The $100,000 Challenge: January Update

We just wrapped up our 10th month of the $100,000 a month challenge at NutritionSecrets.com, and it was a great month.

In January, traffic grew to 159,945 visitors--139,417 of which were unique. Those visitors generated a total of 195,665 pageviews and purchased $76,326.90 worth of fish oil supplements.

Although the numbers for January were great, I expect February to be slower because we ran out of inventory, which I'll talk about in the next update.

So, let's dive into the January numbers.

January's traffic

As you can see from the screenshot above, traffic grew greatly in January. It was partly because of the season--everyone is trying to set health and weight goals in January--and partly because the rankings are just starting to climb.

SEO is a long-term game, and when you write great content and build links, you don't always see results immediately. But when you wait patiently for 3 to 6 months, you start seeing the fruits of your labor.

Compared to December, which had a visitor count of 69,813, January saw a 129% increase in overall traffic.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the majority of the traffic growth came from search engines: 117,070 visitors came from Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The majority of those visitors came from Google.

I am new to the nutrition space, so I don't know whether the traffic will die down in a few weeks, but I hope it keeps going up.

Content production

Because Mike knew that January was going to be a hot month, he prepared in advance. He wrote more content so that blog post production could go back to seven posts a week. But because Mike needed to produce so much content, the topics he wrote on were basic.

The increase in content production hasn't been helping much with social traffic, but it has been helping with search engine traffic. Over the next few months, I'll have Mike continually push out seven pieces of content a week as it will help us hit the revenue goal of $100,000.

Revenue

As you may already know, numbers can be deceiving. Although we are getting closer to the $100,000 revenue mark, more revenue doesn't necessarily mean more profit.

As you can see in the screenshot above, revenue hit $76,326.90. We tested a few different price points, changing the price of our product by a few dollars up or down to see whether we could generate more sales, but we didn't see a big difference.

Now, of course, if we dropped the price by $10.00, I do believe that the sales numbers would go up drastically, but that would eat away at our profit margin.

Here is the breakdown of the expenses for the month:

• Fish oil - $56,401.91 (including Amazon fees, shipping to Amazon for Prime and any coupon-related expenses)


• Aweber - $69


• Designer - $750 (made changes to the website, including linking to the product)


• Hosting - $249


• Mike - free (Mike doesn't get paid, but he owns a percentage of the blog)


• Ads - $9,481.29 (We've been testing ads, and in the following updates, I will show you the screenshots and share the lessons we learned from running the ads. Overall, they haven't been performing too well from a profit margin standpoint.)


• Accounting - $185 (we are now paying a bookkeeper to help out with the books)


• Lawyer fees - $2,000 (this is to get rid of people selling our product with our label on Amazon. We are sending them seize and desist orders.)

That brings the total of the expenses to $69,136.20. That means our profit was $7,190.70.

Conclusion

The big focus right now is on adjusting the listing copy on Amazon. If we adjust the text, it should help a lot with sales, but it's hard because other people on Amazon are selling our product.

Once we get rid of all the other products, Amazon should update the text. I don't know why it works this way, but it just does...

Escalating the promotion of the product on NutritionSecrets.com should help as well. We have already been doing a better job of this in January, and we will continue to push forward with the same strategy in February.

What do you think of the progress so far? I've been happy with the revenue growth, but I need to focus on improving profit margins.