February 2013 Traffic and Income Report – $1094

Hello All – D here.

After a month in Myanmar we’re back in Thailand for a few weeks. I wouldn’t say Myanmar flew by – it went at a medium pace. We liked it, didn’t love it. Unfortunately, the two cooking classes that Vicky had scheduled in Myanmar fell through and we won’t be able to bring you any authentic Burmese recipes. No worries though, Thai food is better and there’s plenty more recipes to showcase.

Traffic:

February was a short month without a lot of promotion on our end since internet was hit or miss while in Myanmar. Still, we felt we had a reasonable month and have already seen a strong uptick in the beginning of March now that we’re back in action and submitting posts again to Foodgawker, etc.

February Breakdown:

BlogHer – $55
Google Adsense – $64
The Thesis Theme – $0
Hostgator – $0
Direct Advertising – $975

Grand Total: $1094

Income Summary:

I don’t have an awful lot of updates since this month we were pretty hands-off. We’re still working on bringing our new website TravelingThroughFood off the ground but that’s really months away, especially at our snail pace (it’s tough when you’re traveling constantly).

One thing I’m determined to work on this month is testing some new Google Adsense positions. Since August when we installed Google Adsense we’ve pretty much kept the same layout without any changes. This has been three vertical skyscraper image ads (160 x 600) all next to each other on the sidebar.  It’s been bringing in similar revenue month to month and is pretty consistent with traffic. Still, there’s no way our current setup is efficient, for the following reasons:

1. Because they’re the same ad dimensions, they often display the same advertisement to the reader, three times. This makes them less likely to click, as opposed to if they had three different ads.
2. They’re all in the same place, so if a reader doesn’t look at the sidebar, they don’t see any of the ads. But seeing three in the same area probably doesn’t make them much more powerful.
3. I haven’t done any optimization around display (in Google Analytics, you can change the font and border color for example).

It’s important to test different things, even if it means sacrificing a few bucks here or there, to see what works for your blog. Google has a lot of tools, like custom channels, that can be used to test ads against each other. I’m going to be experimenting with sticking ads in various places and will bring you the results in the next income update (probably, in addition, to a drop in GA revenue – but hopefully it will be worth it in the long run).

If you have any questions, write them in the comments!

Previous Income Updates (Food Blog)

• July 2012 – $47
• August 2012 – $117
• September 2012 – $128
• October 2012 – $825
• November 2012 – $1019
• December 2012 – $837
• January 2013 – $1260

Previous Income Updates (Travel Blog)

• August 2012 – $55
• September 2012 – $490
• October 2012 – $1345
• November 2012 – $2031
• December 2012 – $2170
• January 2013 – $2925
• February 2013 – $3132