Stats & Analysis for July 2008 - $2,798 Earned
Every record has been broken this month. This is my highest ever earning month and I also hit 3,000 RSS subscribers though that did dip back below the threshold just as I did the stats (boooo!) :-) Also, I’ve been a busy bee. I have launched a new blog called Life Should Feel GOOD which is nothing to do with Internet marketing.
Please note that my income stats refer to all income that I generate online so if I make money from my new blog then that will be included but it will also be clearly indicated. However all other stats such as RSS and traffic stats are for this blog only. If you want to find out how my new blog does then sign up to my newsletter (top right corner of the page) as in that I’ll be explaining all the steps that I’ve taken to launch and develop it and so on.
Income
- Traffic Rush - $1,571.01
- BlueHost - $465
- Blog Mastermind - $442
- Private Advertising - $192.10
- Teaching Sells - $93
- AdSense - $19.45
- Zen to Done Ebook - $8.23
- StumbleUpon Traffic Ebook - $7.50
Total income earned during July 2008: $2,798.29
Sales for Traffic Rush were lower than I had hoped. The launch discount worked well but perhaps too well as I have had very few sales since then. However, most of those people that bought did so within the first couple of days of the launch so they had seen very little content at that time so I am assuming that they had already made the decision to buy beforehand. From now, the content of the lessons themselves have to do their work so I assume that most people won’t buy until they get to the end of lesson #10 and then make a decision as to whether or not to continue. That won’t happen until August 10th at the earliest.
Other income is pretty much the same as normal except that Blog Mastermind had a jump due to Yaro re-launching the program.
Newsletter Subscribers
I’ve had a nice round number jump this month. Last month ended on 257 subscribers and today there are 357. The growth is actually very slow. Everything I have read about email lists is that they should grow faster than the RSS subscription so obviously this has not been working for me. As a result of this I’ve decided to completely revamp the newsletter but I don’t expect signups to increase until I have the new opt-in box in place which will hopefully be ready soon.
RSS Subscribers
Last month I actually forgot to report the number I ended up with! Feedburner doesn’t allow you to go back and check numbers from the past but there is a cool tool called FeedCompare that does (and you can also compare yourself to other blogs, even if they don’t announce their numbers!) so using that, last month I ended up on 2,638 and today it sits at 2,982 which is a growth of 344 subscribers but that includes the 100 new newsletter subscribers.
This chart comes from FeedCompare, as its much better than the FeedBurner one:
Traffic Stats
The traffic level has crept up a little bit this month which is nice to see. One thing I noticed is that somewhere along the way my PageRank has dropped to 4. I’m not sure if that happened this month or the one before but it doesn’t seem to have affected the level of search engine traffic. Even my Traffic Rush site has PR now, whoohoo. Mind you, that doesn’t have content so the only real traffic is direct traffic.
The sources of traffic are still largely the same. Last month I forgot to investigate the traffic sources so I had a quick look back through June today to see if StumbleUpon was still the top traffic referrer and of course it was. Now onto July’s…
Referral Traffic Analysis
These are my top 10 referrers of traffic during July:
- StumbleUpon - 1,962
- Twitter - 463
- The Warrior Forum - 335
- ShoeMoney - 221
- 45n5 - 207
- Traffic Rush - 196
- Courtney Tuttle - 123
- Delicious - 106
- Thirty Day Challenge - 91
- Mixx - 62
A few points here. Firstly Twitter - I still see people whining about Twitter, how pointless it is, how it doesn’t generate traffic and so on. I checked back through the last few months stats and it consistently sends me several hundred visitors per month and the thing is - these are highly targeted visitors. I might write a blog post about this as I have some thoughts on it.
Secondly, I am still boggled by some of the referral sources here. The Warrior forum, ShoeMoney, Courtney - all these sources were published months and months ago and yet they still continue to drive traffic.
Keyword Analysis
I haven’t done any keyword analysis in a while. To be perfectly honest, I am not all that interested. I know many of you will throw your hands up in horror but I don’t do SEO, I just write what comes into my head. Even on the occasions when I do look at my keyword stats I just kinda ignore it. I’ll let the SEO’s worry about SEO, and in the meantime I’ll just stick to what I’m good at.
I did start to have a poke through the keywords but the other thing I notice is that the vast majority of keyword phrases have had just 1 search or a couple. There were almost 3,500 different keywords that brought me traffic this month and almost 3,000 of them were unique!
Most Popular Posts
This is another stat that I haven’t looked at in a while. I didn’t really want to look at it until recently because I felt that while I was going through lots of personal stuff I just wasn’t writing very well. I notice that my writing style has changed quite a lot recently. I used to do a lot of tutorial style posts and now I don’t do so many of those and tend to write more about my opinion on stuff. But the blog seems to be growing faster these days than it used to so I guess that is working.
My WordPress Ebook and Twitter Guide are always the top #1 and #2 spots consistently month after month so I’ll ignore those. These are the top 5 actual blog posts for July:
- Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites
- Video Creation, Hosting & Distribution for Traffic Rush
- 17 Social Sites To Spam For Backlinks
- Top 17 Cheesy Internet Marketing Publicity Photos
- Social Bookmarking Can Kill Your StumbleUpon Traffic!
The first post on that list was written in November 2007! Once again, another example of the power of blogs to continue to drive traffic for a very, very long time.
Conclusion
All of July was dominated with the release of Traffic Rush and that has affected both the content I released on the blog and of course the income. August will be a strange one because Traffic Rush will be mostly forgotten and the whole month will be dominated by niche sites! First of all the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 kicks off today. If you haven’t signed up yet then check out my review of it to find out more about it. Secondly, I have been collecting various resources to do with niche sites in general and I am going to put all of that into practice whilst I work on the challenge.
That will be my work focus during August and of course I will be blogging about what I’m doing and learning. Oh and in case you hadn’t noticed, I have created a video version of my WordPress ebook. There are 10 videos in all and these will be released one per day in between other posts so check those out if you haven’t already.
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Stumble it!
Mistic
August 1, 2008
Hi Caroline,
Congratulation on your highest ever earning for previous month. Stumble Rush - $1,571.01 is fairly motivating me :) It’s not small amount!
Anyway, congratulation again to you and keep it up!
Regards,
Mistic
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