Welcome to the third entry in our monthly income and traffic report!
In this series we are planning on sharing 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 targets from February, and now that March has ended, it is time to share those figures too! So how'd we do? Read on to find out!
Living the Dream's March 2015 Traffic
Our traffic for March 2015 was just over 22,000 page views.
When compared to our traffic in February, our March traffic was up by 13% on a per day basis. Likewise, when comparing March 2015 to March 2014, our traffic was up by 66% - continuing the trend we saw in February.
The bulk of our work in February to increase page views revolved around two things. The first was launching our ten-part Top 100 #myRTW Travel Experiences countdown and the second was putting a focused effort on Pinterest as a means to drive traffic to our site.
Our Top 100 countdown was designed to share our favorite travel experiences around the world while also being a navigation feature which linked to several hundred of our top blog posts. Our goal in this series was to increase page views not only through views of the entire series (10 pages) but also through increased views of our relevant blog posts. Our traffic to this series was approximately 20 page views per day at the beginning of March (with just 2 entries published), and is now exceeding 100 page views per day (3,000 per month) by the end of March after we published the entire list on March 27th.
The second traffic target we worked on in March was a more aggressive campaign on Pinterest to drive page views over to our articles. The work here included making customized pins for our most popular articles (roughly 100 posts, see an example here) and creating a customized board for our Top 100 countdown as well. Throughout March our traffic from Pinterest was approximately 1,300 page views, up from 450 page views in February, making Pinterest our best referring social network of the month.
We will be continuing our work on Pinterest in April to try and replicate that surge in traffic and make the large repinning days we witnessed in March (roughly 2-3 and 200 page views each) occur a daily basis.
Living the Dream's March 2015 Income
Our booked income for March 2015 was approximately $2,000.
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: $1,000
- Amazon Affiliates: $24
- Other Affiliates: $0
- External Work: $860
- Media Sales: $0
- Adsense: $5
Overall, March was a great month as we had a large advertising order and also had a significant increase in external work orders. We're working towards increasing our external work orders more in the coming months, but as of now we think it is going in a great direction (up!).
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 March 2015 Spending
Our spending for the month of March included the following:
Overall, our spending for the month of March was up over February because of a few annual renewals for services and a professional organization membership. As you may know from previous reports, I tend to not purchase these very often so I won't be having these expenses every month. But as with most expenses, there is always something you do not expect.
Either way, March was a great month in terms of our earnings and we're hoping for more improvements in the next few months.
Goals for April 2015
We have a couple pretty interesting targets in mind for April.
First off, we're going to continue to put emphasis on our Top 100 series and Pinterest to try and increase page views on our site. If our traffic maintains its pace on the Top 100 series like it was at the end of March, we'll increase our overall monthly page views by roughly 6,000- a gain of 25%. Likewise, if we can crack Pinterest and get our custom images shared more frequently, we could have a traffic gain of 3,000 page views per month or more by the end of April (and that is being conservative).
The second goal for April is our pending launch of an interesting campaign to try and bring in a new revenue stream here on the site. I'm planning on writing an in-depth post on what we are doing for this one, and since we haven't launched it yet I'm going to keep quiet about it for now. If it works you'll hear more. If it doesn't, well, we'll see if we put it out there!
Finally, I'm going to begin testing more aggressive social media advertising towards the end of the month. As of now I've reported on how our Facebook ads have performed by country, and I'm finishing out a testing plan to take that to the next level.
We'll let you know at the end of April how it is going!
