Welcome to the tenth entry in our monthly income and traffic report!
In this series we share our traffic, earning, and spending figures each month so you can get a glimpse inside the business of travel blogging. In addition to sharing these for your use, by publishing our information we are also able to stay on track with our own goals for our business.
Last month we shared our results from September, and now that October has ended, it is time to share those figures too! So how'd we do? Read on to find out!
Living the Dream's October 2015 Traffic
Our traffic for October 2015 was approximately 27,000 page views.
When compared to our traffic in September, our October traffic was down by 6% on a per day basis and when comparing October 2015 to October 2014 our traffic was up by 55%.
Much like last month, our decrease was all Google related (with a slight decrease on Twitter and Facebook because we traveled a bit and weren't on the networks as much this month). Although there have been some algorithm changes on Google's end, our research suggests that we were not affected but rather it is just a slow period for those terms.
We'll know more for sure in the next few months when our traffic historically picks back up again.
Living the Dream's October 2015 Income
Our booked income for October 2015 was approximately $650.
It seems to be a going trend in the advertising front that inquiries are up and actual income is down. To make matters worse, one of the big projects we were waiting on hearing back from fell through, making October a pretty average month through and through.
Our earning dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
Direct Advertising: $470
Amazon Affiliates: $30
Adsense: $7
Living the Dream Services: $200
Want to support our site in your travels? Our Book Your Trip page has affiliate links to all of the services we personally use and recommend when traveling and blogging. By making a purchase through our links we'll receive a small commission and the price you pay will not change.
Living the Dream's October 2015 Expenses
Our spending for the month of October included the following:
Social Media Advertising: $230
Staff Payments: $100
Services Renewals: $175
Theme Renewals: $89
Conference Ticket: $129
Total: $723
Apparently October of last year was the month when I purchased the most services that had annual renewals, and we had nearly $275 come in that required payment. As most of you know, I try and avoid these as much as I can, but unfortunately there are just a few things you can't get around and it is never a fun month when they come up!
Throw in a few more services, staff payments, and an increase in social media advertising (mostly Facebook), and you have another high month in spending. Luckily, since we're trying to break even for the year, we didn't go over by too much!
Goals for November 2015
We have a few main goals for the month of November for our sites.
Now that Discover the Burgh is up and running, we have a few targets we're going to be pushing aggressively in November:
- We're now experiencing rapid growth both in traffic and Facebook fans. October saw over a 100% gain in traffic (to 2,500 monthly views) and an increase in Facebook fans by over 2,000. We're going to be pushing this growth through new marketing ideas to keep things going, plus trying some new ideas to bring our other social channels up to the same growth we've seen on Facebook.
- Although we're not doing any advertising yet, we're going to start speaking with members of our community to form partnerships that we can later convert into advertising revenue- notably around hotel affiliates and select commission based systems. Our site is still relatively young, so we may take a few more months before getting underway with this, but we're getting the ball rolling now and will see where we end up as we continue building our community.
For Living the Dream, we're also approaching affiliate marketing to generate more latent income that will help us reduce our dependency on direct advertising (and its inherent variability).
This topic is always a struggle with general blogs, so we have a few ideas on how to convert sales. The first is through targeted hotel advertising (which is now live on our sidebar, footer, and in the body of our top 50 articles) and is something we're going to monitor and alter over the coming weeks as we find out what works and what does not. We know we can influence purchases and travel decisions with our blog, but so far converting those into immediate sales has been a struggle. If we can change that this month we'd be very pleased.
On both sites we're also going to be launching our first Black Friday promotion at the end of November, and will see if there is any lessons learned there as well since this is a section of online marketing we've typically avoided in the past.
Will it work? We're not really sure, but that is what we're going to find out! Check back in November to see how we did!
