bJust 1 month has passed. You still have 11 more months to fulfill your dreams.
That’s how we need to focus ourselves when we want to achieve something. Only then, we can Stay focused on our career. So why am I talking about focusing? Did I take any decision to focus on something? Let’s see what’s that as we get into this report.
Staying with New Year Resolution:
Last month on my New Year Post, I mentioned about my resolution for blogging.
Do you remember it?
If not, take a moment to look back what’s that.
I mentioned I would post articles with more than 2000 words.
Is it really necessary to post more than 2000 words?
I see people enjoying results of writing long posts rather than small ones. I would like to try and experiment it and get to know How it works.And that’s why I wanted to keep up with my New Year Resolution.
In this January, I published just 2 posts. One was,
OnlineRockersHub Annual Report 2017 and Happy New Year 2018 ? (2126 words)
And the other one was,
Complete guide – How to choose your domain name? (2634 words)
Both these blog posts are well over 2000 words and,
Yes, I am staying strong with my New Year Resolution!
Is it easy to write more than 2000 words?
It’s not so.
You need to be more descriptive, informative and more engaging when you want to write long posts, else readers will leave the site. Because time is valuable. And you can’t let your readers waste them by reading fillers.
After writing these two posts, I find it a bit difficult to write such lengthy posts, but somehow, I should manage to do them.
Let’s not forget about my Goals to achieve.
Did I achieve my Goals?
In my last income report, I mentioned the Goals to be achieved during January.Let me recollect them.
The first one was,
1) To Get 200 New Backlinks:
At the end of January, I took the SEO Backlink Tool Android App and analyzed my website. I noticed that my site had 1513 backlinks.My goal was to reach 1458 backlinks. But, I made 55 more backlinks than my goal.
When I took this goal, I wondered if it was possible to get 200 backlinks. But, the trick I followed, helped me to more backlinks than expected.
What was the trick?
Blog Commenting.
Yes, I was commenting on blogs vigorously every day. I was keeping track of how many sites, I was commenting. I made almost 96 comments (excluding comments made at OnlineRockersHub). With the help of those 96 comments, I was able to make this 255 backlinks.
But, where did I made these 96 comments?
On 96 different websites. That was the best out of this.
I got from the internet a big list of websites for blog commenting. I will share that list with you soon.
Is Blog Commenting the only way to get backlinks?
No! You can even try out Guest Blogging, but it is a lot more time-consuming. I found blog commenting was a shortcut. But not to forget, Guest Blogging has long-term benefits like brand awareness and building readership.
Let’s move towards the next goal,
2) Reach 4000 pageviews:
As I already mentioned, I just published two blog posts this month. Nothing more than that. I didn’t even share updates regularly on social media.I do have hundreds of emails to be replied. I couldn’t find enough time to focus on my blog. Because I had to focus on my academics.
I thought I wouldn’t be able to achieve this goal.
But the reality was different.
To my surprise, when I took Google Analytics, I noticed I had 4674 pageviews.
But how did this happened?
I have no answer for this. But, I have to analyze my reports detailly to understand how did this happen.
Anyways! I made it.
It’s time to analyze the traffic report.
Traffic Report for January 2018:
Did you see it?
I was talking just about this. And I could notice that there are few more surprises for me.
- Bounce Rate is just 28.43%
- 90% new visitors
Bounce Rate of just 28.43%:
As I made a look back to my old reports, I noticed that in December 2017 I had a bounce rate of 71.01% and for the entire 2017, I had an average bounce rate of 76.20%.
In a recent ShoutersChat that I participated, we were discussing on “Lowering Down Your Blog’s Bounce Rate”.You could check a detailed version of this chat in this post.
During this discussion, we came to know the major culprits for high bounce rate are:
- Website Design
- Wrong Traffic Source
- Popups
- Spamming with Ads
- High Page Load Speed
- Poor Content Presentation
- Lack of Interlinks
Does OnlineRockersHub have these?
I would smile with confidence
I will explain one by one.
1) Website Design:
Considering the first aspect, OnlineRockersHub is using Divi theme, one of the most popular WordPress themes. It gives you enough space to try out your own creativity.
I have made some simple tweaks to this theme, to make the design look simple and different from other websites on the Internet. I guess, my readers are liking this theme.
And the next one,
2) Wrong Traffic Source:
This site does not have wrong Traffic Source. If you have been following OnlineRockersHub for a long time, you would know that initially, OnlineRockersHub was a multi-niche site. I had quotes, science-related posts, coupons and deals etc on this website itself.
Now, I have moved them to subdomains,
- For Quotes – QuotesDrive
- For Coupons and Deals – ORH Coupons and Deals
- Science Related Posts – Science Savvy
This just helped me get over this issue. I redirected my traffic to relevant subdomains and hence I was making targeted traffic.
Next is the popups.
3) Popups:
I don’t have popups at OnlineRockersHub for a quite long time. This happened after some of my readers found it irritating and disturbing the reader’s experience. For me, reader’s experience is the first priority. Money comes later.
4) Spamming with Ads:
Coming towards Spamming with Ads,
I find so many websites on the Internet using Ads so aggressively. But, you can’t find something like that at OnlineRockersHub. I have one Adsense Ad and one Media.net ad along with some banners at the sidebar and then I have few ads in every post between the content, depending upon the post length.
So, definitely, I did not spam this site with ads.
