Welcome to the seventh entry in our monthly income and traffic report!
In this series we are planning on sharing 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 targets from June, and now that July 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 2015 Traffic
Our traffic for July 2015 was just under 30,100 page views.
When compared to our traffic in June, our July traffic was up by 11% on a per day basis. Likewise, when comparing July 2015 to July 2014, our traffic was up by 71%.
This is a new record traffic month for Living the Dream, and have been seeing continued growth on a per day basis ever since migrating to WordPress in December and performing our SEO overhaul in early January.
July's spike in traffic has one notable contributor, and it is because we were name dropped in the NY Times! We've been waiting for this article to come out for a while now, and before we were even notified of it going live we knew of it being out there because of a traffic surge by about 600 page views on the first day of publishing alone.
Traffic died down a few days after the article was published, but it still gave us an impressive 1,000 page views over the last week of the month (roughly 3% of our overall traffic). That being said, ignoring the NY Times traffic spike our standard traffic was still up about 7% through search engines, social media, and standard marketing channels.
I'll take that.Living the Dream's July 2015 Income
Our booked income for July 2015 was approximately $1,030.
Our earnings this month have followed the pattern from the last few months in that our direct advertising has been dependent on just one or two large sales rather than many small purchases like we have seen in the past.
I prefer this method as it helps us get rid of the advertisers who try and low ball us (which happens just about every day) and also minimizes the amount of advertisements we put up on the site. On the downside, our income stream becomes that much more inconsistent and is lower than what it could be simply because we are setting the bar higher than we used to.
I am pointing this out because this is the first month where I'm also not sure if the advertising we negotiated will ultimately come through, so most of that published figure could vanish in the coming days when we find out about the commitment for sure. What happens when you only negotiate one major contract for the month and it falls through? Well, your income goes to practically zero and that is not good at all.
On the plus side, we are seeing an uptick in affiliate sales, specifically with our BlueHost account thanks to our WordPress migration posts, and I am pretty excited to see this kind of revenue stream grow with our site's traffic and influence.
Our earning dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
Direct Advertising: $900
Book Sales: $12
Amazon Affiliates: $33
Other Affiliates: $65
External Work: $0
Media Sales: $0
Adsense: $20
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 July 2015 Expenses
Our spending for the month of July included the following:
Social Media Advertising: $123
Staff Payments: $100
Opt-In Monster License: $199
Total: $422
This month's spending is, thankfully, back to normal as I am not replacing any expensive cameras like I had to in June. Our spending for the month was split between paying our team for articles (on par with normal), social media advertising (slowly ramping this one up for our newest site Discover the Burgh), and one product purchase- a yearly license for Opt-In Monster.
I plan on putting together a full review for Opt-In Monster in the coming weeks, but so far I am quite impressed as the service allows for many opt-in configurations, exit intent technology, and A/B split stream testing for optimization. At $199/year it is a bit on the high end, but to be honest this is a service that I should have been using from the start as our newsletter would likely be 10x larger than it is now had we put proper effort into it. The preliminary results are great, and it is going to be a killer once optimized.
Goals for August 2015
We're now getting into a standard work pattern for our sites that we'll be continuing in August. Living the Dream and Discover the Burgh will continually receive 2-4 articles published per week, daily social media updates across all channels, and will have continued optimization of social media ads as well as our Opt-In Monster configurations.
As our primary target on both sites is audience growth, and not revenue (for now), most of our efforts will be focused on those tasks. Unfortunately, when it comes to optimization of advertising and opt-ins, it takes time to see results and even more time to make them even better, so we expect to be at this for the next several months before we move into our next phase of site work.
Although, by August's recap don't be surprised if we bought another plug-in or item dedicated for site improvement. It does seem like we're on a one-a-month kick right now and that works at a great pace to match the revenue streams that we do have coming in, however limited that may be.
What will August's purchase be? I'm not sure, but I look forward to finding out. Check back then for more earnings, spending, and traffic recaps!