The $100,000 Challenge: February Update

Hey, everyone! We just wrapped up our 11^th month of the $100,000 challenge for NutritionSecrets.com. As predicted, it was a down month.

Traffic was up overall, but because we were running short on fish oil inventory, revenue wasn’t as high as it was in the previous month.

For the month of February, traffic grew to 200,709 visits and 251,834 pageviews. That’s not too shabby, considering we had 159,945 visits in January, which had two more days.

As for income, revenue went down to $54,285.30… So, let’s dive right into the numbers…

Traffic

Shockingly, traffic was up significantly. It mainly came from search, but I never expected it to grow as January is an extremely popular month in the health and fitness space and February isn’t. As March rolled around, we noticed that the traffic growth started to slow down, but I’ll get into that in the next month’s update.

Mike posted about a post a day, which helped February’s traffic. As you can see from the screenshot below, there is a healthy mix in traffic. Google is our biggest driver of traffic, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise since it is for most blogs. The direct traffic includes email, and social media is starting to pick up.

If you are wondering how you can replicate similar results, you need to do two things:

1. Write content using these guidelines.
2. Use the templates in this post to find and build links. Make sure you use the “basic link request, PR pitch, and funny link request” templates. Although I wrote that post years ago, those tactics still work, and they are what Mike uses to generate links.

As you are building links, focus on getting them to all your internal pages. Don’t focus on anchor text; focus on relevancy and quantity. Over time, your rankings will naturally go up.

You saw it with the NutritionSecrets.com challenge, and you will see it with your own website: you build links, and your traffic doesn’t go up. But if you wait 3 to 6 months, you’ll see it all kick in, assuming your content is high in quality and people want to continually read your blog.

Revenue

In February, we generated $54,285.30 in revenue, which is less than January’s revenue of $76,326.90. The main reason…we ran out of fish oil. I estimate that our income would have been closer to $98,000 if we had enough inventory. But we should be good for the month of March in achieving our $100,000 goal.

In the meantime, to supplement the revenue, we tested out being an affiliate for Organifi. We signed up through Clickbank and tested to see whether we could generate some extra money.

After a few days, we turned it off as it didn’t generate any sales. The main reason I think it didn’t work was because of the email copy they provided.

It’s a great product that I have tried in the past, which is why I didn’t mind testing it out from an affiliate perspective, but I should have known that their email copy wasn’t maximized for conversions.

Companies that offer affiliate programs typically have incentives. If you are the best affiliate for a certain time period, you get bonuses like a free car…and yes, I meant to say free car. I’ve seen people like Russell from Clickfunnels give away a Ferrari.

Organifi didn’t have large prizes to give away to affiliates, which usually means they aren’t as large as some of the other companies. And if they aren’t that large, the main reason behind that is because the offer usually doesn’t convert as well as other companies’.

Again, they have a great product, so instead of using their copy, we should have written our own copy to promote their product.

Inventory

I’ve been getting a ton of questions over the last few months about how to find someone to help produce tangible products. Most of them require minimum orders and money upfront, but it is all a negotiation game.

The person we use is Austin Song, who has facilities in Cleveland, Ohio (or somewhere around Cleveland)… He has staff and had extra hours that weren’t being used in his warehouse, so he was more flexible on the deal terms as he was paying employees when they didn’t have anything to produce.

The way I found Austin was purely by spending days Googling for people who can manufacture products. Austin is busy these days and won’t do the same deal again (or else you would have seen 4 or 5 more products from NutritionSecrets.com).

Expenses

We didn’t make much profit in February because we had to produce more fish oil.

Here is the breakdown of the expenses:

• Fish oil – $53,204.44 (including Amazon fees, shipping to Amazon for Prime, coupon-related expenses, and producing more inventory)
• Aweber – $69
• Designer – $250 (continually tweaking the homepage)
• Hosting – $249
• Mike – free (Mike doesn’t get paid, but he owns a percentage of the blog)
• Accounting – $210 (we are now paying a bookkeeper to help out with the books)

Overall, we turned a profit of $302.86. It’s not a great number, but that’s what happens when you have to dump a lot of cash into producing more product.

Conclusion

Overall, the month wasn’t too bad, considering we ran out of inventory. March should be an interesting month. From a revenue perspective, it shouldn’t be hard to hit $100,000 because we are also working on utilizing other channels to generate income.

Next, I should have a detailed update with new revenue channels (hopefully, they work) and what we learned.

How do you think the challenge is working out so far?

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