Welcome to my monthly income report - this time covering month of October 2014.
In brief:
Things kinda went wrong - after 2 great months with Amazon Affiliate, October earnings decreased, not tragically, but decreased.
How much my blog earned in month of October 2014
- In total I earned $142.81, what is a -50.28% decrease if compared to previous month ($287.25)
- $142.81 makes average $4.6 a day
Thus, my earnings in month of October decrease by around a half, it still managed to became a second best month, in terms of online income
Obliviously I started to wonder - why does income this month is lower - and if honest I didn't find a good explanation. I have just one assumption - October was a slow month for retail sales, why? Have no idea! Maybe in October people have less money to spend?
See - there is nothing wrong with traffic to my blog, it even increased for 42% in month of October, so I cannot explain this with lost traffic. Even clicks to Amazon increased sharply, but conversation rates decreased from about 5% in September to 2.4% in October (more than by half).
What leads me to think, there is nothing wrong with site, content on it, just people are buying less. Or - I'm sending wrong traffic to Amazon.
Will it change this month? - at least I hope so. It's holiday season, and if done right, this should be a gold miner.
RPM
October RPM
On August Income Report I defined a new measurement for my blogs income - RPM - well it's nothing new, and everyone is familiar with that already. In August I wanted to play with RPM only for unique page views. Now I decided - why to make it complicated? I will stick with ALL Pageviews. So by learning my traffic stats in month of October, I know that I had 7,591 pageviews, what makes my RPM to stand at = $18.81
Now - I would like to speak about RPM more:
I started to monetize my blog at start of this year in month of January, back then I was using plug&play Google Adsense, what brought (and still brings) me on couple of dollars each month. I even did setup a goal to reach minimum $40 per month on Google Adsense (Haven't happened yet). I was not paying much attention to my earnings RPM (Google Adsense offers their own RPM). Then on August I decided to give a try for Amazon associates program, which literally broke the bank in first month, earning me some $95 in total.
I'm the geeky person who likes to track every single data, he can track, so I have created a Google Spreadsheet where each month I'm analysing different data (visitors, page views, bounce rates as well earnings (both Google Adsense and Amazon). A pretty neat sheet containing all data in one place. So yesterday I added a new columns and rows to my sheet for RPM, and here I will add my RPM for this year:
Month | RPM |
January | $0.09 |
February | $0.08 |
March | $0.69 |
April | $1.33 |
May | $2.17 |
June | $2.80 |
July | $1.19 |
August | $12.88 |
September | $51.00 |
October | $17.89 |
RPM January 2014 - October 2014
Values for RPM doesn't correspond 100% my blog, there are few other resources I'm using monetization, and they are counted in, but they role is around 3-5%, the basic data is right.
As you can see - January - July - RPM is really modest, starting August (starting to promote Amazon products) RPM goes up sharply,reaching all time pretty impressive high of $51.00 per thousand page views in month of September.
Technically speaking, RPM of $18.81 (or $17.89 in table) is second best and I must admit a pretty impressive. Would I like to have it again at $51.00? Definitely! Will it happen any time soon? Have no clue - I'm still new to Affiliate marketing. One thing I can tell for sure - affiliate marketing works!
Forecast/Predictions
Last month by forecasting this month I said:
to get over $100
Well, that happened this month.
Now what about November?
Well my inner feeling says, there must be something good - it's holiday season, and people are looking for gifts. Will I predict something ... hmm... taking into account slow month of October - I will forecast $150.