Welcome to the 13th 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 December 2015, and now that January 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 January 2016 Traffic
Our traffic for January 2016 was approximately 40,000 page views.
When compared to our traffic in December, our January traffic was up by an incredible 32% on a per day average. When comparing January 2015 to January 2016 our traffic was up by 112%.
I'm really excited about this because, first off, this is one of the biggest leaps in traffic we've seen since migrating from Blogger to WordPress in December 2014, but also because this traffic appears to be sustained traffic based on our current marketing platform. As a result, we thoroughly expect to see roughly the same daily visitors moving into February which is a very encouraging start to 2016.
Another great milestone that happened in January is that we hit our 1,000,000th page view. It has taken quite a bit of time (considering we're seven-plus years old) but I am really thrilled to hit this milestone, especially that hitting the next million is going to be that much easier with our current traffic. Progress!
On the Discover the Burgh front, the newest site in our brand, we had another huge leap from 19,800 monthly page views in December to over 50,000 page views in January- a gain of over 150%. For those who are doing the math, this means our seven month old site is 25% larger than Living the Dream- a site that has been open for seven years. On one hand it is a bit deflating to not be there yet with this site, but on the other hand it is nice that it is one of our sites growing so rapidly for a change!
Unlike Living the Dream, where the traffic we saw in January is sustained, Discover the Burgh's growth last month appeared to be mostly due to one post going extremely viral, and a few others getting rather good traction across social media as well. Removing these, our baseline traffic was still well over 35,000- another healthy 50%+ gain over the previous month. That being said, we are quickly discovering that this site has huge potential for any article to receive a viral boost, so I thoroughly expect to see these surges rather consistently in the coming months.
Suffice it to say, 2016 is going to be exciting for us.
Living the Dream's January 2016 Income
Our booked income for January 2016 was approximately $880.
In December we had a boost in income upwards of $2,000 thanks to one freelancing campaign coming in, and as we expected, that did not happen in January. Our income dropped back to what we've been normally seeing throughout late 2015 and I was not surprised by this in the least as we still have yet to start monetizing Discover the Burgh. We love to play the long game when blogging, so although this will be coming in 2016, it will still be a few months away.
Our earning dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
Direct Advertising: $780
Amazon Affiliates: $85
Adsense: $15
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 January 2016 Expenses
Our spending for the month of January included the following:
Social Media Advertising: $395
Staff Payments: $325
Plug-In Purchase: $37
Total: $757
As our income dropped back down to what it was like in previous months, we also made sure to keep our spending in check. Although higher than normal thanks to some extra staff payments, I'm glad we're still under what we brought in!
Our only outlying purchase this month was for the OIOpublisher plug-in, a premium plug-in to help facilitate advertising sales that we will be using as we begin to monetize Discover the Burgh and increase our monetization here at Living the Dream. I haven't had a chance to play with the plug-in yet, but when we do expect a full review. (To read more about it, click our affiliate link in this paragraph.)
Goals for February 2016
Our February goals are focusing on two major tasks to help us achieve our 2016 goals that were outlined in our January income report.
The first is through expanding our social media marketing. We are completing a comprehensive study on Instagram this month on a test account, and we've found some encouraging results that we will begin leveraging on our main accounts. We also have plans to overhaul our marketing platforms on Twitter and Facebook to help encourage more engagement, picking up a new audience, and ultimately bringing in more page views to our articles. Although this will primarily be focused on Living the Dream, since Discover the Burgh is taking care of itself, we always like to see what we can find to leverage across all our brands.
Be sure to keep up-to-date with our Blog Your Trip directory as we'll be sharing key lessons learned whenever they come up!
Our second goal for February is building our contact database for partners in Pittsburgh. We began our outreach to get in touch with key marketers in the city in January, and will be continuing this outreach throughout February. Our first round of plans does not involve using this as a monetization effort, but as the relationships develop and we move forward demonstrating our capabilities, I am certain we will get there.
Finally, our goals for February are going to be somewhat reduced from normal because of two reasons. First, I'll be traveling to Venice for my day job for a training seminar, and compared to other places I've been you won't hear me complaining in the slightest (especially because it is Carnival!). The second is that we're also planning another trip thanks to an impulse purchase we just made on an incredible deal to Iceland! So although we're still pursuing our site goals throughout the month, we have a few things to juggle now along with that.
Check back in February and we'll let you know how we did!
