It is over a year since I published my first income report. These reports document the ups and downs of this blog, as well as income from freelance blogging. The reports do not detail income from other websites such as Rise Forums.
May was a pretty uneventful month on this blog, however income increased due to me taking on a few extra blogging jobs. Traffic increased towards the end of the month too; therefore I am fairly pleased with how things went.
Traffic Statistics
You may recall the problem I had in April with W3 Total Cache. This caused a 403 response error. The issue was resolved at the start of May. Due to the problem, no traffic was reported until 7 May 2014.
After that, I sae traffic slowly climb every week. The trend has continued into June (thus far).
Traffic from search engines doubled from the second week to the last week of the month. This could partly be due to some good articles being indexed and partly due to my using a different caching plugin. It may also have been caused by the latest Panda update by Google.
- Sessions (Visits) – 8,613 (+2,798)
- Users (Unique Visits) – 7,291 (+2,314)
- Pageviews – 25,628 (+16,683)
Readership & Social Media
My activity on social media services continues to be infrequent and sporadic. Despite my own inactivity on social media services, it does give a good indication of the popularity of this blog.
The stats below were taken yesterday (5 June 2014). As you can see, once again growth has been slow, but steady.
- Email Newsletter = 2,095 Subscribers (+52 subscribers)
- Facebook = 1,081 Followers (+14 Followers)
- Twitter = 2,028 Followers (+38 Followers)
- Google+ = 981 Followers (+43 Followers)
- YouTube = 37 Subscribers (+1 Follower)
Income & Expenses Details
At the moment, the majority of the income through this blog still comes through my freelance writing services. I had always planned on decreasing the time I spent writing for others, though it is not turning out that way. I am getting approached by more and more companies every month to write for them. As the income from this blog is still quite low, I have not been in a position to turn the additional work down.
In total I earned $5,665.76 in May. I also paid out $218.05 for three guest posts, therefore my total profit was $5,447.71. This represents an increase of $299.80 from April 2014.
Income
- Freelance Blogging = $5059.13 (+$239.48)
- Consultation = None (-$50)
- My Books – $121.09 (-$37.62). This includes digital and printed book sales.
- Affiliate Income = $260.54 (+$17.09)
- Advertising Revenue = $225 (+$125)
Expenditure
- Guest Posts = $218.05 (-$5.85)
* Difference in income and expenditure from previous month shown in brackets.
Overview
May was certainly “more of the same”. I did not develop this blog much, though I am fairly pleased that income and traffic increased slightly.
Once I bring in some good writers, I will be able to increase traffic quicker. Unfortunately, the quality of submissions has generally been very bad. Every author submits posts with dozens of basic errors and grammatical mistakes. It proves to be time consuming to explain all these issues to authors and frustrating when they re-submit the post with the same errors.
Thus far, I have relied on bloggers contacting me for writing for the blog, though I need to be proactive and seek out good writers. On the bright side, Joe Fylan continues to write great posts every month for this blog :)
How was May 2014 for all of you? Did you see an increase in traffic and income?
Kevin