Wow, I’m having trouble accepting the fact that TheAtHomeCouple.com is already 1 month old – and what a productive month we’ve had! If you remember back when I posted our goals at the beginning of August, we had 5 main objectives which were fairly attainable. Our top 3 was to post everyday, increase our presence online via social media, and to connect with like-minded bloggers by actively commenting. Mission accomplished.
We actively created profiles and have begun participating on all the major social networking and social bookmarking sites as you can see in the newly added “Connect With Us” section in the sidebar. I also spent the month rabidly commenting on some of my favorite blogs, and discovered some sparkly gems along the way – which is always nice. Somehow I managed to convince Alan from AffiliateConfession.com to grace us with an off-beat interview and he gladly accepted, which was awesome, and I pretty much posted everyday minus 3 or 4 times that I needed to disconnect and let the laptop cool down. As Borat would say, “Great Success!”
If you’re reading this post expecting to see an income report of some kind, it’s not happening just yet and here’s why: a) We have been focused on building the foundation – which is the content and the community, and b) I hate seeing 2 month old blogs that are full of ads and top 10 lists. If you think no one will notice that you’re rewriting content from authority blogs, or polluting your site with 125×125 ad blocks in an attempt to attract buyers for your ad space, think again. It’s blog suicide and unless you’re already established and have social proof of your status online do not pretend to be something you’re not – because you’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Be yourself and you’ll do just fine!
Even though I’m not going to let you know about the $7.85 we made from Adsense, I do have some screen shots I’d like to share with you guys and gals relating to our traffic, subscribers and search engine presence from our Hostgator cPanel admin. As you can see below from our AWStats report we had 1370 unique visitors between 08/01 and 08/31, with 16,855 page views and an average of 5.79 pages per visit.
On a per day basis, shown below, our lowest was on 08/03 with 8 unique visitors, and our busiest day was on 08/08 with 324 unique visitors – which was when I did the first post discussing SocialMarker.com and how to use it for efficiently submitting your posts to social bookmarking sites. Our overall average bounced between 75-100 visits per day, sometimes higher and rarely lower, which could only mean one thing – you guys rock!
In regards to subscribers, as of Saturday we have 25 wonderful people who have locked in with their favorite RSS feed reader to keep up to date with our Internet marketing adventures. I’m still not 100% sure on how to read the statistics provided within the Feedburner dashboard, but as you can see below it says “25 readers” so that’s what I’m sticking with!
For those of you who don’t know, I’m really big on keyword research, backlinks and getting organic traffic from the search engines using Wordtracker, to find kick-ass key phrases for post titles and content. Out of curiosity I opened up Google and typed in “the at home couple” and was pleasantly surprised with the results I received. There are approximately 833 listings for this term, and tons of them are links coming from other blogs as well as social media services that we belong to.
I think that’s enough screen shots for now. I’ve absorbed quite a bit of information in the last 8 months, and even though it’s easy to get overwhelmed it’s becoming apparent that I might actually know what the heck I’m doing – which is comforting. I can remember a point in time when Veronica actually thought I was loosing my marbles with this “Internet” stuff and she would just sit and nod when I’d start rambling about affiliate marketing this, and click through ratio that… Poor girl!
We just want to say how awesome each and everyone of you are. We’ve hit some sort of nerve within the blogosphere and it’s comforting to know that there are other people just like us who lay in bed each night dreaming of working from home or traveling to distant places without breaking the bank. It does seem far fetched until you actually go out and do it, and with the power of the Internet at our fingertips there is no reason why a twenty-something couple or stay at home mom can’t improve their situation and bring freedom and excitement into their life. It really is a beautiful thing.
Cheers,
Elijah