Traffic and Income Report: July 2016

These months are just flying by! I know it’s the middle of summer, but I can’t wait for the next few months to go by! People mention the fourth quarter and I get a little giddy on the inside. I’m counting down the days until the fourth quarter gets here, with its increased traffic and increased earnings, it’s the BEST time of the year for bloggers!

Oh right. It’s only July. So for now, it’s warm and sunny and the kids are home from school. And we’re having a great time together! No need to rush that cold weather! Remember, I live in Canada, so it gets cold, and I definitely need to enjoy this warm summer weather while we have it!

One Little Project - Income Report for July 2016

Remember how last month I was talking about all the great things that were happening and I had no explanation for them? Well, don’t worry, this month the universe corrected itself and I’m cool with that. I feel like I don’t have to watch my back anymore! I enjoyed the roller coaster ride, but I’m the type of person who likes things to make sense. (Seriously, if you missed last month’s income report, I’ll tell you all about the weird jumps my income and followers made for no apparent reason!)

July 2016 Income Details

Here are the income stats for the month:

Income

Monumetric (Formerly The Blogger Network) – $6,843.31

Google Adsense – $284.30

Amazon Affiliates – $45.90

HostGator (How to Start a Blog) – $126.82

ConvertKit – $14.70

Total Income = $7,315.03 USD

Expenses

The following list contains affiliate links.

Black Chicken Host – $74.99

MailChimp – $150.00

ConvertKit – $29.00

BlogVault – $9.00

UpWork – $246.39

BoardBooster – $40.00

CrashPlan – $5.99

HelloBar – $15.00

Total Expenses = $570.37 USD

July 2016 Net Profit = $6,744.66

This was a record month for blog income here on One Little Project, so I’m pretty excited! Last month, my income went crazy because of some tests Monumetric was doing on the ads on my site, and a lot of the income this month is from that little beta test.

Then one day it stopped and my income went back to normal. That was a sad day. But hey, I had awesome revenue for 4 weeks, so I’m not going to complain one bit! (Hooray for beta tests!)

Lowering my Bounce Rate by 10%

Last month I also talked about how adding a pop up lowered my bounce rate by about 5 percent (how’s that for counter intuitive?). This month, I made a few more changes that lowered it by another 5 percent. The impact on my traffic has been huge!

I’m in a blogging group where they were discussing adding slideshows to your roundups this month. You know, the types of posts where you click for the first picture, then click for the second picture, then click for the third picture… and usually by then I’m tired of clicking so I leave the slideshow. But, by getting me to click 3 times that site got 3 pageviews out of me rather than 1 pageview. I’m not a huge fan of those types of slideshows, but my blog is my business, so I’m definitely willing to try new things to increase my revenue.

I considered adding the slideshow plugin and converting my roundups, but my site already loads really slowly, so I was nervous that no one in their right might would click through 25 loaded meal sized salads for example, one photo at a time. (Not to mention, it was more challenging to set up the slideshow plugin than I had time to invest into it…).

But asking people for one more click, didn’t seem like it was all that bad? So I decided to try testing out splitting a few of my craft and recipe posts into two pages instead of one (You can see an example here) – So rather than including the entire tutorial on one page, I’ve added a “Click Here to Continue Reading” button after my beginning blurb and photo. It’s kind of like having a teaser page at the beginning or a title page before you get to all the tutorial photos.

It’s been working amazingly well! My bounce rate for the posts that I split into two pages has dropped from 83% down to about 40%. So yes, 4 in 10 people aren’t clicking through to the tutorial, but 6 in 10 people are clicking through. So that’s increasing my pageviews for those posts by 60%. I’ve only added it to 5 or 6 of my most popular posts, but I’m already seeing huge results!

Facebook Stopped Loving Me

Remember how I had said last month that I stopped posting on Facebook and suddenly Facebook started sending me tons of love? (In the form of at least 1,000 Facebook fans every day. Talk about weird!) Well, that has worn off now as well, which is fine – I figured it wasn’t going to last forever.

I’ve reached a point that I’m going to call Facebook utopia. It’s a place where my Facebook page is large enough that I have a decent reach for my posts and I don’t have to post 15 times a day to increase my followers. Could my following be bigger? Of course. And when I have more time this fall, I’ll probably start working on it again. But for now, I have 137,000 Facebook fans, and when I post one of my new blog posts to Facebook, I get a few hundred visitors to that new post within a few hours. It’s saving TONS of time and energy to only be posting my own content on Facebook instead of finding 15 other popular posts to share every single day.

When I first started working on my Facebook following last year, I had 2,000 Facebook fans. I worked HARD to build it up, but I wasn’t sure what number I was aiming for? When I got to 10,000 fans, I still wanted to keep working. When I got to 50,000 and even 75,000 I still wanted to keep working. But honestly, once I hit 100,000 Facebook fans that seemed like a good number. I feel like I can take a break for a bit, and enjoy all of that hard work I did! (Because it was a TON of work to build that fan base!)

Traffic

One Little Project saw a 40% increase in traffic this month, a lot of it was probably from the changes in my bounce rate. The little spike in the middle of the graph is the day that a large Facebook page shared one of my posts, so that’s always a nice boost as well.

I love the fourth quarter because my pageviews typically go up like crazy as we go into fall and winter. Man oh man, I would be thrilled if I could get to a million pageviews for November or December! It would be like a dream come true! So I’m keeping my fingers crossed. (And working crazy hard to create awesome new content of course!)

July 2016 Traffic July 2016 Traffic2

Most Popular Posts this Month

Here are the five posts that had the most pageviews this month.

Marshmallow Play Dough Recipe

How to Make Puffy Paint

Tomato Basil Soup Recipe

25 Meal Sized Loaded Salads

Dish Soap Silly Putty

Email Subscribers

This was the second month of having a pop up on my site collecting email addresses and wow, it sure is working well! I’ve been using HelloBar and I’ve got about a 0.7% conversion rate on it. I would say about 30% of the subscribers are fake, but even after those are removed, I’m still getting about 115 real subscribers a day. Holy cow! If you’ve ever been on the fence about adding a pop up, all I can say is give it a try! No one denies that people hate pop ups, but they sure do work!

New Email Subscribers – 3,448

Total Email Subscribers – 15,944

RPM

RPM is revenue per thousand pageviews. It’s a metric to track your income against your traffic, to see how effective you are at bringing in income.

My RPM was still high this month from the tweaks that Monumetric made to my ads. Next month I expect it to be down closer to $8 where it normally is since Monumetric stopped that crazy profitable beta test. We’ll see how it goes!