Stats & Analysis for December ‘07
During December, it has been as though time has stood still on this blog. The stats have been rather static with RSS numbers just gently fluctuating but not really growing at all. Considering the the month I’ve had (which you’ll know about if you’ve been reading for the last couple of weeks) this doesn’t surprise me at all.
Normally what I do in these stat posts is breakdown all my stats and try to figure out how the results relate to my marketing efforts throughout the month but that just isn’t appropriate for this month as I have done absolutely no marketing whatsoever. Still, I’ll breakdown some of the more important stats as it’s still quite interesting.
Blog Stats
RSS Subscribers
After my somewhat unconventional personal revelations of 2 weeks ago I really expected my subscriber numbers to drop so I am actually really pleased that they have managed to pretty much stay the same all month. Thanks to all of you who have stuck by me as my blogging has gone a bit wobbly recently!
Traffic Stats
The traffic has been pretty much as I expected this month - it has steadily declined towards the later part of the month as my usual sources of traffic such as social media, blog commenting etc were simply not being utilised.
The graph shows a little under 16k visitors but if you look at the end of the graph you’ll notice that the line drops to zero for 4 days - this is where I forgot to install Google Analytics on the new theme and didn’t notice for a few days! So I expect the actual number is probably nearer 17-18k visitors.
Traffic Sources
The pattern for this graph is virtually the same as every month before it. Percentage wise, the search engine traffic looks like it has doubled as it has risen from 3% to 7% but the percentage figure is misleading because the actual number of hits from searches was virtually the same and the change in percentage represents a drop in referral traffic from sources such as StumbleUpon.
Keywords
Some of the recent posts I have done about embedding youtube clips into wordpress blogs and the do-follow social bookmarking sites have brought in a large number of searches - several hundred each. If I could find more topics like that to blog about, over time that could really lead to a steady increase in traffic.
As always there are a few funny ones in there:
“sequence 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6″
Am I about to self-destruct?
big juicy tits.com
I’m really starting to regret prefixing that Twitter Guide with “big juicy!”
how do you steep eggs
I have no idea, I’m sure that’s a great question!
make my own caroline
Hmm that’s a money making opportunity I hadn’t thought of - self cloning! Wasn’t that a movie?
Referral Traffic Breakdown
Now this is interesting, until I checked this, I assumed that I hadn’t had much Stumble traffic but I still had over 9k visits from there! What I didn’t have this month of course were the huge floods of traffic from LifeHacker, Delicious etc that I had last month as a result of the Twitter Guide promotion.
It’s actually nice that many of my regular sources of traffic are still coming through for me even though I have not been my usual active self this month. Here’s the top 10:
- StumbleUpon - 9,486
- Direct - 2,927
- Twitter - 1,354
- Bloglines - 313
- 45n4 - 298
- Lifehacker - 216
- Search Engine Guide - 202
- ProBlogger - 148
- NetVibes - 124
- MyBlogLog - 109
What this is also showing me, is that much of that traffic is coming through to my older posts. Most of the Stumble traffic came into a post from November and that’s the same for the Lifehacker etc traffic. This is good to know because it means that everything you write on your blog can have a long lasting effect which really adds up over time and it means that you can go semi-awol for a month and still survive!
Business Stats
- Teaching Sells Affiliate Program - $189
- Blog Mastermind Affiliate Program - $120
- Paid Interview - $47.75
- $300 Affiliate Challenge - $30.57
- Adsense (Niche Site) - $8.45
Total earned during December: $395.77 :-)
I’m really pleased with my earnings this month because I really struggled to blog about many of the products that I promoted that have led to sales. Similarly to November, much of the revenue has come from one-off promotions but I’m getting the feeling that there will always be one-off promotions.
Interestingly the Adsense revenue for my niche website increased this month even though I did not touch the site at all for the entire month!
Conclusions
Overall I am very pleased with my stats this month. I feel like I have been barely keeping my head above water work-wise, I’ve literally worked no more than a couple of hours a day (if that!) for the vast majority of the month and yet the numbers have held out and I’ve even made more money than I did last month.
January should be fun because I’m hoping that the launch of my WordPress ebook will make some money and I’ve opened up advertising on the blog now though I need to get a proper advertising page up soon and will need to offer pro-rata rates for those that come on board part-way through the month. Plus I just have good vibes about January - I’d love to hit the $500 mark and 1000 subscribers.
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moneytalks
January 2, 2008
To me it is a good stat compare to millions of other sites and blog. IMO if you can get that much is just possible to get more than that because that what is interesting about internet especially about income. if you can do nothing but income can increase although it is small what would happen with a side with already generating 2000-3000 per month. You possibly can earn that much without doing anything for a month.
Because of that scenario make thing that internet is the way to make money. I know it need a lot of work but it so worth all the trouble. We just need to continue build on our site with content and never stop link building and the money will come later on.