For the last couple of days there has been a spike in traffic.  Retribution has come at last.  Finally the recognition I deserve.  After almost 9 months of work and waiting, after over 400 hours at the keyboard, the website is taking off.

That was my initial reaction after seeing the sudden increase in traffic.  But after some digging around in the website stats I discovered that it was not my hard work paying off – it was somebody else’s.

Clue 1 – Referral Websites That Do Not Link Back To This Website

The first thing I checked after seeing the spike in traffic was who it was coming from.  Who is sending me all the traffic.  Is it Google, is it a guest post I did, was this website featured on some blog, was this website submitted on a social network like reddit.com? 

I quickly discovered that it was none of these.  Using awstats I noticed that the top three websites sending this website traffic are website’s that I have never heard of before.  I checked them out and discovered three things:

1. They had nothing to do with my niche (make money online)
2. They were not in English (mostly Russian)
3. They did not have a backlink to this website

Number 1 and 2 are strange.  But 3 just does not make sense.  How are these website sending me traffic without having a link to this website?  Something is not right.

On seeing this the initial smile on my face slowly flattened out. 

Clue 2 – Traffic was not increasing in Google Analytic

Every morning I check the website traffic via two sources: awstats and Google Analytics.  Awstats is a server side analytic tracker.  Every time a request is made of the server then awstats make a note of it.  It could be a human viewing a webpage, or a search engine spider indexing the site, or a hacker trying to gain access.  Server side means that every request the server is asked to do gets recorded.  It is the most detailed and accurate measure of your website’s activity.

Google Analytic on the other hand is a client side analytic tracker.  It is a small java script sitting on every webpage that gets activated only when a browser views the webpage.  Client side analytics is a good measure of how many people are viewing the webpage – every time a browser reads the webpage the Google Analytic script is activated and the page view is recorded.

There is a major drawback to client side analytic tracker: the visitor must permit the running of java script in their browser.  If the visitors browser has java script disabled then the Google Analytic script cannot run and the visitor is not recorded.  For this reason the server side analytic traffic stats will always be higher then the Google Analytic stats.  That is why every morning I check both.  Usually they report the same number of visitor but sometimes Google Analytic is a little lower.

But with the recent traffic spike the numbers being reported where completely different.  Awstats was reporting 218 visitors while Google Analytic was reporting only 54.  Why the large discrepancy? 

The edges of my mouth became heavy and I could no longer hold them up.

Clue 3 – Pages That I Did Not Create Had The Most Amount Of Page Views

Again looking at the awstats I noticed that there where some strange looking pages that where quickly rising in the number of page views.  The odd thing is that they where pages that I did not create.  Pages like:

• howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com/SpryAssets/_vti_logs/CitiBank/CitiBank/citibankupdate/images/newimages/secure/bankofamerica/signon.php
• howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com/library/_notes/www.bankofamericaonline.com/www.bankofamerica.com/Onlinesecuritydepartment/bofa-update/session.cgi/cgi-bin2/Signin.Do/

CitiBank?  Bank of America?  What the hell is going on?  What are banking pages doing on my webpages?  I clicked on the links and here is what came up:

Request for banking information.  This is not good.

On seeing this my face was completely deformed.  Eyebrows pointing downwards and wrinkles on my forehead.

This Website Was Making Money By Collecting Banking Information

My website had been hacked.  A not so nice person uploaded and ran a script on my webspace.  This website was sending out requests to people asking them to update their banking information.  Those that dutifully complied sent their banking information to the not so nice person.

Based on the stats the request to update banking information was viewed around 500 times.  Unfortunately there is no way for me to tell how many people actually filled out the form.  Or how much money was stolen from those that did.  But to those that did fill it out, and had money stolen, I apologize for the small part this website played.

The funny thing  is that thanks to my low traffic numbers I was able to catch the problem quickly.  Only because my traffic doubled from the usual 70 visitors a day to over 150 visitors a day I able to notice the hack.  If this website was more successful and had 1000′s of visitors a day then it would of taken a lot longer (if ever) for me to notice.  An extra 50 visitors a day would a been a small unnoticed blimp on the radar.

How This Website Makes Money?  By stealing peoples banking information.  This website makes money – but unfortunately in this case I was not be the one receiving it.

How the Hack Was Removed

Although I liked the high traffic numbers I felt the right thing to do was to remove the hack.  I contacted my web host and told them about the problem.  They quickly disabled the infected folders on my website and deleted the hacked files.  Now if somebody tries to access the banking page’s  URL’s they get a 404 error instead of a banking information update page. 

Then I did an IP block for the suspicious websites that where sending traffic to my site.  So now if they try to send traffic to this website they get an access denied message. 

Now my website is back to its old self again.  Traffic is down to where it should be and the website is back to making a couple of dollars a day that go into my pocket. 

I admit, there were casualties – some people lost a lot of money.  But I am glad it happened.  I got the taste for success.  I got to feel, even if for just a brief few days, the excitement of this website finally taking off.  And I learned something – how to make my website is a little more secure.  I benefit from somebody else’s loss – that does not happen to often.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used

When I decided to create this website the first thing I did was open an account with a web host service.  The second thing was to create a few email accounts.

Three email account where created:

1. info@: this is used for the contact page.  When a visitor fills out the contact form and clicks send I get an email from info@.
2. roman@: I use this address when I want to email somebody or when I need to leave a contact address.  For example, on blog comments and on my AdSense account.
3. paj@: When someobody fills out the PAJ order page this email is used.

