Here is an update for the third week of my making money with a blog case study. From October 15 to 21, the blog made $208.22 from Google AdSense, well ahead of the $161.02 from last week and $179.16 from two weeks ago. As always, the number 1 performing ad unit continues to be the 300×250 box, followed by the top 468 banner and bottom 468 banner. The 300 box ad makes more than the top and bottom 468 ads combined. If you are not using an inline box ad on your blog, you are losing major money.
Blog traffic for week 3 was 80,807 unique visitors and 116,777 page views. This is significantly higher than week 1 and week 2 traffic levels. While traffic is up, eCPM rates remain flat at $1.78 (an improvement of just 1 cent over last week and down $1.14 from week 1).
Week 3 represented the first full week of running Vibrant Media IntelliTXT and that bought in $289.34 to help bring total week 3 income to a record $497.56. That is more than what the blog made in the first two weeks of the month. Total income for the blog this month is $967.65. I said last week that I expect the blog to break $1,000 before the month is over. Well, that’s pretty much a sure thing. The question now is; how much over $1,000 will it make?
The Rise of Search Engine Traffic
I am pleased with the rise the blog is making in search engine traffic. According to my Google Analytics stats, the blog got just 269 visitors from search engines back in August. In September, search engines sent 2,585 visitors. For the first 3 weeks of this month, search engines have sent 6,704 visitors. The number one referring search engine is Google, accounting for over 95% of all search traffic.
The rise in search traffic mirrors the rise in backlinks the blog has been able to generate. Back in August, the blog had only a handful of sites linking to it. There are now 89,700 pages outside of John Chow dot Com linking to the blog. I am expecting the blog to go from PR4 to PR6 on the next Page Rank update.
Look for the week 4 report next Sunday.