Update June 2012: Website grows!

June 2012 is nearly over and the Vintage Speaker Review Website grew bigger than expected. Instead of investing time in many posts, I spent a few evenings improving layout and format of my posts. Also, in the upper left corner you will now find a few options for social networking and sharing.

Visitors
Personally, I was most impressed by the increase of visitors, which happened despite me only posting a few new articles. Reason for this could be that my reviews received new backlinks from Craigslist, trading forums and several audio forums in Vietnam, France, Russia and the US.
Reviewing my post from the beginning of June, I set the goal to attract 4500 visitors in June. Now, on June 29th, vintage-speaker-review.com did just hit 5000 visitors for June, which is way more than I expected.

Click it, if picture is too small!

Google Ads
As mentioned in my short update from Yesterday, I did receive my first check from Google and am again heads-on with my closest competitor from Switzerland, as we did both passed 300 $/CHF. I am glad to see that changing, testing and optimizing banner locations really makes a difference and that my adsense revenue is slowly growing. The overall frequency of clicks increased by about 0.2% to about 1%, which is probably ok for a website that does not offer or advertise a clear product that is offered at google ads. With the increase in traffic, the clickrate did finally show some upwards trend. The picture below shows also the frequency of ad clicks before the website went online (Jan/Feb. 2012) and the increase starting during the middle of February.

Rate of clicks on Ads

Goals for July:
July will become a busy month as I have to find a job, probably in one of the big cities at the US East Cost. I´d be glad, if traffic increases to 5500 visitors and if I can post another 6 articles.
As I mentioned before, I tried to improve my website layout, its content and more. I´d appreciate, if you could have a look at it (click). If you have any feedback or suggestions, I´d be happy to read them! Post them as a comment or here (PS.de forum).

Thanks for reading, see you all in July :)

Google adsense works!

Income: 336.02 $ 

About one year ago, I posted the first google adsense banner on this blog and it took a long time to reach the minimum cashout requirement. With my vintage speaker website, I have now a more stable click rate and finally cashed out $105,67.

My June update will comes soon, but I´d like to post it now, as it brings me ahead of the Swiss competitor...at least for a few days ;)

How to build a bog part 4: 1st organic link building

Another month has passed and my vintage speaker review blog is still doing fine. The goals for May had been to write 15 reviews and get at least 3000 visits (up from 2300 in April).

However, I did not achieve to write that many reviews. I managed to post 6 reviews, 2 of which are now the begin of a special category in which I restore an old set of speakers.  Despite the low number of posts, I managed to increase my visit number to 3742 for May! 
And even better, not only that the blog gets most visitors from search engines, but several people linked to my reviews from audio forums, craigslist and ebay. I feel that in particular  linkbuilding will play a huge roll for high ranking of my blog in the future and will therefore actively increase link building.

A big step regarding the original challenge is also coming up: I reached google´s minimum withdrawal limit this month! It will be deposited on my bank account on July 1st, so there is still some time to wait.



Below, the monthly graph to show the increase of traffic on my blog:

Click Me!

Goals for June:
1. For June, it is my plan to post 8 reviews, which I still have on my posting list. It becomes more and more difficult to find vintage speakers that qualitfy for a post. On the one hand the speaker needs to be searched for frequently enough. Second, it needs to be a decent amount of information available to write about it, but at the same time not sufficient information on one single webpage.

2. Hitting 4500 visits!  This will be tough, in particular as this means there has to come additional traffic from somewhere "new". Links from Craigslist and 2 audio forums brought approx. 350 visits in May, I hope to be able to do some SEO to increase that.

See you in July!