Welcome to my 3rd installment of my traffic and income report. In case you are new to this series, I recently decided to begin documenting the income I earn from this blog. I’m doing this in an attempt to build more transparency around the topic of blogging – there is SO much misinformation out there about whether blogs can become income generators, and how to actually going about doing it. After implementing some of the monetization and traffic strategies that I’ve learned over the last 10 years as an web based marketing professional, and starting to make a few pennies, I figured what better way than to show people that this CAN be a business, than to have a totally open book about how mine is doing. So I decided to begin publishing blogging income reports, showing traffic statistics, social media statistics and sharing new strategies that I implemented this month along with takeaways that had a good or negative impact on the blog.
This past month the blog was just a tiny bit neglected, because I’m working really hard on a new Blogger training program – more on that down below. But I wanted to mention that as I’ve been a little delinquent on putting up new posts to my blog because of the beta group that I’m running – don’t worry, it won’t be that way for long! I just spent this past weekend finishing up SEVEN projects though, so prepare to be inundated with new DIY and upcycled awesomeness here pretty soon!
Lets get into the nitty gritty…
Traffic and Pageviews for September 2014
Unique Visitors
- 21094 visitors
- 19559 unique visitors
Pageviews:
- 79,459 pageviews
Revenues**:
- Google Adsense- $130.37
- Prosperent Ad Network – $14.20
- Bluehost** – $180 (earnings come from my tutorial on how to start a blog)
- Media.net – $11.12
- Content.Ad – $11.48
- ShareASale Affiliate Program – $0
- Sponsored Posts: $211.35
Total: $558.52 – Up 275%
September’s Takeaways
1. Doubling Pageviews –
Despite the fact that my unique visitors remained relatively unchanged, my pageviews more than doubled. During September, I completely changed my top navigation. I removed some of the exraneous links such as the “about me” page, contact us page, etc – pages that my casual readers are not as much interested in, and replaced it with a better organized, content driven top navigation. I also changed it from a text based navigation, to a graphically interesting navigation bar. Readers are clicking through to more pages now, because I’ve made it easier to find the type of content they might be interested in.
2. Viraltag is AWESOME** –
Seriously – if you need traffic, you should be using it to promote your posts on Pinterest. My Pinterest traffic continues to soar – I believe this is still due to my continued use of ViralTag which is helping manage the automation of my pins.
There has been a lot of talk lately about how aggressively to use ViralTag, and I would say my strategy is WAY on the conservative side. I know people who use Viraltag to pin the same image multiple times a day to the same board (if the board has a TON of contributors, and a ton of followers, where the pins get buried quickly). Right now its not getting them into any trouble, but I used to be super aggressive with marketing tools such as this – and back in ’07 with my first website, it got me into a lot of trouble with Google – basically caused my site to lose all its traffic when Google penalized me for “overpromotion” – so I’m super cautious about making things look natural. I’m not concerned about people thinking I’m pinning too much, I’m concerned about Pinterest deciding to penalize accounts that are going crazy with their pins and repins – something I have to think they are bound to do sooner and later. Some may still opt to go my aggressive – for me, I want to keep my Pinterest traffic going strong, long into the future, so I’m going to keep on at a manageable, natural pace.
3. Calls to Actions/Text on Graphics
I took some time to go through my Facebook statistics this month, and I saw a crazy trend with my posts. Images that had calls to action or text on them had engagement as high as 300% more, than the same image being posted without any text on it. Some I know don’t like images with text, but the numbers don’t lie. If you want to get likes and clicks and comments and shares on FB – at least for right now – put an overlay of text describing your image or your post, or with a call to action!
4. OptinMonster
This past month, I installed an optin pop up box on my site, run by OptinMonster. Their pop ups appear based on specific user actions, so they aren’t super annoying. My optin rates have more than tripled since I installed this, and I’m still tweaking my call to action to see if I can improve that even more. Highly recommend their service for the ease of use of their plugins, their great looking designs, and their pop up algorithm. Definitely worth the $.
Now, as I mentioned above, I’ve been working on a new program, where I walk people through, step by step – the process of building a blog, optimizing it, and how to make money from it. I’m in my 5th active month of blogging here at Giddy Upcycled, and I’m seeing close to 200% growth, month after month, income wise.
Enrollment will open on November 3rd for new members.
I’ll be posting an early bird VIP rate for readers of my blog – if you’d like to be notified of that offer when the time comes, enter your email in below and I’ll send you the scoop (you’ll also get my free 7 day blogging bootcamp course, totally free!)
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**This page contains affiliate links.
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