Welcome to the 14th 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 January 2016, and now that February 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 February 2016 Traffic
Our traffic for February 2016 was approximately 37,000 page views.
When compared to our traffic in January, our February traffic was down by 2% on a per day average. When comparing February 2015 to February 2016 our traffic was up by 115%.
Overall, I'm not thrilled by the fact that our growth was relatively flat in February but, considering we did very little work to help promote the site over that period other than our standard marketing, the fact that we held our huge gain from January certainly says a lot. We have a huge marketing push coming and hope to be changing this one substantially in the months moving forward.
On the Discover the Burgh front, the newest site in our brand, our traffic was at approximately 42,000 page views- down 19% on a per day basis from January. Although this is the first month where we've had a decrease in traffic on our newest site, there is a reason for this.
Roughly 20,000 page views from our record high of 55,000 in January came from one post that went viral in the region. Removing this article's traffic from the figure would've put our January traffic at approximately 35,000 views (a 50% gain from December on its own, I may note). Towards the end of January we could see the decrease in traffic returning to a baseline, but considering we ended this month at 42,000 page views, we were pretty happy. That is an effective growth of approximately 20% on a per day basis.
Onward!
Living the Dream's February 2016 Income
Our booked income for February 2016 was approximately $240.
Unfortunately, due to a computer crash I lost my data for the month of January and the figures reported this month are mostly estimates as I have not had time to rebuild my spreadsheet yet.
Our direct advertising is down (we took in no new ads this month), but we've been aggressively pursuing affiliate campaigns which have been paying off nicely- including a few hotel bookings on our local site! As this is one of the primary income streams we're targeting to grow in 2016, it is nice to see some more bookings come our way.
Our earning dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
Amazon Affiliates: $50
Hotel Affiliates: $125
Other Affiliates: $37
Adsense: $30
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 February 2016 Expenses
Our spending for the month of February included the following:
Social Media Advertising: $350
Domain Renewals: $40
Plug-In Renewals: $45
Professional Association Renewal: $75
Camera Equipment: $450
Total: $960
Do you remember a few months back where I highlighted that I wasn't really planning on spending more than I make in any given month? Well, oops.
This month our initial spending was going to be low, but we booked an impulse trip to Iceland that I just had to have a new camera lens for. (That logic works, right?) And by one lens, I mean two. A day after booking our trip I wound up purchasing a 16mm f/2.8 prime lens for my Sony a6000, as well as the 12mm f/2.8 UWA adapter which works on both that and my 20mm prime (knocking it down to 16mm).
Did I need the lens? Not really, but it certainly will work wonderfully on our trip to Iceland and I'm already marketing a few new services locally that will help me pay it off rather quickly. Overall, I'll call that a good enough reason.
Goals for March 2016
Our goals in February were to begin a new marketing campaign for our sites to help bring in more traffic, subscribers, and revenue. As this plan involves a comprehensive outreach campaign on our part, we're still in the process of putting it all together. The first step was to log all of the articles and updates we wanted to promote, of which we found 500 or so, and the next step is to put it into action.
This is one of those goals that is going to span several months, so for now we're going to say that this one is underway and will be a primary target of ours in the coming months.
I am also happy to say that our Instagram test report that we published in February is still carrying on strong (now at 10k subscribers), and we're now adopting the test plan onto our main accounts throughout February and March.
Finally, we have our first local hotel stay scheduled in March which will help give us even more of a push into the hotel affiliate market that we are aggressively jumping into. Overall a lot of fun things going on, but also a lot of background work that isn't really exciting to talk about until we get the results.
Check back in March and we'll let you know how we did!
