Welcome to my monthly blog income report. This is the 15th report so far.
I'm doing those report since start of 2014 and they (reports) help me track my online success or failures. I hope they can inspire others as well.
About Online Income in March 2015
In total I earned $619.17 what is a decrease by -34.13% if compared to previous month (February) when I earned $940.05
$619.17 in a month equals to $19.97 per day
Now - a 34% drop in online income is a huge, there are two simple patterns I have found to explain why this drop happened: People have less money to spend online; I'm sending a wrong audience to affiliate programs. Read more about this bellow.
About Blog Traffic in March 2015
Blog traffic March 2015 (Data source: Google Analytics)
March was great month in terms of overall traffic coming to my blog, it did setup a new record, my blog first time cracked a 20,000 user milestone and totalled in 20,499 users.
About Income streams
There were 3 streams which generated some money last month - I prefer to divide them into two subgroups - Affiliate marketing and Display Ads:
Affiliate marketing
Amazon Associates - $588.98
Display ADs
Amazon CPM - $11.67
Google Adsense - $18.52
Earnings from display ads went up a little bit last month and that's a good sign. While the earnings from my top performing channel (Amazon Associates) dropped sharply from more than $900 in month of February to $588.98 in March.
Well this is a really interesting trend to observe. I'm not 100% sure but I find that March together with month of October are really slow months for Amazon Associates (at least for me). The interesting trend to observe here - CTR dropped below 2%, while it was steady above 3% both in January and February.
There are two patterns I find to explain this - either I'm sending a wrong traffic to Amazon either people have less money to spend and buy new items. I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I believe the coming months of this Spring and Summer season will show lower CTR % for Amazon earnings.
Actually I did have one more affiliate marketing channel - Booking.com.
I have tried to earn some dime with it for already two years but no success yet, though last month I noticed from booking partner central I will probably get around EUR 150.00 commission in month of August. Some person has booked apartments paying more than EUR 2,000. A pretty good commission right? Well I cannot include this booking commission to this report, because I have to wait until month of August. Probably I will have a nice income report in month of August.
About expenses in March:
Linode VPS: $50.00
Facebook ADS: $17.00
Total: $67.00
March 2015 VS March 2014
A year ago my blog was just six months old, back then in March I created my third online income report and earned very modest $5.51
So what has changed a year latter?
My traffic is up from 542 to 20,499, and affiliate marketing is my top earning channel, simple.
Goals/ Forecasts for April 2015
Well - I feel that this spring/summer season won't make me to crack $1,000 milestone. It's hard to tell. I would be happy with anything above $500 this month. But in reality I fear that it could drop somewhere between $250-$400. I have decided to give a free flow for my blog this month. I have no plans of using any promotion or to write some reviews with affiliate links included. I would like to test how my blog performs on a free run this April.