Welcome to the 17th 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 April 2016, and now that May 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 May 2016 Traffic
Our traffic for May 2016 was approximately 40,500 page views.
When compared to our traffic in April, our May traffic was up by 1% on a per day basis and was a new record! When comparing March 2015 to March 2016 our traffic was up by 65%.
We are now starting to see a slight boost in Google impressions and traffic, on the order of 10-20%, which we believe is a result of the article deletion push we made a few months prior as no algorithm changes have been reported.
Unfortunately, this gain started towards the end of the month, so we'll have to let June run its course to confirm that we are seeing higher-than-average growth. But since we did nothing to progress our site in May, and even went on vacation and put everything on autopilot for two weeks (with some marketing channels turned off altogether), we'll take that- it's only going to get better now that we have the time to work on it.
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic was approximately 32,500 page views. This was a drop of approximately 14% from the previous month and is similar to the traffic we had in March. As we mentioned in previous reports, our traffic ranges from 30,000 to 55,000 per month and the higher end is typically tied to posts going viral on Facebook, which we did not seem to have happen in May (and we also did not market on all of our channels when we were on vacation, as above). We are seeing rapid growth in our search engine referrals, on the order of 3,000-5,000 page views per month now, which should keep rising as we grow and produce more content in the future.
Onward!
Living the Dream's May 2016 Income
Our booked income for May 2016 was approximately $1,045.
We had a nice balance income streams for the month including a few promising advertising inquiries and our latent income sources holding up from the changes we made earlier in the year.
Our earning dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
Advertisements: $675
Amazon Affiliates and CPM: $150
Hotel Affiliates: $95
Adsense: $125
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 May 2016 Expenses
Our spending for the month of May included the following:
Social Media Advertising: $265
Mailchimp Fee: $45
Staff Payment: $75
Total: $385
Our spending for the month of May was towards our lower average as we did not work on our sites too much thanks to our scheduled vacation- hooray!
Goals for June 2016
Now that we are back from our vacation we have a number of new site goals we want to work on in the coming months. A few of the upcoming projects include the following:
- We are starting to see positive results from our article deletion campaign from the beginning of the year, and as a result are looking into deleting more irrelevant posts in the future to keep the SEO improvements coming. A more recent site audit has shown that over half of our posts contribute less than 10% of our overall traffic, most with no traffic at all, and is something we need to look into closer to help out with our site's overall SEO. June will include another round of deleting posts that will take is down another couple hundred.
- We found out that our local blog is quite popular on Pinterest despite letting it go on autopilot since we founded it in May 2015. We are now making a push to build custom pins for all of our current articles and get them scheduled over the coming months using Viraltag. As nearly all of our pins get repinned a few times (with some in the low hundreds!), this is a new traffic source we hope to exploit moving forward as our collection is now robust enough to make a huge dent into this social network.
- We are also going to be publishing a lot of new content from our trip to Iceland, and hope to have the first post live within the week!
Overall, I'm pleased with how thing are going, especially in that the world did not fall apart while we were away (not that we were worried). I have a lot of free time coming up throughout June and I look forward to getting through my to do list to help grow our sites more in the coming year!
You'll just have to wait until the end of the month to see how it all went!
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