Welcome to the third quarterly traffic and income report update covering third (Q3) quarter of 2016 (July, August, September), in which I will reveal some secrets on how I made more that $5,000 and got traffic more than 170,000 unique users. Here is the link to the archive for previous online income reports.
If you are new to my blog, here is a brief explanation on sharing data on traffic and income:
I have been collecting and sharing data for my online success or failures since January 2014, back then my blog was 3 month old and I decided to start an online experiment - can someone actually make money through blogging? Now, I know it for sure - yes, you can, but it takes a time and determination. Back at January 2014, I made enormous eight dollars. Online income reports helps me to track my success or failures, and hopefully can inspire you as well.
Most of the time in third quarter of 2016 I spent on home remodeling works doing brick and mortar stuff (more on that in close future). My 31st birthday was on August and I took few days off to celebrate it abroad (again, more on that soon). As usual I managed not to miss a single day without a blog post - that has been one of mine corner success strategies since day 1 when I started this blog. In just a few days it will be already three years.
Blog Traffic Q3 2016
Blog traffic for the past quarter has been pretty steady. By now each month my blog gets about 55,000 monthly users, compared with previous quarter blog have experienced a nice 28% traffic gain. Awesome.
Blog Traffic Q3 2016
By now, I'm pretty satisfied with getting more than 170,000 users to blog in the past three months, thus I might not reach my overall goal for 2016.
In my 2015 year review I did set a goal to attract in total 650,000 users to my blog. Which would be about 162,000 users quarterly. Last quarter was the first I actually managed to crack that milestone, unfortunately Q1 and Q2 didn't perform such good in terms of traffic. In order to reach my yearly goal - 650,000 users, I should get about 212K users in the last quarter of year. That's about 70,000 a month. I wouldn't say that it is not possible, it's doable, hard but doable. On the other hand if I will get close to that number it will be fine, not a tragedy after all missing few thousands, right?
Income Q3 2016
I believe most of the readers are more interested in actual income rather traffic stats, but let me remind you, in online business (If we can call it so) any income is dependent on traffic. It might differ niche from niche - there are niches where a way more money are made from traffic I have.
Combined income from affiliate sales and display ads in Q3 made me a nice revenue of $5,485.84
Combined RPM from different revenue channels stands at $22.77 for Q3 2016, what is up from $17.03 at Q2 2016. RPM - stands for earnings for 1000 page views/impression - Reach per Mile.
RPM Q3 2016
RPM rates have been up since the start of the year: $13.00 at Q1, $17.00 at Q2 and finally I have got to the sweet twenties rate. I believe a RPM rate close to $20 per 1000 page views is pretty satisfactory. Of course raising this number more would increase overall income, but as long it is close to twenty - I'm a happy hippo.
Expenses Q3 2013
To earn some money, you should spend some money on some basic or advanced things. In last quarter I spent in following positions:
- Linode VPS: $147.5
- Facebook Advertising: $41.94
Other Stats
- Twitter: 6,501 followers (-141)
- Facebook: 2,520 likes (+733)
- Email subscriptions: 61 subscriber (+10)
- Alexa global rank: 179,799 position(+18649)
- Web push subscribers: 457
Thoughts on Q4 2016
Now, speaking about goals for the fourth quarter (October, November and December) of 2016 - Traffic combined should be at least 170,000. Speaking of Income - I will stick with a humble $4,000 goal. The thing is - from my previous experience I have noticed that October is really slow in terms of income - affiliate sales drops by half and more (I will keep this in mind for this October as well). November should start to give a nice boost at the end of the month, and following holiday season (December) could give a really lucrative income, on the other hand, last year's December, thus performed well, didn't break the bank after all. Taking all that in consideration - I would say $4,000 seems pretty hard to handle actually. But I will keep experimenting to try to get there.