Welcome to the 16th 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 March 2016, and now that April 2016 has ended, it is time to share those figures too! So how'd we do? Read on to find out!
Living the Dream's April 2016 Traffic
Our traffic for April 2016 was approximately 38,750 page views.
When compared to our traffic in March, our April traffic was down by 0.5% on a per day basis. When comparing March 2015 to March 2016 our traffic was up by 68%.
Our content audit from March (where we deleted roughly 250 articles off our site) produced no negative impact on our search traffic apart from a few (1-5) new 404 errors per day that were quickly dealt with. As SEO tends to take a few months before you start seeing any positive results, we're going to hold off until June or July to begin our next SEO overhaul to see if deleting roughly 25% of our articles provided any benefit to our traffic and click-through rates.
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic was approximately 37,900 page views. This was a gain of approximately 18% from the previous month and puts us back in line with traffic we saw earlier in the year. We are finishing a Facebook advertising campaign that is currently increasing our click-through rate by 100-200%. If we can sustain this in the next month we can either increase our traffic for the same amount of money, or (more likely) start reducing our spending to maintain the same traffic levels we have now.
This will be a hard choice as we always face the burden of re-investing our income vs realizing it as profit, and right now we're leaning towards the latter for the next few months.
Onward!
Living the Dream's April 2016 Income
Our booked income for April 2016 was approximately $700.
April saw an income drop for us mostly because we did not take on any new freelance assignments for the month. One thing worth noting is that we are now seeing sustained earnings on Amazon, Booking.com, and Adsense after recent optimizations in February and March- to the tune of roughly $100 per month on each network.
This is important for two reasons- first, it means we're properly optimized to the point that we're making decent money (and amply covering our base costs) and second, these are tied to traffic so any viral surges (which are common on our local blog) can be monetized effectively. Just this past week we had two $10 days on Adsense alone thanks to a few traffic boosts, and had we not optimized our ads we likely would've barely made 5% of that.
What happens when that happens more frequently as our sites grow? More money!
Our earning dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
Advertisements: $375
Amazon Affiliates: $60
Hotel Affiliates: $110
Adsense: $155
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 April 2016 Expenses
Our spending for the month of April included the following:
Social Media Advertising: $350
Mailchimp Fee: $35
Staff Payment: $25
Camera Gear: $100
Total: $510
Our spending for the month of April was low as we had very few staff articles come in (this will be picking up over the summer thanks to a new team member joining in a few months). The only notable expenditure was for some extra memory cards and camera batteries for our upcoming trip to Iceland. Our Facebook advertising was also a little high as we are working on an optimization test, and once we finish that study we will likely pull back on ads to start reducing our advertising expenses moving on while (hopefully) maintaining our current traffic levels from the social network.
Goals for May 2016
May is going to be one of those months where nothing happens. Sorry!
We have a few small changes were going to make on some of our internal pages, and past that we are not planning any new tests for a number of reasons:
- We want to take some time to see if our recent social media optimizations and content audits remain/become effective. This is one of the downsides of writing a blogging insider series vs. going full steam ahead.
- We want to see if our latent income streams hold as viable options for when we grow (they should).
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we're going on vacation.
Unfortunately for you I'm going to be a horrible travel blogger and not live blog my vacation. We're shutting off completely while in Iceland and won't publish a single thing until after we return home. Since we've not been on a real vacation in ages (and have worked 10-14 hour days for far too long), it is time to enjoy ourselves and not think of the blogs for a bit.
You'll just have to wait until the end of the month to see how it all went!
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