Lower Traffic, Higher Income
For the month of November, John Chow dot Com received 217,876 unique visitors and 329,853 page views. This is down from the record breaking 229,144 visitors and 360,967 page views posted in October. While traffic is down, blog income went up thanks to continued tweaking and the addition of new ad revenue sources. Here is the breakdown on blog income.
- Google AdSense: $872.69
- Vibrant IntelliTXT: $791.56
- TTZ Media: $338.54
- ReviewMe: $50.00
- Text Link Ads: $30.00
- FeedBurner Ads: $57.14
- Grand Total: $2,139.93
This is a nice improvement over the $1,361.64 the blog made in October. Blog traffic dropped almost 10% but blog income went up 57%. An even more impressive improvement is the site wide eCPM, which went from $3.77 to $6.49 for a 72% increase. How did all this come about?
Higher Search Traffic
The blog continues to receive lot of love from the major search engines, especially Google, which accounts for over 95% of all search engine traffic. The above chart could very well be titled Google Traffic instead of Search Engine Traffic.
Search engine traffic is by far the most profitable traffic. According to a Google research study, a search engine visitor is 14 times more likely to click on an ad than a visitor from another source. And this is the reason AdSense income went up even though traffic went down.
I expect the growth in search traffic to continue. In the first week of November, search engines sent me an average of 485 visitors per day. In the last week of November, that number had increased to 943 visitors per day. How did I pull this off? With lots of unique content that other sites like to link to. There really is no magic here. Google loves unique content – the more I write, the more they index and the greater the chance that I’ll show up on a search.
Just having unique content really isn’t enough. Your content has to be unique enough for other sites and blogs to link to you. Once Google finds you, it will index your content, but where you rank in the search is based on how many other sites are linking to you. My blog is on page 1 for the search term “urinal†because of the number of sites that linked to my high-tech urinal story.
Less Dependence On Digg
Digg is a great source of traffic but you can’t really make much money from it unless you have a really targeted offering. In October, Digg accounted for nearly 50% of blog traffic. For November, they were reduced to 16.81%. I expect traffic from Digg to continue to go down this month because, well, I’ve been banned from it!
More Advertising Opportunities
I added a few new advertising revenue sources to the blog in November. In addition to my own TTZ Media Network, I installed Text-Link-Ads and FeedBurner ads. I was also paid $50 for doing a review of RevewMe. The Text-Link-Ads and FeedBurner ads were added in the last few days of the month so they only made $87.14. However, I expect them to really pick up this month – Text-Link-Ads starts this month at $400 right out the gate. I will continue to tweak the revenue mix until it’s just right. Then I’ll tweak it some more.
Conclusion
It is amazing what can happen in three short months. In September, when this case study started, the blog made $352.94. In October, the income increased to $1,361.64 and in November, it broke the $2,000 barrier. We are now getting very close to part time blogging, full time income.
To celebrate the blog’s achievement, I’m going to take the family out for dinner at Lumière. Hopefully I won’t spend the entire month’s paycheck.