Google effect in action

I've been running a web site that acts as a wrapper for Amazon's aStore. This was started as an experiment a few years ago, yet it didn't accomplish much, beyond a learning experience in how to use PHP to perform some on-the-fly screen scrapping and content embellishing. It was also something I could use when experimenting with PPC advertising. Having been pulled in some lucrative projects I didn't pay any more attention to this. In fact functionality that used to work, like search engine friendly URLs (SEFU), is now broken...

Anyway, glancing over my analytics account today I see a smashing 338% traffic increase during the last month:

Wow ! All this traffic coming from Google. To what do I owe the honour ? No inbound links, none of the usual favourable auspices. The only logical explanation is Amazon dropping their affiliates form California, about at the same time as my jump in traffic, which likely caused the poor folks to pull the plug on their sites. Or perhaps a glitch in Google's secret sauce for bestowing wealth in cyberspace ? Anyway, the people are coming in, goals as measured by analytics are fulfilled, meaning people are adding stuff to their carts, good times rolling.

Of course the earnings exploded :)

One thing that strikes me is the conversion rate, which at 7.69% stands much higher than industry average (which I believe stands at less than 2%). So yeah, this passive income thingy is not entirely hype. If you can bring people over, the money will follow.