Welcome to the 11th 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 October, and now that November has ended, it is time to share those figures too! So how'd we do? Read on to find out!
Living the Dream's November 2015 Traffic
Our traffic for November 2015 was approximately 28,400 page views.
When compared to our traffic in October, our November traffic was up by 8.5% on a per day basis and when comparing November 2015 to November 2014 our traffic was up by 95%.
Overall our traffic appears to be turning around after the lull from September and October, and if the last few days of the month are any indication, December may be our best month yet thanks to a few site changes we made that we'll highlight more below.
On the Discover the Burgh front, the newest site in our brand, we skyrocketed from 2,500 monthly page views in October to over 12,500 page views in November- a gain of 400%! This was a result of a few videos and articles going somewhat viral on Facebook, causing us to gain over 4,000 fans over the course of the month which is still going strong. Considering our newest business model has this site as a key feature for revenue generation, I'm pretty excited to see how fast it is coming along in its first six months.
Living the Dream's November 2015 Income
Our booked income for November 2015 was approximately $665.
Now that we've had several months with Living the Dream's income being relatively stagnant, I'm thoroughly prepared for it to remain that way for quite some time. One thing I'm really excited to see, however, is the rise in our affiliate advertising, which jumped from around $30-$40 per month to nearly $200 for the month of November- most of which being through hotel affiliates thanks to a recent overhaul we did on our most popular articles (a full how-to post is coming soon).
Do not be surprised if this income remains flat for several months until we get our monetization plan in place for Discover the Burgh, which we think can outpace this site ten-fold if done right- and that goal is for the first year alone.
Our earning dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
Direct Advertising: $440
Amazon Affiliates: $93
Adsense: $5
Book Sales: $3
Hotel Affiliates: $79
Other Affiliates: $45
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 November 2015 Expenses
Our spending for the month of November included the following:
Social Media Advertising: $240
Staff Payments: $100
Upgrading to a Premium Server Space on BlueHost: $100
Total: $440
Our spending for the month of November went up on social media- as expected thanks to our gradual marketing budget increases, and down for our staff payments- something we planned well in advance for.
We've been light on staff articles over the past few months (this was planned ahead of time), and although that has been a bit of a downside for us as we're wanting to publish more content, there have been many internal reasons why we have scaled back for the time being. That being said, the waiting game is over as the Morgans from Morgans Go Travelling will be publishing new articles on Living the Dream again from their travels in the USA very soon! (...and RTW Rylei will be bringing great content from Antarctica when she returns shortly, too!)
For what it is worth, the upcoming schedule will have been worth the wait.
Site-wise, the upgrade to BlueHost Pro was something I've been wanting to do for a while, but I've had to push off thanks to incidental spending over the last few months. My reason for upgrading this server is simple- after running the new site on the current server for the past year things have slowed down, primarily due to the traffic increase we've received. As an attempt to help speed up our site more, which will allow for more visitors to enjoy our articles in the future, it was time for a server upgrade. After speaking with tech savvy friends, we settled on the BlueHost Pro service and are quite satisfied with how it is all going so far, although the change was made just a few days ago so it is too soon to comment yet.
As with everything blogging related on this site, once we can fully evaluated the pros and cons of making the switch, you can be certain there will be an article about it.
Goals for December 2015
We have a few main goals for the month of December for our sites.
Now that Discover the Burgh is past the threshold of receiving 10,000 monthly page views, we have a few new targets we're going to pursue:
- The first is the introduction of a monthly contest to help encourage our fans on social media (and their friends) to subscribe to our monthly newsletter. Our first contest is now live, and currently performing better than any contest we've hosted on Living the Dream. I thoroughly expect our final spending to be under $0.25 per newsletter subscriber, which is not bad at all when you really think about it!
- The second is we're going to be pursuing forming partnership with businesses in the city, and already have our first hotel stay in the works to kick-start our affiliate marketing. This one will be slow to develop, but once it is there, it should take off quite rapidly!
On Living the Dream we're going to be looking more into our affiliate marketing and how we can continue the gains we made in November for our hotel affiliated advertising. Although our Black Friday promotion didn't come up to what we had hoped for, the hotel affiliates has so far exceeded our goals, so we definitely think this is going to be a valuable place where we can improve upon in the future.
Check back in January and we'll let you know how we did!
