My InfoBarrel January 2014 Income Report

Note To Reader: This page features some affiliate/referral links.

Yeah, I think I’ going to be doing these income reports again. I used to do them a few years back and they were always a good way for me to keep moving forward and at the time everyone seemed to get a lot out of them so here goes nothing.

If you haven’t yet given it a look I first recommend reading my “Graceful Fall” post from a few weeks back. It sets the stage for this income report.

At my peak with InfoBarrel I made just over $1200 but after a ~80% slide in traffic (as outlined here) my earnings for December 2013 were just $160.82.

What About January 2014?

January 2014 saw my about face. I decided to clean up my act. I joined a few social networks that I had been avoiding (Pinterest, LinkedIn, and G+) and started brushing off my Twitter dust. Please feel free to network with me on any of those places - links are in my sidebar.

I also made my appearance again over on IB in the forums and started being up front about my current earnings and the state of my archives over there. I had well over 100 unindexed articles at the start of January and even more that were in really bad shape. Lots of them were crap.

I decided to start cleaning them up as you can see in the thread I started over on the IB forums here.

The goal here was multi-faceted. I wanted to get my “red” unindexed articles indexed again. Without indexation G would never serve them up in search and even if someone did find them they didn’t have any ads on them.

I also wanted to start addressing Panda problems on my lower quality articles. Even those articles that were not red (yellow) were still pretty bad in terms of keyword density, spelling, grammar, and outbound link profiles. The idea is to spruce them up so that the perceived quality (by an algorithm) is improved.

I’ve still got some work to do as I still have about 70 articles that are red and a bunch more yellow but I’m making progress. Eventually I'll tackle the yellow articles but first things first.

Pinterest

In addition to making the articles better and reindexing them I’m also adding pictures to each article – roughly 2-3 in most cases. The pictures get long tail SEO titles and some get paragraph descriptions too so that there is some indexable content on the page.

Sometime soonish I'll post something specific to using Pinterest with Infobarrel to maximize potential. You'll have to check back for that in the future.

In any event, once the pictures are up and the articles republished I then go into each picture page and pin it to a thematically similar board on my Pinterest account. I don’t have many Pinterest followers but I do know from experience in working with other sites that these pins do get found internally on Pinterest and ocassionaly from Google. The pins then get repined, likes, and even more importantly they do drive a bit of traffic back to the website they were pined from.

I've also started using PinWoot to start helping out a few new pins in getting their first repins. You can see my review of PinWoot here to see more about what it does and how it works.

Because media pages tend to convert extremely well I’ve decided to pin the media pages themselves rather than the articles the pictures are uploaded to. Also doing this allows me to pin each picture instead of just choosing one picture from an article to pin. More pins equals more potential traffic.

It will be interesting to see how much extra referral traffic this can drive to my IB pages but for now let’s just look at some stats.

In December my media pages had 283 unique page views compared to 479 in January. My earnings on the media pages were basically flat increasing from $24.31 in December to $24.80 in January but I imagine this will change as we are not comparing against the Christmas shopping season in the months going forward.

Referral traffic from Pinterest in December was 47 visits compared to 69 in January. This is a clear sign that adding pictures and pinning them is a good strategy for the long term. Articles are better with pictures and those pictures are traffic generators at the same time.

Amazon

In December I had 44 items ship for commission $48.59. With the shopping season ending January saw a decline to 7 items shipping for commission of $25.02.

As I started cleaning up articles in my IB library in January I found a number of broken links to Amazon that were coded years ago. I’ll be continuing to fix these links so I expect at least a few more clicks in the coming months.

Shareasale

One of my niche accounts I promote a Shareasale merchant. This isn't a Christmas seasonal item; it’s fairly steady throughout the year. I made $20 on this in December and $25 in January. No action was taken on this during the month. It’s simply on autopilot.

If you've never considered using Shareasale before you might want to at least think about it. Amazon isn't the only affiliate network on the block. One day I may put up some Shareasale guides but for now you can give them a look right here.

My Overall InfoBarrel Income

Overall on IB my earnings declined from December to January predominantly due to declining Amazon sales as Christmas came and went.

Amazon - $25.02
Shareasale - $25.00
IB Ad Program - $85.36
Personal Adsense - $3.87
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Total IB Income - $139.25 (down from $160.82 in Dec ’13)

Of course I don’t make anywhere close to the bulk of my income from InfoBarrel but I did make a lot every month previously. I’d like to see big numbers here again so I hope you’ll follow along with me. I’m not going to get everything right but I’ll get some of it right and I’ll share it all right here on the blog.

Want to try your hand at InfoBarrel? Join right here. But for the love; don't expect to make a ton out of the gate. Try your hardest to get a hundred articles up that are all at least 3 months old before you start expecting anything worth calling home to mom about.