September 2012 Traffic and Income Report – $128.37

Post By D

Hello All – D here.

This month was our first month running two blogs, full time, while traveling. We we’re hoping to be able to keep up with the same post frequency, but, unfortunately, we hit a few road blocks. Internet was hard to come by, as well as time to write. We’re working on adjusting to a schedule that will allow Vicky to work on the food blog as well as the travel blog in a way that isn’t overwhelming and works with our nomadic lifestyle.

Traffic:

It’s always sad to see a monthly drop in traffic because it feels like such a set back. You wonder, have you lost it entirely, or was it just a bad month? How much effort will it take to bring it back? Unfortunately, though understandably, Vicky and I worked so hard in September to move out of DC, move back in to Boston, and then get ready for travel, oh, and travel in Japan for two weeks that we/she just didn’t have time to post as much, as well as submit quality photos to those oh so important food sharing websites.

September Breakdown:

BlogHer – $54.34
Google Adsense – $74.03
The Thesis Theme – $0
Hostgator – $0

Grand Total: $128.37

Income Summary:

If you’ve been following along with the last two months of income updates, you’ll probably wonder how we managed to have the highest income yet with so few page views by comparison.

Basically, Google Adsense has been our saviour, and a full month of image ads really results in some quality income.

I think the take away here is that there is always a lot of untapped potential in a blog. If you want to increase your income, the most direct way is usually to increase the traffic BUT, if you aren’t doing a thorough job with your advertising techniques you’re simply missing out. The question is not why we’re “so high” this month in revenue, it’s why were we so low in the past months (and that’s because we weren’t using images for google adsense and didn’t have proper placement).

Affiliates:

Same old story - Host Gator and Thesis simply don’t yield anything at the moment. I was hoping that the reviews I wrote would have materialized into something more substantial as they were indexed by Google, but so far, no dice.

• Host Gator Review
• Thesis Review

Other Advertising:

We are also going to look into other forms of advertising as a way to diversity the income streams, starting with more direct methods. I could also try donation buttons or selling and taking payment via credit cards. For credit card processing, comparing merchant account providers can be a little daunting (read more). All the same, we will have some updates in October at how these “other” forms are doing.

Has advertising negatively affected our blog (bounce rate, pages/visit)?

I mentioned in previous income reports I wanted to explore different questions in each update. This month, I wanted to see if advertising shows significant, negative impact on the blog by looking at two metrics – bounce rate and pages/visit.

Pages per visit is a measure of how many pages the average person goes to on the website. If they like your blog they go to more. If they don’t (or are turned off by advertising), they go to less.

Bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave after visiting the first page.

The two are related, but different metrics. Unfortunately we don’t have a long history of Google Analytics data because of the switch, however, we do have starting in late June and advertising didn’t start until mid July. So let’s look:

Bounce Rate is consistent over time

Pages Per Visit is also consistent over time

So, as far as we can tell, the advertising isn’t hurting the blog, but it is making a bit of extra cash. Therefore, if you’re thinking of doing some advertising on your blog, but not sure if it’s the right time, my recommendation is to get your feet wet and go for it!

Previous Income Updates

• July 2012 – $47.83
• August 2012 – $117.31

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