Welcome to the #23 traffic and income report covering blog traffic and earnings/expenses for November 2015. #23 means just one - one more month and it will be already two years since I have opted into thing called - making money from blogging. Two years are a lot of time, it's has been a long journey, but... I still feel it is day 2 or day 3.
I was doing separate reviews both for traffic and income until September, when I realized - how time consuming it is to provide 2 similar articles on related topic. Traffic and Income for a website goes hand to hand. You might wonder what stimulates me publish my traffic and revealing earnings for the past 23 months already? The reason for publishing such reports and revealing secrets beyond the scenes are simple - Transparency matters. I hope my success or failures can give some ideas to you as well.
About Blog Traffic in November 2015
Past November was just brilliant - for the very first time it cracked 50K unique users milestone and totaled in 54,446 unique users. Compared to October it is 36.36% traffic growth.
Blog Traffic November 2015. Data source: Google Analytics
As you can see in the middle of November there is a huge traffic spike, on this day my article about minimum wages in European Union for 2015 got a lot of eyeballs, mostly originating from Turkey. This was already third traffic spike to my blog, previous record was set back in January (2015) with 3,584 users. While the first serious traffic spike my blog experienced almost two years ago, when total daily traffic surged just above 1,000 daily users. You can read more detailed case study on this traffic spike here: Third Traffic Spike: More than 7,500 Daily Users.
Now, the thing that makes me worried is a low Pages / Session generated per user. In November it was as low as 1.23, which I believe is among the lowest by all time. It's time to implement some better User Experience on my blog. I would love to see this number being about 2 Pages per session for a long term, but for shorter time would love to increase to about 1.5.
It has been more than a year ago when I set a goal - to reach 100K monthly users. As in November that didn't happened, last month still makes me believe it's possible. 54K users are about 54% of my goal. It would be great to crack 100K user milestone by the end of 2016. In combination with better pages per session ration 100,000 monthly users would make a very nice total page views.
About Income and Expenses in November 2015
A quick note: Some of the links below are affiliate links.By clicking on them I might end up earning some income from that.
- Google AdSense: $76.38
- Amazon Associates*: $930.85
- Sovrn: $6.87
- Booking: $1.09
- Bluehost: $0
- ThemeSnap: $7
*Amazon Associates includes Amazon CPM
Total income: $1,022.19
Expenses
- Linode VPS: $42.50
- Facebook Ads: $12.64
Total expenses: $55.14
Net Profit: $947.05
Thoughts on Income and Expense
November was the first month this year and second in lifetime cracking $1,000 milestone. Although I have been monetizing my blog for almost two years already, the money stream is more or less constant just for the last one year. Two years ago in November I didn't made anything, a year ago in November I made about $700. Technically speaking about $300 growth over a year is nothing much, taking into account that traffic have "exploded" from about 9,000 users in November 2014 to about 54,000 users in 2015. It's about 6 times of increase for traffic to my blog in just one year. Unfortunately money made on blog is not increasing at the same pace as traffic does. This is the thing I should be concerned in coming months and years.
On the other hand I'm very happy seeing earnings increasing from Google AdSense. $78 per month might not seem much, but a year ago I was making about $5 per month with Google AdSense.
Combined RPM
Those of you who are using Google AdSense, are already familiar with term of RPM - which stands for earnings for 1000 page views/impression - Reach per Mile. I decided to create my blog's overall RPM covering not only AdSense, but all other income streams combined. My combined RPM Stands for $13.78 in November.
This is the second lowest RPM this year, just up by about three dollars from October, when as I believe the bottom of the pot was reached this year. I believe RPM will go up in December. But speaking of a good RPM - twenty dollars per 1000 page views seems a pretty reasonable amount to have.
Things on blog
There is one major feature I implemented on blog last month - e-mail subscriptions (you can find a form to signup for my monthly newsletter under each article). In two weeks in November my subscriber base grown from 0 to 7. It's not much, but it's better than nothing. Make sure you subscribe bellow to not to miss some important updates.
How did it went for you in November? Any passive income money made? Drop a comment, readers and me would love to hear.