Welcome to the second entry in our monthly income and traffic report! Last month we launched this series by sharing our figures from January 2015, and are continuing on again to recap February.
Each month we are planning on sharing our traffic, earning, and spending figures so you can get a glimpse inside the business of travel blogging. We are also doing this as a way to help keep ourselves on track for our traffic and revenue goals for the year.
How'd we do in February? Read on to find out!
Living the Dream's February 2015 Traffic
Our traffic for February 2015 was approximately 17,700 pageviews.
I never liked traffic in February for two reasons. First, the month is short, so our monthly pageviews are inherently low when compared to other months. Second, on the whole our traffic for February is often the lowest of the year even when accounting for this shortage of days. So when we say that our traffic this month was 60% better than in February 2014, and about 4% higher than January 2015 (when using per-day averages), you can imagine that we we are very excited about it.
Overall, I think we are working well towards our traffic target by the end of the year but it is far to early to predict what will happen in the future. Will there be a huge spike of traffic in the summer? Will it stay at the end of the year when we typically see a small drop? It is hard to say, but I am encouraged by what is happening so far as we're already breaking away from historical trends.
The next few months will be key to see if we are doing well and will also be time for us to begin more aggressive advertising campaigns to help reach our target.
Living the Dream's February 2015 Income
Our booked income for February 2015 was approximately $775 .
It is worth noting that this feature illustrates our booked income for the month. This is not the income we actually received, but is instead all the income we have confirmed agreements for that were arranged within the month. Some work may be finished, others may not, and a slim percent (hopefully none) may fall through in the coming weeks. But since this is how life is online, this is how we have decided to display our income in this series.
This dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
- Direct Advertising: $315
- Amazon Affiliates: $30
- Other Affiliates: $19
- External Work: $375
- Media Sales: $32
- Adsense: $4
Overall, February had one of our highest booked incomes on both Amazon affiliates and external work orders. Our direct advertising sales were lower this month due to a reduced number of inquiries, which is always all over the place. The site improvements I plan on making in the coming months will hopefully start improving our sales in the latter categories, as direct advertising is something I've never been fond of.
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. 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 February 2015 Spending
Our spending for the month of February included the following:
- Social Media Advertising: $33
- Developer Work: $70
- Staff Payments: $100
- Domain Renewals: $10
- Total: $213
Overall, our spending for February was down significantly from January- mostly thanks to reduced work that I needed my developer to do. I had a few small changes to make for a new promotional series (see below) and to provide a better user experience after playing with our new template more. Pending no critical website changes I think I have finally finished my development work for the new theme. Hooray!
Now that our expenses from them migration are winding down, I'm able to free up some of our income to invest in a more aggressive advertising campaign. (This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time but have been unable to do until now). Hooray!
Goals for March 2015
In February we started launching a few projects as a means to increase our subscribers, page views, and revenue streams. A few of these included giving away a digital copy of our book, The Long-Term Traveler's Guide, to subscribers on our mailing list (and using a healthy sign-up hustle), as well as launching a new Top 100 series for our #myRTW feature as a new navigation option for readers to reach posts on our site.
As of now, I can easily say that both were a huge success as our newsletter subscribers jumped from 2-3 per day to 15 per day (or more) and our Top 100 series is set to help improve our pageviews and time on site. Unfortunately, as these were launched toward the end of the month, March will include some time tailoring these features to optimize their performance (including the bulk of the Top 100 publications as we've only published two out of ten so far).
Likewise, on the income front I'm getting settled in on a few freelancing networks to help supplement our income with writing, and am hoping to start receiving a steady workflow in March. But now that two of my major projects from February are pretty much running themselves, I am now free to start on a few others that may have a more immediate income boost.
We'll let you know at the end of March how it is going!
