Welcome to the sixth 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 May, and now that June has ended, it is time to share those figures too! So how'd we do? Read on to find out!
Living the Dream's June 2015 Traffic
Our traffic for June 2015 was just over 26,300 page views.
When compared to our traffic in May, our June traffic was up by 10% on a per day basis. Likewise, when comparing June 2015 to June 2014, our traffic was up by 67%.
This is the first month where I can say that our WordPress migration and SEO overhaul is working. Since December, our Google traffic has gone up 200-300%, our average time on page is up 50%, and we have not seen an explosion in social media referrals that we could attribute growth to (although optimizing that is on our to do list)- it has been purely search engine increases.
If we experience similar growth in July, and I have no reason to expect otherwise at this point, our traffic will have doubled in just six months.
I'm okay with that.Living the Dream's June 2015 Income
Our booked income for June 2015 was approximately $675.
Overall this is a significant improvement over May, where we only made $200, but this could be better. Unfortunately we did not receive any freelancing assignments for June, so our "consistent" income stream was, sadly, zero. Oh well. We've had other inquiries that we're chasing down that will more than make up for that if all goes well, but we won't find out the status of those until July.
This dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
- Direct Advertising: $450
- Book Sales: $12
- Amazon Affiliates: $28
- Other Affiliates: $177
- External Work: $0
- Media Sales: $0
- Adsense: $12
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 June 2015 Spending
Our spending for the month of June included the following:
- Social Media Advertising: $111
- Staff Payments: $125
- New Camera and Gear: $1,500
- Total: $1,736
As you can tell, the really big outlier in our spending this month is on a new camera. I don't really have the money to buy a new camera, but having yet another Sony camera go out on us made me go out and fix that for good (and yes, I still bought another Sony... sigh). That put a few of the major site purchases I wanted to make on the back-burner, but at the end of the day having a good camera for media acquisition is essential for doing what we do.
We'll just have to wait until July for some of our other planned purchases.
Goals for July 2015
I have a few goals for the month of July, most of which revolve around getting our new website, Discover the Burgh, off the ground. We're in a mad dash to get 100 articles on the site which means a lot of exploring the city, lots of social media shares, and a whole lot of writing.
I'm also going to be in the process of determining if I want to hire a virtual assistant to help out with our quest to expand our reach on social media, with a focused effort on Pinterest. I was intending to do that this month, but the camera purchase really put any other site investments to a halt.
Oh the joys of moving and having huge credit card bills.Once we get those items out of the way, we can then tackle other big plans we have to encourage site growth and increased revenue. But we'll have to talk about those next month as I have a feeling they're going to be August activities.
We'll let you know at the end of July how it is going!
