connectivity.  After the completion of the e-book and through the remainder of the year this will be a focus of mine.  

Website Additions/Changes

• None this month

Ongoing Additions

• Added 7 new articles to the site
• Delivered one newsletter
• Added one new podcast on my personal belief submission for This I Believe.

Other Activity & Development

• Registered and posted two articles (Why to Hire a Wellness Coach and The Who, What, When, Where and How’s of Wellness Coaching) to four article submission directories (EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, SelfGrowth.com and blogcarnival.com)
• Completed three more chapters of e-book (Draft form)

Details of Activity

1. Registered with new Article Submission Directories - The only change here was that I’ve found that SelfGrowth.com does a good job of allowing you to add URL’s to articles submitted.  I find their interface to be poor as it is difficult to track what you’ve submitted - as an article submitter you’ve got no record of what went through and what didn’t.  Regardless I am going to keep using this directory even though its a bit transparent as to whether or not the articles are being published. 

2. Completed three more chapters of e-book - This again is very exciting to me.  Its where my effort is focused.  The writing in coming very smoothly and the chapters are unique in the approach towards stress management.  I am very excited to make this a free addition to the website.

Learnings & Observations

I continue to learn and build, and the slow monetary growth is truly a testament to the importance of a plan to grow revenues as well as content.  My experience to date is that growing a blog business takes patience, time, a strong technology background and it must most importantly provide value to the world. 

With relatively few changes over the past month, I am very pleased with the continued growth - over 1000 visitors have come to i-grow.net now, and over the past month nearly 300 unique visitors have graced its pages.  This is a huge accomplishment considering it was 7 in January :O). 

Here are detailed results from July:

Traffic and Monetary Results

According to Google Analytics, here is my unique visitor results for the past 3 months.

May- Unique Visitors

June - Unique Visitors

July - Unique Visitors

July represents a significant jump in traffic, averaging about 10 unique visitors per day.  My previous best was 201 in April. 

May- Ad Revenue

June - Ad Revenue

July - Ad Revenue

The ad-revenue is promising.  Again, its my highest rate of page impressions, one more click than in any previous month and certainly it seems to be pressy consistent click rates at about 1.3%.  In the future I’ll see if I can redesign the site such as to make the advertisements more appealing. 

May- Alexa Ranking

June - Alexa Ranking

July - Alexa Ranking

The Alexa ranking continues to improve and I am excited about this.  I’ve broken into the top million in popularity for my 3 months rolling average!  Alexa begins tracking more detailed traffic when you get into the top 100,000, so this is my goal for 2009.  Regardless, I am very pleased with moving up another 450,000 slots and I expect that moving up several hundred thousand more will be attainable without a major site redesign. 

Plan for the Future (Moving Forward)

Here is my plan for the month of August:

Monthly Goals

• Complete draft of e-book
• Submit 2 articles to 3 article directories
• To attain a total of 15 reciprocal links on my links page (repeat from last time)
• To earn $14 in Google Adsense revenues for the month of June (again, carry over from July!) - Looking to double June’s revenue of approximately $7

Long Term Goals

• Continue writing at a pace of 6 articles per month (2008 goal of 100 articles)
• Continue developing 1/2 podcast per month (2008 goal of 7 podcasts)
• Continue writing one newsletter per month
• Create a more user friendly archives page - filterable by category
• develop a free e-book to give out to people as an incentive for subscribing to my newsletter
• Deliver audio version of free e-book
• Redesign home page and ancillary pages
• Improve performance of database queries to pull up blog information
• Optimize website to improve click through rate

Looking forward to providing another update in September!

"If you’ve found this site useful, please link to it so that others can benefit!"

Be Well

Related Articles:

• Growing a Blog Business - June 6, 2008
• Growing a Blog Business - May 4, 2008
• Growing a Blog Business - April 1, 2008
• Growing a Blog Business - Feb 18, 2008

Written by Doug Nau, The Wellness Coach, i-grow.net