Welcome to the #24 traffic and income report covering blog traffic and earnings/expenses for December 2015.
#24 means just one - It marks two year anniversary since I started to share with public my online earnings/ expenses. Wow, two years are a lot actually. You might wonder why should me revealing my traffic and earnings for the past two years already? The reason for publishing such reports and revealing secrets beyond the scenes are simple - they help me track my success or failures and hopefully can generate some ideas for you as well.
About Blog traffic in December 2015
Past December came with almost - 20% traffic dip if compared to November, and resulted in 43,941 unique users visiting my blog. Deep in my heart I was hoping to break a 60,000 user milestone this month after great traffic expansion in November, but that didn't happened.
Blog traffic December 2015. Data source: Google Analytics
- 43,941 users are a - 19.29% dip if compared to previous month
- It is a drop of -10,505 users
- 43,941 users in a month is about 1,464 daily users
Although I experienced a huge drop in traffic by more than 10,000 users, last December still was the second best in terms of traffic. Hopefully I will manage to crack 50,000 user milestone again anytime soon.
About Income and Expenses in December 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.
There are some good news regarding expenses in December - I didn't spent a dime. Linode affiliate is working pretty good and I had a free ride (worth of $60) last month, thanks to referrals I have sent to Linode. Linode rocks! If you are looking for a reliable VPS provider - Linode is your best bet.
Read more:
Speaking of income - as stated already in title of this post, last month generated pretty serious amount of $1,524.09 from different channels, like Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, Bluehost, Amazon CPM, Booking and some other. I decided to remove Svorn Ads temporary from my blog, since they are not performing very well.
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 $24.24 in December, which is fourth highest this year. Last time I got so good RPM was back in April ($26.63)
December RPM
Speaking of a good RPM - twenty dollars per 1000 page views seems a pretty reasonable amount to have.
E-mail subscriptions
Back in November I implemented a new feature on blog - e-mail subscriptions. Read more: How to add MailChimp Signup Form for Drupal. In December my list grew by +20 subscribers and at the end of December was 27 subscribers. In the middle of December I sent first e-mail campaign to 13 subscribers and using Mailchimp tracking features I can report that 5 e-mails were actually opened. I'm new to e-mail marketing and will continue to experiment with it in 2016. Make sure to subscribe to e-mail list at the end of this article not to miss some important updates from blog.
In Conclusion
December, although with a huge traffic dip, still managed be second best in terms of traffic, and in fact in revenue as well, a year ago in December 2014 revenue from blog was a little bit more than $2,000. One of my goals for 2016 is get stable revenue around $1,000 monthly and coming to the end of 2016 I'm looking to crack $2,000 monthly income. Right now I have this feeling that I will experiment a lot with income streams in 2016, adding some more, getting rid of those that doesn't performs good enough e.t.c.
I'm looking on month of January pretty concerned - I mean holiday season is over - there should come a further drop in revenue. I will stick with high forecast for myself, but modest for more pro affiliate marketers - January should reach $700.00. Speaking of traffic - 45,000 users would be great to have at the end of January 2016.
How did it went for you in December? Any passive income money made? Drop a comment, readers and me would love to hear.