5) Page Speed:
And then comes High Page Load Speed.
Recently, I came to know that the more plugins that I use, the more resources are consumed and the more page size.So I uninstalled so many less used plugins. I compensated the functionality of those plugins by adding codes on functions.php.You might ask me,
How do the plugin and coding going to differ by?
Yes, I accept, they both have PHP codes. But there is a difference.
When you perform a task with coding directly at functions.php, you add only the necessary parts of the code, but a plugin will have many other kinds of stuff too, like extra functionalities, additional code to prevent anyone misusing the plugin, compatibility code for various themes and frameworks etc
But, you don’t need all them. With coding directly, you are avoiding unwanted lines of code. This saves more resource. That leads to less page size and lesser page load time.
One more important factor that affects the page speed is good web hosting. I have hosted my website on Namecheap. It has a pretty decent speed.
6) Content Formatting:
Now let’s get into the content formatting.
No matter, how good your content is, if you have a poor editing, then your post is going to be left unnoticed. I am not an expert in Grammar and editing and hence, I prefer using additional tools for this editing.
I use Grammarly for editing my content. It is easy to use and free.
And coming to the last point,
7) Interlinking between Posts:
I do have interlinks between most of my posts. Interlinks are the one that passes Domain Juice between posts in your content. If you don’t have them, then you need a huge number of backlinks for each post to make them rank in Search Engine.
So it seems, I have covered most of the basic requirements to have a low bounce rate and that’s why my website is having a low bounce rate.
Next is 90% new visitors.
How did I receive 90% new visitors?
To analyze this, let me check the traffic source.
Comparing with the previous month, I could notice,
- Google’s Organic Traffic has Increased
- Direct Traffic has decreased
- Traffic from Facebook and Twitter has increased
- New Traffic from Inbound.org
As you see, the major reason for a high percentage of new visitors is decreasing in returning visitors, which is the direct traffic. This happened just because, I did not post regularly and hence my regular audience did not visit the site often.
But, I shared the two posts published on various social media platforms and web 2.0 sites like Inbound, Medium, Flipboard etc. Traffic from these sites is most probably going to be new visitors.
These are the various reasons, why the site had a high percentage of new visitors.
We made a deep analysis of the traffic source. Now, let’s move on to the income and expense.
Income and Expense Report for January 2018:
First, let me list down the income.
Income Report:
- Sponsored Posts: $5
- Google Adsense: $2.36
- ShareASale: $1.4
- OpinionBureau: $0.62 (₹40)
- Neobux: $0.433
- Familyclix: $0.3082
- EasyHits4U: $0.3
- Pifexplosion: $0.02
- Media.net: $0.01
Total Income: $11.28 ( ₹723.50)
It is, as usual, I haven’t scored anything big on income wise. I have ideas and strategies to make money online and turn this website into a company. But, I am lacking a team. I need writers. As of now, I am planning to carry out them with content writers from ContentMart. If you feel, you could really be a good team player, let me know at admin@onlinerockershub.com
Moving on the expense section.
Expense Report:
- ACT Fibernet (Internet Service Provider) : $17.44 (₹1119.82)
Total Expense: $17.44 (₹1119.82)
If you are following my income reports for quite some time, you would ask “why did I include Internet Service Provider at the expense?”
I usually don’t do that. But, then I realized that I use my Internet mainly for maintaining this website. So, obviously, this should come as an expense for my blog. And, I should manage this expense too with the income from this blog.
From now on for every month, I will add that Internet subscription at my expense.
Next, I would like to set my Goals for the next month.
Goals for February 2018:
I would set two Goals to reach this month.
1) Get 50 new Referring Domains:
To monitor the progress of this goal, I would like to use Ahrefs. Because it lists down referring domains in real time. Whereas the Android App, that I used last month for my goal, gets updated only over a period of time.
At the end of January, I have 116 domains referring to my website. So, I have to reach 166 referring domains. This is a little tough task, but I have to make my plans clear and work on this.
2) Reach 5000 pageviews:
I haven’t achieved this milestone ever since I started Blogging. To get this huge number of audience, I need to make sure, my content is focused on the niche. Also, I have to share them regularly on a lot of social media platforms. Only then, I will be getting enough traffic.
Just getting more traffic from social media sites will not help me achieve this, I will have to update and republish my existing content for regular readers too.
Looks like a huge workload. But, I will try my level best.
Wrapping Up:
Just like every month, I might have failed to earn a big number, but I learned to write in the format that my reader’s like. From now on, I must research on topics well and write in-depth content, to get more subscribers.
I don’t mean the more subscribers lead to more income. Income can roll out even without much subscribers. But, I would like to grow this as a community. So, I should focus on readership more than on my income.
Also, I demonstrated to you how to analyze your website’s analytics when you find some unusual numbers in the traffic report. Try the same on your website. If you need more assistance, let me know. I will help you out.
And last but not the least,
I made sure that I kept my New Year Resolution with this post too, as I have reached the 2000 words mark for this post. (This post has 2072 words)
Here are my next income reports to check for new updates:
- Monthly Traffic and Income Report: February 2018
- Monthly Traffic and Income Report: March 2018
- OnlineRockersHub Monthly Traffic and Income Report: April 2018
- Here is the Blogging Income Report for May 2018: $587
- Blogging Income Report June 2018: $240.9