November 2012 Traffic and Income Report – $1027

Post By D

Hello All – D here.

We’re finishing our last days in China, or, as I like to call it “where internet comes to die”. It’s been difficult maintaining our two blogs ( one travel and one food) but, given that it is our only source of income at the moment, we are sticking with it!

I hope that everyone has been enjoying the Asian recipes that Vicky is showcasing, many of which are from cooking schools here in China. Her first, if you remember, was at Yangshuo Cooking School. Recently, she did another at Rice and Friends in Dali, China. Those recipes will be published over the next two weeks. Soon, we’ll be heading to Vietnam, where Vicky will continue on her quest to conquer every cooking school in Asia.

Traffic:

November, with elections, Veteran’s Day, and Thanksgiving was a bit of a down month for blogging – but for the most part it’s the same traffic we’ve had for the last three months.

November Breakdown:

BlogHer – $45.90
Google Adsense – $77.67
The Thesis Theme – $0
Hostgator – $50
Direct Advertising – $854

Grand Total: $1021.67

Income Summary:

While the Direct Advertising is still the breadwinner of October, one thing I’d like to call out is our HostGator affiliate sale. In past reports I’ve noted that we haven’t had any success with affiliate sales on our blog. About a week ago, we got an email from HostGator saying that we may have made our first sale! I say may, because as far as I can tell it is still showing up as not valid in HostGator’s system…I’m not entirely sure what’s going on and should probably call HG to see what the deal is. Still, it’s nice to know we may almost have a sale. That’s closer than we’ve ever been before.

I don’t want to overstate a few of my actions here because it just resulted in one maybe sale, but I did take a few steps this past month to better showcase our post on How To Start A Food Blog (which contains our affiliate links). Here are a few tips:

1. Make it visible. If you have a post you really want to showcase, consider putting it in your menu (see how our menu now has “Start A Blog“). If you don’t want to put it in your menu, maybe your sidebar or footer would be a good place.
2. Go back to old posts and add it in. Just because a post is old, doesn’t mean that no one reads it anymore. People search on Google and find old posts all the time, so you want to link to new posts in old posts.
3. Spread that Page Rank juice. In order for a post to get seen in the search engines, it helps to have a good page rank. If you’re a blogger you’re probably familiar with the concept of page rank, but what some people don’t realize is that just because their home page has a page rank of X that does not mean that every page on your blog has that page rank. In fact, there is a good chance that the page rank of many of your pages is actually lower. You want to link to key pages often in order to spread the juice around internally. This will help those pages in the search engine rankings. This can be done internally (see step 2) by looking for key words (like “food blog“) and linking to your post. It can also be done when other bloggers link to your post (which  is also aided by steps 1 and 2). Shortly after I went on a campaign to better showcase our post, we had a blogger link to us here!

Previous Income Updates (Food Blog)

• July 2012 – $47
• August 2012 – $117
• September 2012 – $128
• October 2012 – $825

Previous Income Updates (Travel Blog)

• August 2012 – $55
• September 2012 – $490
• October 2012 – $1345
• November 2012 – $2031

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