Traffic and Income Report: September 2015

Hey there everyone! Welcome to my very first traffic and income report for One Little Project!

I know it probably seems a little out of place, and maybe even strange to post about the details of what goes on behind the scenes here. Afterall, this is a recipe and craft blog, not an internet marketing website.

But, I’ll be honest with you. I LOVE getting a sneak peak of what goes on behind the scenes in the blogging world. I’ve been following other bloggers’ income reports since I started blogging almost three years ago, and I have found them very informative and unbelievably inspirational!

Here are a few of the income reports that I follow. These bloggers are all pretty darn amazing:

• Moms Make Money


• Just a Girl and Her Blog


• Pinch of Yum


• Smart Passive Income (brace yourself before you click on that one…)

So often, details about money and income are kept private and hidden, at least in the “real world”. But in the “blogging world”, it’s all about helping people move forward with their businesses. And the best way to learn is to see what other people are doing, and how it’s working for them.

This income report is not meant to say “Hey world, look at all the money I made!” (although, you probably won’t be saying that about this little blog quite yet…), it’s meant to help other bloggers who are learning and growing. I have a long, long, long way to go before I get anywhere near the success of the blogs I listed above, but I know I can improve.

I’ve been working on this blog for a long time, and the money making progress has been SLOW. I’m definitely happy to be earning what I’m earning, but I want to increase my income. I’m hoping by making all of this public, that it will make me more accountable to myself for growing my business.

So here we go!

Income

• The Blogger Network – $2,142.90


• Google Adsense – $281.73


• ShareASale – $12.58


• Amazon Affiliates – $65.94

Total Income = $2,503.15 USD

Expenses

The following list contains affiliate links.

• Black Chicken Host – $31.99


• MailChimp – $35.00


• BlogVault – $9.00


• UpWork – $395.10


• Facebook – $720


• BoardBooster – $30.00


• CrashPlan – $5.99


• HelloBar – $15.00

Total Expenses = $1,242.08 USD

September 2015 Net Profit = $1,261.07 

September was a record month for One Little Project, both for traffic and earnings. My biggest source of income has always been ad revenue. To tell you the truth, affiliate marketing has always baffled me. I just haven’t figured out how to be successful with selling other people’s products.

My approach has always been to drive more traffic to my site so I can increase my ad revenue. But I know that moving forward, it’s far better to have multiple income streams rather than one very large one. It definitely makes me nervous to have all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.

One of my goals is to create my own product. It’s been in the back of my mind for almost a year now, but I really need to make it happen. I’m not sure what that product is going to be just yet, but it’s on my to do list. Other people have been very successful with e-books and courses, but I still have to wrap my head around it.

I’d love to talk more about the services I listed in my income and expenses, and let you know why I chose them all, but this income report would be crazy long if I explained every little thing in one post – And I’m pretty sure you’d all fall asleep part way through. So I’m only going to talk about one of them today – BlogVault – and spread the rest out over a few income reports.

BlogVault

I’m kind of the paranoid type when it comes to my blog content. The horror stories I’ve heard of bloggers losing everything on their websites had me freaked out pretty early on, so I’ve been using BlogVault almost the entire time I’ve been blogging. I love that it’s really easy to use and you can test your backup at any time. I’m a very visual person, so it makes me feel so much better to be able to click a button, open a new window, and see exactly what my website would look like if I ever needed to restore it from the backup they saved for me.

I’m not sure I even know how to get to the FTP for my site, so downloading a backup manually is just not an option for me. Once you install the WordPress plugin, it’s pretty much set it and forget it with BlogVault. It automatically runs a new back up every 24 hours, and you don’t have to do a thing. If you aren’t using anything to back up your website, they have a 7 day free trial if you want to try them out. I would be crushed, and I mean CRUSHED, if all my hard work just vanished.

Traffic

 

September was a record month for traffic here on One Little Project! For the first time, one of my own posts on Facebook went viral (8.5 million reach and counting!). You can see the huge spike in the graph above just after I posted Tissue Paper Pumpkin Favours on the blog. It was so amazing and exciting! It’s such a crazy thing to imagine that 8.5 million people had to scroll past one of my images in their Facebook feed. Most of them probably ignored it, but they still had to glance at something I created. It’s a pretty cool feeling for sure!

I’ve been working on increasing my Facebook likes, traffic and engagement this year, and I’m so excited to see that my work is actually paying off. I started the month with 21,082 likes on Facebook and finished the month with 36,207 likes. Since the viral post was one of the things I posted on my own Facebook page, it really seemed to bring in a huge amount of likes to my page! My goal for the end of the year is to reach 50,000 Facebook likes, and it’s starting to look like it can actually happen!

I had a total of 391,748 pageviews during the month of September which works out to be 13,058 pageviews per day. My previous high was from December 2014, so I’m hopeful that my pageviews will keep going up as we get closer to Christmas.

My bounce rate is horrible, I know. But I don’t think there’s too much I can do about it? Most of my traffic comes from Pinterest, and Pinterest users just don’t stick around for long. I’ve been experimenting with manually adding images with links to my other posts at the end of all my recent posts, so we’ll see if that makes any difference.

Most Popular Posts this Month

• Tissue Paper Pumpkin Favours


• How to Make a Smash Cake for a First Birthday


• Three Cheese Italian Rigatoni Pie


• How to Make Puffy Paint


• Romantic Dinner Recipes

Email Subscribers

• New Email Subscribers – 1,143


• Total Email Subscribers – 3,128

I’ve been using HelloBar since the beginning of the year to collect email addresses. They recently changed the free version so that something like 1 in 10 viewers see a HelloBar ad, rather than the newsletter signup that I want them to see – I’m a little ticked off that they made that change, but I just didn’t have time to research and make changes to it this month. When I started getting all the crazy traffic, I signed up for the pro version of HelloBar to help increase my subscribers. I was out $15 for the month, but it got rid of the HelloBar ads and the HelloBar logo, and it definitely helped me collect more email addresses.

During my really busy traffic days, I was collecting more than 100 email addresses PER DAY, so I was really happy with that! According to the HelloBar analytics, I’m converting about 0.2% of my visitors into subscribers. I’d love to see it do better than that, but for now, I’m pretty happy with the extra 1,143 people I added to my list this month!

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.

I’ve been paying closer attention to my RPM this year, and from what I can tell, let’s just say I’m not very efficient at bringing in income. My RPM has been steadily going up throughout the year, and is the highest it’s ever actually been, but I’d like to see it closer to $10 rather than the $6 I’m at this month. But I definitely can’t get there if my only revenue stream is ad income.

September 2015 RPM = $6.39

I always get a little excited around this time of year because October, November and December have always been my busiest traffic months. I can’t wait to see what happens!

That’s all I’ve got for now! If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments!

Click here to see all of our income reports.

Source : onelittleproject.com
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