Welcome to the 19th 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 June 2016, and now that July 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 July 2016 Traffic
Our traffic for July 2016 was approximately 42,500 page views.
When compared to our traffic in June, our July traffic was up by just over 4% on a per day basis. When comparing July 2015 to July 2016 our traffic was up by 62%.
This month we have noticed an uptick in traffic on two fronts. The first, as has been the case in previous months, is improved Google page views were up on the order of approximately 5%. The second is a new focus on Pinterest, despite the fact that I said I was going to give up last month.
We made an abrupt change and hired a VA halfway through the month after some prodding by a few friends. It may only amount to an extra 3,000 page views per month right now, but we expect this one to grow quite rapidly over the coming months as the trend is pointing up!
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic was just under 46,000 page views- a 66% increase in traffic from June. Like on Living the Dream, our traffic increased here primarily for two reasons. The first is that we saw an increase in Google traffic by 20%- now up to 6,000 monthly page views. The second is that we put more effort into our Facebook advertising and saw a recovery of all the traffic we had lost previously from scaling back. And although we did see a major decrease in reach as a result of this month's algorithm change, our click-throughs have actually increased on popular/frequently shared posts. I'll take that over reach any day!
Onward!
Living the Dream's July 2016 Income
Our booked income for July 2016 was approximately $390.
This month was rather light in terms of income, mostly because we are in talks for a few campaigns that have not come through just yet (but should any day now). This means we had no direct advertising orders, and relied purely on our latent income streams for the month.
Our earning dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
Amazon Affiliates and CPM: $215
Hotel Affiliates: $50
Adsense: $125
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Living the Dream's July 2016 Expenses
Our spending for the month of June included the following:
Social Media Advertising: $325
Mailchimp Fee: $50
Staff Payment: $100
Domain Renewals: $15
Opt-in Monster Renewal: $199
Total: $689
This month's spending was high mostly from a renewal of the Opt-in Monster plug-in. Coupled that with a low earning month and you have one of the few months of the year where we've gone negative in net income. But this level of spending will now be our new normal, as our staff payments will go up considerably thanks to our add-on of a Pinterest VA.
That being said, since we're reinvesting all of our income for the time being, this does help us off-set some of our income from previous months. So it is all a wash in a way, and I'm more than okay with that for now.
Goals for August 2016
Every few months we have a month where we do not focus much on site growth, but instead stay the course. August will be one of those months.
The reason for this is because we are feeling rather behind on writing actual articles as our effort into building traffic and income have taken up the bulk of our time over the previous months. So in August we're going to let everything go on autopilot from the growth standpoint, and focus instead on writing a lot of articles to help fill out our backlog. There are a few side projects planned, but nothing too crazy overall.
The only notable exception is that we are attending a food and beverage conference in Pittsburgh and hope to network with food writers from national media outlets and meet a lot of great business owners in the process. That I can handle.
You'll just have to wait until the end of the month to see how it all went!
