Update July to November 2012

Income: 456.92 $ 

What is Vintage-speaker-Review.com doing?
It has been a while since I updated this blog, but every now and then I feel that I should write an update regarding the $1000 challenge. 
The vintage speaker review website is still up and running. I was unable to create new reviews for a couple of weeks in August and September, which led to a decline of visitors from 7500 in August to around 6000 in September. As I did not find any interesting old speakers, I spontaneously translated my English articles into German and restored the google ranking of the website. The goal for November is to beat the website´s visitor record, 7492 (July 2012).

What is the Challenge doing?
The most recent Google Adsense payment has arrived in October, being 110,90$ and another $10 from the amazon associated program.  I won´t be able to beat my swiss competitor, but that does not matter anymore. I guess we both are happy about the little extra income we get every now and then :).

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 :)