Welcome to the 15th 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 February 2016, and now that March 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 March 2016 Traffic
Our traffic for February 2016 was approximately 40,250 page views (a new record!).
When compared to our traffic in February, our March traffic was up by 2.5% on a per day basis. When comparing March 2015 to March 2016 our traffic was up by 82%.
We did not do much in March to try to increase our traffic; however, towards the end of the month we began a content audit which involved deleting approximately 25% of our articles (nearly 300) as well as starting an SEO campaign on our top 200 articles to improve search impressions and click-through rates. I expect to start seeing results from this in April, but as this campaign will take a few months (and lead times on SEO updates can be long as well), this may take a while.
On the Discover the Burgh front, the newest site in our brand, our traffic was approximately 32,000 page views. Much like on Living the Dream we did not have enough time to spend promoting our articles, so our page views dropped accordingly. Our subscribers did increase quite a bit during the month and we are at just under 2,000 newsletter subscribers and over 30,000 Facebook fans which is quite impressive for a nine month old site.
Onward!
Living the Dream's March 2016 Income
Our booked income for March 2016 was approximately $1,420.
March was a great month for us on income because just about every outlet we have for monetization brought something in. We had one advertisement order, one large freelancing assignment, a lot of hotel bookings, a huge increase in Adsense thanks to an overhaul we did on our display ads, and many more.
Our earning dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
Advertisements: $400
Amazon Affiliates: $80
Freelance Writing: $750
Hotel Affiliates: $72
Other Affiliates: $37
Adsense: $80
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 2016 Expenses
Our spending for the month of March included the following:
Social Media Advertising: $350
Mailchimp Fee: $30
Staff Payment: $25
Total: $405
Overall, our spending for the month of March was low as I was trying to behave after our over-spending in February. Since we had a surge in income for the month, this was a welcomed change of pace.
We are also getting to the point where we are able to offset our base expenses (~$300-$400/month) with our latent income like Adsense and Amazon Affiliates. This means that with no advertising sales we should be able to maintain nearly all of our spending and remain cash positive. Anything after that is, well, profit (or can be reinvested accordingly). Yay!
Goals for April 2016
One of my big goals for March was to begin an outreach campaign to help promote our most popular articles to the world. This involved identifying the articles, logging and organizing them, and then finally sending notifications out to relevant brands and businesses who may be interested in sharing them with their fans.
Naturally, for 500 custom articles this takes a lot of time. By the end of March we had successfully organized all of our articles and began sharing them with relevant users and brands (on both sites). As we are set to reach out to hundreds, if not thousands of brands and relevant personalities, we're planing for this one to take the better part of the year as an on-going project (and to be honest, it is extremely boring so we're going slow with it).
As mentioned above, we also started a site audit where we deleted irrelevant posts and began overhauling the SEO in our top performing articles. Article deletion is easy. Overhauling SEO on good articles, not so much. We've begun looking up targeted keywords for the top performing articles on our site, and will begin overhauling a few key placements to improve SEO in these in the coming weeks and months. (Right now the plan is coming together, and we're waiting to see if the deletion had any effect first before instituting another change. Expect a full post soon!)
If all goes well we hope to see a rather large surge in traffic, and since we spent the better part of March optimizing our advertising for latent income generation, these two should work hand-in-hand to grow our revenue moving forward.
Check back in April and we'll let you know how we did!