It is amazing how optimistic and ignorant I was.  The reason I created 3 different accounts was for organizational purposes.  I imagined that emails would be flooding in all day.  By having 3 email address I would be able to quickly determine what the email is about.  Is it a contact page submission, PAJ order, or a response to a blog comment I left?  It was suppose to be a great time saver.

Seven months have gone by since I created the email accounts.  No emails have come in via paj@.  Not a single order for a PAJ.  You are not surprised – I am.  Of course I did not expect 100′s of sales but at least 1 or 2 a month.  Nope – nothing.

I also expected that people would have questions and comments about the website.  Where did you get that number? How did you make that graph? Can you tell me how I can…?  I was actually worried that I would be spending all my time answering email questions and have no time to work on the website.  I have proof of my ignorant optimism – when you fill out the contact form the thank you message states:

Thank you for your comment. I read all emails, and I try to respond to all emails.

TRY to respond to all emails.  Large mail bags arriving everyday and my hand cramped up from writing to all my fans….I will try to respond to all emails.

Reality: the contact page has been up for 227 days.  I have received 12 contact page emails.  Around one contact form email every 20 days.  Wandering around the Sahara desert for 227 days I would certainly stumble upon a oasis more often.  Every time an email comes in from the contact form I think it is a mirage – it has been so long since I have seen one.  I will try to respond to all emails. 

A couple days ago I received one of the precious and rare contact form emails.  For me it is an event – I do not just open the email.  I savor it – somebody took the time to send me an email.  I get an coffee, close the door, turn on some music, and click on the email.  Before responding I read the email over and over again.  What do they need?  What are they asking?  How can I help?  Taking a sip of coffee my brain begins to formulate a response.

But the email I received a few days ago was different then the 12 before it.  I read it over and over again.  I could not believe what I was reading…it had to be a mirage.  An email that cannot exist. 

In essence it called me a liar.  It questioned my honesty.  It stated that the numbers on the website must be fabricated.

The reason the person doubted the numbers was that my AdSense revenues are too high for the first month.  The first month my AdSense revenue was $40 dollars.  That is too high.  The whole website it bullshit.  That was the message of the email.  It was not a mirage, the oasis was real, but the water was poisoned.

Why The AdSense Revenue Was High During First 2 Months

Here are my AdSense Revenue’s for the first 6 months:

As you can see for the first two months AdSense revenue was great.  Much more then the next five months.  How can this be explained?  There are two possibilities:

1. I am a liar – and this entire website is spattered with fabricated information.
2. The numbers are real. There is a rational and logical explanation for the high AdSense revenue.

The first possibility cannot be discounted – I am making the numbers up.  Even though the homepage states: “This website is a no nonsense, no hype, honest account of how it makes money online.”, it is just another lie on a fly infested dung heap of lies.  This website should have been called: How This Website Lies To Make Money (and how much it lies).

Of course there is nothing I can write to persuade you to believe me.  You do not know me and I do not know you.  The safest thing for you to do is not believe me.  The only argument I can give is that there is no reason for me to make up numbers.  How do I benefit by fabricating numbers?  Would this website make more money if I made less during the first month? I have no idea.  I cannot think of any reason to pull numbers from a hat.  It is actually easier for me to give the actual numbers because it requires no thought from me – I simply take numbers from one report and enter them into another.  Monkey work – no thought required.

Fabricating number with an intent to make more money is a level of thought beyond me.  I do not even know where to start.  Should I be claiming that I get more traffic?  Will more people click on Ads if I do?  Will that improve my SEO?  Or maybe it is better to claim that I get very little traffic.  People will come to my website just to see what kind of loser I am.  I do all this work and all I get is 10 visitors a day – would this website make more money if people thought I was an idiot?

Lets assume that you do not think I am an idiot and that the numbers are real.  What could be the logical explanation for the large AdSense revenue the first two months and then the big drop thereafter?

Here is a graph showing the traffic sources for this website for the previous 7 months:

Looking at the graph, what sticks out like a pimple on a super model, is that for the first two months most of the traffic is from referral sites.

The first two months I received almost no traffic from search engines – the website was new and not indexed.  All my traffic came from forums I visited.  Forums in my niche: make money online.  I was leaving comments and the signature was a link back to this website.  People who clicked on my signature where exactly like me – they were looking for ways to make money online.  They come to this website and see ads about making money online.  They clicked them because the ads are specifically targeted to them.

This was great.  I was driving perfectly targeted traffic to my website.  And made money with AdSense.  The problem was that it was a lot of work.  I spent countless hours on the forums reading and making comments.  Roughly an hour a day.  So for the entire month I spent 30 hours driving traffic to this website which earned me $40.14. A little over a dollar an hour.  Pathetic.

Month 2 was more of the same – 30 hours work for $50 dollars.  I needed a new plan.  Driving traffic from forums is too much work with very little gain.

So at the end of month 2 I changed strategy.  Instead of working like a donkey for a measly $1 an hour I changed focus.  Decrease my forum time and spend more time I getting search engine traffic.  Increase backlinks, improve SEO, add more content to the site.  Because of this change my AdSense took a big drop.  Search engine traffic is targeted but not as perfectly as the forum traffic.

The hope is that in the long run it will pay off.  If ever the day comes that search engines start to send me traffic in the 1000′s per day then I will be making a lot more in revenue and doing a lot less work.

And as this is going on I will be diligently updating the website’s tables and graphs.  Monkey see number, monkey copy number.  Of course, when I do become a success there will be lots of people who will not believe the numbers.  But whether that will help or hinder the website I have no idea.  Honest sells, but so does a lot of 0′s.

Actual Stats From The Website Used, Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head, What YOU Expect vs Reality