I have learned a lot from other bloggers by reading their content, seeing them lead by example, and I have also learned a lot from their advice/content directed at blogging specifically. My blog was started as a way for me to network with others, share ideas, practice my writing, and to hopefully help others.
I never started a blog with the intention of making any money and I didn't even know it was possible to monetize a blog in the beginning. I have watched others make life changing decisions as a result of their blogs and I have seen some people make substantial amounts of blogging. I do not make any substantial amount but none of us would make any money if it wasn't for the readers/traffic that we generate.
Therefore, I wanted to become more transparent with my blog and any income that it may generate. I want to focus on several key areas with this and these posts.
- How I have done with traffic generation and revenue.
- What has generated changes in the aforementioned
- What I have learned from the changes.
I have seen others such as Lindsay & Bjork from Pinch of Yum and I think that it is an honest, open, and educational dialogue to have with you readers, the blogging community, and potential new bloggers. I am still learning a ton but I hope that I can share ideas or lessons learned along the way with others that may be curious. While I do not make much money from this endeavor (like I said this is not the goal) I think it is only right to stay transparent. Therefore, I will be sharing my monthly traffic and ad revenue reports with you in these posts.
So let's begin then...because this is my first post and there is nothing to compare it to - I will post the statistics from my previous 3 months.
Traffic
This sort of traffic is laughable by many in the blogging community. Some people average this many page views by the second or minute. However, we must all start somewhere and it is a big increase from when I started blogging where I was happy to see 400 page views a month. Some additional traffic stats that I have to share are:
I am encouraged by my relatively low bounce rate. The bounce rate is the % of people that leave my blog after visiting only one page. This is associated closely with the pages per session stat which is how many pages people view on average while looking at my blog in one viewing session.
So how much did I make? Well for one...I forgot to mention that these statistics are for my blog only and do not include my YouTube video stats. I will however include my earnings from my YouTube video ads. I have three sources of revenue that I use to monetize my content. Google Adsense for ads on my blog, YouTube (technically Google Adsense) for my videos, and Sovrn (formerly Lijit) for my website ads as well.
So what is the breakdown you may be wondering? Well here it is by source:
A couple of things stick out at me from the past few months when I look at this table:
- I had an error with my Sovrn Ads and I obviously wasn't very observant of this and it went quite awhile without me fixing it. Once I fixed it there obviously was a big increase. I am excited to see where this goes over the next year if traffic continues to increase.
- Secondly, I see a definite and consistent increase in YouTube ad revenue as I start to create more YouTube videos and increase the amount of subscribers to my YouTube Channel. I hope to create more YouTube videos that are of better quality with better content over the next several months so I am curious if this trend will continue in a linear fashion.
Well...There you have it folks. I will do this at the end of every month. I am definitely not bragging about these stats nor do I see my blog ever making me rich. Some people have made it rich from their blogs and that is impressive. Those scenarios took the right mixture of hard work, great content, dedication and the right niche of readers. I see quite a few flaws with how I run my blog to ever reach it big but fixing some of those flaws also creates a better overall experience for my readers and creates a better looking blog overall. So who knows...
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