September 2015 Site Report

Every month, I’m going to do a round-up of what’s happened on the site, for you busy people who didn’t get time to read along.

Also, I want to hold myself accountable. I have a set post schedule, set goals and – seeing as I’m writing about being a professional writer – I want to put my money where my mouth is, and give you all real world figures. That’s what the monthly round-up is all about.

 September 2015 Site Report: Traffic Growth, Round-Up, Other Stuff.

You’ll have to bear with these for the first few months – as the site is building momentum. However, in our projects, the hard work is always done up front.

This month saw the site launch. I wanted to launch the site on September 1^st, but I had a lot of freelance work to do. That took priority, so I waited until I had a free spot before I launched the site officially. The site went live on the 20^th September.

I’d still written the posts, so they published automatically behind the password protected wall I had on the site.

Post Round-Up For The Month.

In this section, I’ll run down the list of posts that I’ve released.

Firstly, I released “Why SEO Doesn’t Matter For Writers.” This is a post about how writing skills more than make up for technical SEO knowledge.

Next up, I started the series, “Photography For Content Marketers.”  Part One described why you should get into photography and other multimedia production if you’re an internet writer.

Part Two talked about what you needed to do to get started with photography.

Part Three was on the subject of challenges you’ll face as a beginner photographer.

Part Four was about how to incorporate and make money from your photography as a writer, and concluded the series. (For now. Leave comments about anything I’ve missed!)

I then reviewed my camera, the Nikon D3200.

I then posted an article on how to get writing experience if you can’t find a writing job – again, with instant money making options.

Then, I finished up the month with an article; Bob Bly’s, “How To Write Simple Information For Fun And Profit” review.

Writing Figures.

We’ll get to how this site is doing soon enough, but I’m a writer first and foremost. Anyone who wants to be a writer should be judged on one metric: How much they write.

This month, I wrote a grand total of 93896 Words.

Of course, these are finished, publishable words. Most words that we write will get thrown into the scrap heap. For instance, this article will probably be less than a thousand words, and I’ll have scrapped double that before I hit publish.

Figures for this site.

Every month, we want to see our projects getting bigger and better.

When you have your own website, you can get a million different analytics programs, but there are a few key metrics that actually count:

Traffic.

Subscribers.

Income.

Each month, I’ll give you the figures for this site. As I said in my first post, “SEO Doesn’t Matter For Writers,” I’m not doing any inorganic link building, so it’ll be interesting to see how much traffic the site gets without any of that.

Subscribers are important. It’s one thing to get a million visitors, but if they never come back, you’re probably doing something wrong. If, on the other hand, you can create a set of loyal followers who red, like and share your information, then you’re doing something right. Good fortune is sure to follow!

Income is what most of you have come to this site seeking. Writers are a funny bunch – they have an incredibly useful and in-demand skill, yet many of them are slaving away and starving for their art. If you want to be a professional writer, at some point you’re going to have to make money. In this section, I’ll tell you how much money this site (and the projects below) made.

The news isn’t great this month. I didn’t launch the site until the 20^th – and so viewers are practically zero.

Still, it’s not all bad news. Among those initial visitors, I got several via search engine traffic. The site is mostly indexed, and trickles are appearing.

I even got some viewers from Facebook, which is bizarre. Social media isn’t a strength of mine. Yet.

Anyway, we’ll be able to see a lot more information next month.

Traffic: 72

Subscribers: 0

(This will include an email list when I start one, Facebook, Twitter and G+, as well as anything else that exists in the future. I’ll break the figures down when I get some!)

Income from JamieMcSloy.co.uk : 0

Projects

I routinely build side projects to teach myself new things, gain traffic and make money. Each case study will have its own posts where they are relevant, but just like with above, I’ll give a rundown of the stats monthly here.

That will start at during this month, where I’ll be going through how to build an authority website. Stay Tuned!