November Income Report and Update – How to Geotarget Your Authority Website

An interesting fail to learn from and some very good news

In this post, I have some good news that shows I am currently on track to earning six figures again but also have to report what appears to be a pretty significant fail. However I think my current problem is not much more than a little discussed but clearly important feature of Google called geotargeting.

During the past month I revealed my Useful Niche Website and announced my intention to earn six figures again. Well, just last week I got some really awesome news – my affiliate partner emailed to tell me how much income the site produced for the prior month and it shows the website WELL AHEAD of schedule. As you will see from the numbers and my explanations below it looks like I am well on my way to achieving my goals with no link building and very little thought about keywords, optimization or SEO so far. I have however been giving a lot of focus to being useful and building a website that does that.

This could not have come at a better time because the past couple of weeks I have been trying to understand a sharp drop in organic Google search traffic. Now that I do understand this drop, it highlights the potential benefits and pitfalls of geotargeting.

First, what looks initially looks like bad news:

My website RSACoursesOnline.com seems to have basically disappeared from organic search engines, which coincidentally was the day after I announced it here on Cubicle Free (November 9). When I saw this, I have to admit I was a little confused. In the scheme of things however I now realize that this is a pretty insignificant setback and it actually offers great insight into a little known feature of Google called geotargeting.

As you may know already, I am basically building traffic to RSA Courses Online without link building. I have decided that this may be a slower way to build traffic and revenue but it I think it also makes the most sense from a safety and longevity point of view. I know all to well what happens if Google decides to give you a penalty, so for now at least I will not be doing anything that could be counter productive and will focus instead on getting traffic through natural methods like I outlined in my last post about Ninja Marketing. This is not to say link building does not work, it certainly can but it is not my choice.

Geo-targeting

Something many people may not be aware of is geotargeting. If you are building a website where you want to target a certain Country or Nationality this can be very important. For example, let’s say you were only targeting American residents – a .com website tells Google potentially that you are interested in attracting the whole world. This may mean that 90% of visitors to your site soon leave after arriving. In Google’s efforts to show only the most relevant search results, this sends a negative signal to Google that your site is of low value which means you will either lose rankings because of a high bounce rate, or simply that you fail to attract the right people to engage them and make money.

Little known geotargeting can be the difference between success and failure.

Google tries to help with this automatically but they can get it wrong especially if you inadvertently send the wrong signals so they give you the option to geotarget yourself.

How Geotargeting works when on autopilot: Google attempts to determine your websites target visitor based on a number of factors such as:

Country-coded top-level domains (such as .ca or .co.uk) but if you have an international domain such as a .com google looks for other indicators which Google says, “including IP address, location information on the page, links to the page, and any relevant information from Google Places.”

In my case, I am in Canada so somehow Google decided that my website must be for Canadians for a while at least. Here is a plot of organic search traffic with Canada and Australia separated out from the total number of visits.

As you can see the addition of the orange line (Aus) and the green line (Can) makes up almost all of my traffic. Google initially thought it should focus on traffic in Canada because I am in Canada (probably due to my IP address). Since then it has realized that the site is actually not meant for Canada based other indicators within the site. Longer term this is probably good news for the site because my niche is mostly in Australia, but I will be checking and ensuring that Google is sending traffic from Australia in the future.

Here is a link to how you can change your geotarget manually through webmaster tools if you find a geographical problem or want to maximize your income. It is important to note that while Google took away my traffic from Canada it did not add traffic to Australia. SO WHY DO IT? Engagement is a key here. Google rewards websites where people stick around and engage with your website.

So here is what you are waiting for – my earnings for November 2012!

Workgateways.com
This Months Income = $ 3530.86     
Last Months Income = $3417
Difference = +113.86

Jobaroo.com
This Month Income = $  738   
Last Month Income = $459 (includes $270 of non-recurring affiliate income)
Difference = +$279

RSACoursesOnline.com
This Month Affiliate Income = $80
 Last month = $10
Difference + $70

Grand Total Income = $4344.86 Last Month = $3856

Difference +$488.86

The really exciting number here is the $80 earned from RSA Courses Online!

Lets put this in perspective – The site is basically brand new and is my first attempt at building a website from scratch. Although $80 is a relatively small amount it shows that I am well on my way to earn the $300/month target I initially set for this website.

$300/month translates to $72/hour for the number of hours work I expect to put into the site and represents a step towards making six figures again.

Icing on the cake

During the month I was also approached by another affiliate who offered to double the commission I am currently earning. If I had been using this affiliate instead of my current partner I would have earned $160. That is more the half of the goal I am trying to achieve in one year.

It is true that next few months may be a step back due to the geotargeting I discussed, but I have shown that the site can convert when it does get even rather menial traffic. Now I feel very confident about the $300/month target and more importantly excited by this project because this means that anyone else can build a website from scratch and create income that puts them on track to earning six figures too.

In the interest of full disclosure, these figures are correct to the best of my knowledge at the time of writing. They do sometimes get adjusted with refunds or extras that I do not know about until later.  These are also income figures and so not include expenses (which are minimal) but I plan to include these in future posts so you get a full picture. Right now however my goal is to give you a clear picture of my income with a focus on the authority site as a case study.

Other awesome authority niche websites

During the month I came across a collection of awesome authority websites from Sunil’s Extra Money Blog. Sunil is building his own authority website too which in itself is a great case study.

It is terrific to see guys like Jon Haver from Authority Website Income who in three months has built a site that last month generated $240.20. Jon modestly talks about just becoming profitable, but I expect that his expenses will become insignificant rather soon.

Eric from My 4 Hour Work Week is also building a great site in what I believe to be a very targeted and profitable niche. Jon has 25 subscribers to his niche site already and I can see how people will happily pay for an information product from his niche.

Mike from The Financial Blogger also has an authority site which is set to do well. I have been following Mike for a while and he has experience on his side. Mike works four days a week in the financial industry and part-time at his online business and makes well over six figures, so it sure is great to see how he builds profitable authority websites.

Thank You for reading

If you like this post and want to get my latest insights into building real businesses that generate passive income from websites I have been sending out updates every fortnight through my newsletter. You can join at the top of this page on the right.

Your say

What do you think about geotargeting? How do you think I am going with achieving my goal of making six figures? Do you have any other ideas of how to go about building traffic?

Image courtesy of Charisma / FreeDigitalPhotos.net