Welcome to the ninth 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 August, and now that September has ended, it is time to share those figures too! So how'd we do? Read on to find out!
Living the Dream's September 2015 Traffic
Our traffic for September 2015 was approximately 28,500 page views.
When compared to our traffic in August, our September traffic was down by 7% on a per day basis. Although this was our first drop in traffic since migrating to WordPress in December 2014, when comparing September 2015 to September 2014 our traffic was up by 86% (we saw a similar drop from August to September of that year, too).
This drop came primarily from a decrease in Google referrals over the month as well as a drop in Facebook conversions. Google is down likely because September was a beautiful month in most of the world (who plans a vacation when they can go outside?) and Facebook was due to the fact that we also spent a lot of time away and missed scheduling updates for a week. Oops.
On the plus side, we have noticed an uptick in traffic from Pinterest thanks to our recent acquisition of a Viraltag license ( claim your $15 credit here - shameless plug). I thoroughly expect this to be a source of rapid site growth in the coming months once we get our update patterns optimized (look for a review when that happens).
As for organic traffic from Google? Well, all we can do right now is keep watch and hope the fall/winter rise hits us again this year as thoroughly believe the drop was something out of our control and not algorithm related.
Living the Dream's September 2015 Income
Our booked income for September 2015 was approximately $340.
We had quite a few inquiries for advertising this month; however, most were too low and not worth our time to entertain (although we could've made a good amount had we accepted them all). As we've also dropped out of the freelancing market (mostly) to focus our efforts to building up our newest site as well as Living the Dream, I'm not surprised that our income was low. Not what I'd like, but not surprising. Freelancing is easy, building income on a website alone is not.
Our earning dollar amount includes the following breakdown:
Direct Advertising: $300
Book Sales: $10
Amazon Affiliates: $25
Adsense: $5
As I mentioned in August, I'm still waiting to hear back on a few large opportunities in the pipeline, but when those get decided on are outside of my control and they seem to keep getting pushed back.
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 September 2015 Expenses
Our spending for the month of September included the following:
Social Media Advertising: $166
Staff Payments: $50
Domain Purchase: $50
Domain Renewal: $165
Total: $431
A month in the hole again?! Oh no!
Okay, not really. As many of you know we have day jobs and are looking at our expenditures at the moment as investments into our site's future potential. If we break even for the year I'll be more than happy, so I'm spending a lot of effort to reinvest every last penny into our businesses.
This month our biggest spending went to social media advertising, specifically Facebook for Discover the Burgh which just crossed over 4,000 followers in four months. Our advertising has honed in on a few very successful ads and now that our conversion is somewhat optimized we are ramping up our daily spending to accommodate (now $6/day). By the end of next month we expect that page to be even bigger than Living the Dream 's!
Goals for October 2015
I went into September thinking that I would spend my time installing a new photography section on our sites to help push media sales, but it wasn't but a week or so into the month that I realized that wasn't going to happen.
The main reason for this, as I mentioned above, was that we received a license to the scheduling software Viraltag via our PTBA membership and I spent most of the month optimizing it for both Pinterest (my main goal) and Twitter (a side bonus). The initial setup took quite a bit of time, especially because I built a few hundred more images for Pinterest and a few hundred for Twitter, but the effort was well spent because we are now able to publish content throughout the day, everyday, by scheduling as far in advance as we wish.
Even better, we're already starting to see results on Pinterest within just a few days.
I believe that October will be spent evaluating this more as our number one priority right now is growing our traffic both on Living the Dream (which has seen a nearly 100% growth in the last year) and Discover the Burgh (which is growing at around 70% month over month since being founded in June- now around 1,250 page views and a projected 2,000 for October). Once I am convinced that our growth will continue on our current path, it may be time to return to the goal of setting up our photography outlet, but that is on hold for the time being.
Check beck at the end of October to see how we do next month!
