Stats & Analysis For October 2008 – $1,153 Earned

Income

• BlueHost – $570
• Blog Mastermind – $248.50
• Traffic Rush – $223.25
• Teaching Sells – $47
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $35.97
• Zen to Done Ebook – $4.75
• AdSense – $17.12
• New Age Email Marketing – $6.43

Total Income Earned for October 2008 – $1,153.02

Nice to see the income pop back into 4 figures this month. Actually I think something went wrong with last months stats as I got an affiliate payment from Blog Mastermind into my PayPal account a couple of weeks ago but their reports were showing all zero’s for September so I think it was just playing up on the day I did the stats! Oh well, it’s always nice to get unexpected money!

Subscribers

Aweber which manages the email list (now called The Bloggers Bible), and Feedburner which manages the RSS feed for the blog, have been integrated for some time now which means that the number you see in my sidebar is a combination of both subscriptions. Usually in these stat posts I separate out RSS subscribers to those who have subscribed to the email list so I can track the growth separately. However yesterday when I introduced the lightbox popup which advertises the Bloggers Bible it made me re-think the whole idea of these two subscriptions.

Obviously some people don’t like the lightbox and some people have gone so far as to say they’d unsubscribe from the blog as a result. What does that really mean for me? What does it mean for me to have a blog subscriber v a Bloggers Bible reader? Blog readers are lovely – they let me know that what I am saying is not falling on deaf ears. They leave me interesting comments and most importantly of all, they feed my ego! Occasionally, but not often, they’ll buy something! What does a reader of my list mean to me? They don’t comment or offer feedback because there is no mechanism to allow them to do so. They have asked for information and they are getting it and more often than blog readers, they buy something.

Obviously both types of readers are highly valuable to me but does it really matter how each one grows? My lightbox has now been active for around 48 hours and signups have increased significantly (much faster than I would ever expect to see RSS readership grow) but it is possible that I will see a drop in RSS subscribers as a result. When I really thought about this I realised that all that really matters is that my readers are on the increase. If I piss off a few people with the lightbox and they unsubscribe from the blog (guys – use an RSS reader!!), but gain a whole bunch of readers to the Bloggers Bible then my overall readership has increased all that’s all I am interested in. As an early indicator, this shows the effect of the lightbox so far:

So, from now on, I’m just going to lump them both together but I’ll try to report the numbers a bit more clearly. I haven’t posted an RSS graph this month as Feedburner had two of it’s annoying blips which slash your subs in half which also screws up the nice pretty graph.

Subs at End of September: 3,260

Subs at End of October: 3,557

Total new Subscribers in October: 297

Last month I had a bit of a flatline but the growth seems to be back to normal this month which is nice. Hitting 3,500 is a nice milestone. It would be nice to hit 4000 by the end of the year. Even though the readership is small compared to the likes of Darren Rowse (who has a mind boggling 66,000!) if I try to imagine what it would look like to have all of those people standing in a room and listening to me speaking it’s quite something!

Traffic

Traffic is pretty much the same as always though with the exception of one spike it has been so flat this month that you can clearly see in the traffic graph just where each weekend is, as there is a little dip over the weekends. Seems people only make money online during the week :-)

One trend that I am seeing though is a slow and steady increase in search engine traffic and decrease in social traffic which would seem to correspond with my reduced activity in the social sites. Even though traffic levels have remained largely consistent over the last few months, where it is coming from is slowly shifting. Search engine traffic is always a good thing because it doesn’t require maintenance. This is unlike social traffic which requires constant participation to continue to bring in large benefits.

Amusing Keywords

I don’t usually pay much attention to the keywords that send me traffic as I just write about whatever I feel like and don’t pay all that much attention to SEO (maybe I should now that I am getting so much more search traffic than I used to!) but I did notice a phrase that made me laugh near the top of my stats. “caroline middlebrook is a loser” brought me 43 visitors! I tried the search myself but nothing came up so I’m not too sure where that came from but you’re know you’re famous when that many people are doing searches like that :-)

So, amused by that one I had a dig through to see if I could come up with any other amusing ones:

“i want to be rich”

“keep it dirty”

“lolcats look at my balls”

“ethics of begging”

“monetize my porno collection”

“find out when cats puke and when its bad for them”

“I’ll keep your dirty secret”

Conclusion

Much the same this month but I feel as though the introduction of the lightbox to plug the new Bloggers Bible is going to have quite a positive impact on overall subscriber levels. I’ll be monitoring it closely and tweaking it on a weekly basis to make it as effective as possible. Judging from the early results, it is here to stay so If you are one of the people who does not like it and would prefer not to see it but you still want to read my blog, I can highly recommend the offline RSS reader called Feed Demon.

This is now free software (I had to pay for my copy!) and it’s great. One of my favourite features is that it synchronises with newsgator an online reader which means that you can install it on multiple computers (I have it on my desktop PC and on my laptop) and they are both kept in sync. And because its an offline reader, there’s no ads, unlike some of the online ones.

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