Stats & Analysis for February ‘08 - $2003 Earned!
I’ve been itching to do this post! All this month I have seen emails coming into my inbox almost every day telling me that I’ve made money! It’s a lovely feeling and I have a taste for it now. When you start to make money it changes your mindset because you start believing that it is possible. It’s early, my RSS stats have not updated for the day yet so I’m going to start out with the money today!
Income
- Bluehost - $1,560
- Direct Advertising Sales - $222.05
- Instant Money Reports ebook - $76.50
- The Easy SEO Report - $40.80
- AdSense Profit Tips Coaching Program - $29.97
- The SEO Book - $25
- Zen to Done ebook - $22.48
- AdSense - $21.35
- Deal Dot Com - $4.72
- Teaching Sells - $1
Total Income Earned February 2008: $2003.87
It’s funny but just a few days into the month I was continuing to see BlueHost sale notifications come in almost daily and I got it into my head that I was going to hit $2k this month. All through the month I fixated on the idea that I could earn that amount and the results speak for themselves. Actually it could be a little higher than that - I was unable to login to Blog Mastermind to check my stats and there might be some recurring commissions in there to add in.
One thing I need to point out is that this is the total amount of income earned across all of my money making projects. That includes this blog, my WordPress ebook and my niche site. I plug the BlueHost package both in the ebook and using a banner on this blog. Their affiliate statistics are only allowing me to see details of the last two weeks which is annoying as I use different tracking ID’s so I can see where people are signing up from. However I know that the majority of the sales have come from the ebook.
One thing that I found very interesting is that I made $285 with Teaching Sells last month and I can only assume that came from the ad in my sidebar. This month I changed the graphic to an animated GIF and didn’t make any sales at all. I have no idea where that single dollar came from! I think I’ll change the graphic back and see if that makes a difference.
Blog Stats
RSS Subscribers
FeedBurner has been playing up a lot this month - all those odd dips are errors in the way FeedBurner has been collecting and reporting stats. However, it’s working today so I can still get the stats for the month so that’s ok. I ended January on 1389 subscribers and today I have 1593 giving me a growth of 204 new subscribers.
There’s quite a lot of interesting things to note about this months stats. Firstly it has grown - it always does. Each and every month my subscribers grow and that is a wonderful thing. It allows me to project forward into the longer term and envision a time when I could possibly have many thousands of subscribers and think about what that would mean. Secondly, the growth has been significantly slower this month and that’s not so good. I have some thoughts as to why that might be that I am going to publish in a separate post next week.
Lastly I was hoping to end the month over 1600 as I hit that number a few days ago. The graph there shows that on my highest day I had 1652 subscribers but if you look closely you’ll see that there has been a steady decline over the last 5 days. What have I done in the last 5 days? Promoted an AdSense coaching program. This makes me think that sales pitch type posts turn off blog readers.
That’s an interesting dilemma because a large chunk of the income earned from a blog like this is from the affiliate programs promoted within it. My conclusion is that the promotional posts need to stay but that I need to make extra effort to be providing useful content as well. When I look back at what I have posted this week I can honestly say that I don’t think I have written anything genuinely useful - not something that somebody would want to link to, or Stumble etc. See, this is why stats analysis is good - it highlights your flaws and teaches you lessons to learn from!
Traffic Stats
Hmm very interesting. First of all that lovely dip that occurred about two thirds into the month was caused by my blog being down for almost two days. What I find most interesting about this graph is that there are no significant peaks. What does this mean? That I haven’t written any outstanding content that has brought in a flood of traffic that’s what! More harsh lessons from my stats this month.
However the good news is that the overall level of traffic is about the same as last month despite the lack of peaks - I am now receiving an average of between 500 and 1000 page views per day and this is pretty good. Here’s the numbers:
Traffic Sources
This may look similar to last month but there are some differences. This month I received 3,143 visitors from search engines compared to 2,570 last month. That’s a nice boost and I’m seeing that upward trend every month. This is a good thing. Direct Traffic was virtually the same and I imagine a lot of that is people clicking through here from my ebook.
What is not so good is that that referring traffic is down from 15k to 13k. This is as a result of several factors - people not linking to me, my pages not getting stumbled as much and so on. These figures paint the same picture as I have seen elsewhere - this month I have not delivered enough good quality content on this blog and the results really show it!
Keywords
Last month I was shocked to find that 327 visitors came from a search on my name. It was 548 this month! Another one of my high count keywords this month is “wordpress niche site”. When I type that phrase into Google, in the UK results my ebook page comes up as the top result, and fifth in the US results. I’m also seeing lots of other WordPress related keywords in there. It just goes to show that when you continually blog on a subject you will eventually start ranking in the search engines for related terms.
I had two visitors from the search term “make money online”. This is probably the most competitive term in the IM niche. What I found especially interesting about this is that when I did a search I found that I ranked somewhere between 900 and 1000 of that term! That means that two people looked through over 900 search results to find me! Wow…
There weren’t many funny ones this month, well a couple… “big juicy wobbly tits” and “give me your dirty love video”! Well, not a lot I can say to those really!
Referral Traffic Breakdown
Here are my top 10 referrers excluding Google obvious blog readers:
- StumbleUpon (4,137)
- 45n5 (286)
- Shoemoney (278)
- Twitter (262)
- Delicious (197)
- Yaro Starak (193)
- Dosh Dosh (185)
- Lifehacker (179)
- Design Shack (176)
- Chris Garrett (162)
Most of this traffic is coming to content written a long time ago. A lot of the stumble traffic came into older posts, the traffic from Shoemoney, Delicious, Lifehacker is all to content written before February. This is good and bad. It goes to show that once a blog reaches a certain stage that traffic can continue to come in for a long time and this can sustain a blog during a rough period for a while. What it also shows me is that the content I have produced this month isn’t as good as my previous content. That’s about the third clear sign from this months stats.
There’s another interesting referrer that sent me 171 visitors this month: caroline-middlebrook.com! What, that’s myself isn’t it? Not quite - see that is my root domain but this blog is hosted in the /blog/ directory. However people will often erroneously link to me at my main domain instead of the proper blog address. At the moment I have a large graphic showing my old blog theme with a link to this blog on there. I’ve played around with redirects before but that caused some problems. One day I’ll do something better with the root of this domain!
Summary
Financially I’ve had an awesome month - I actually earned enough money for me to live on this month. From a blogging point of view I cannot complain because I’m still seeing plenty of traffic and continued growth but there overall theme that my stats are telling me is that I can do better. Let’s see what March will bring…
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Stumble it!
Scott
March 1, 2008
Way to go Caroline!
I really enjoy your blog and you have given out some very good info that I will be putting to use in the near future.
I hope next month brings you more success.
Scott’s last blog post..First Project Starts Today