Thursday 15 November 2007

Blog Performance and Monetization Update: November 2007

READERSHIP: EnoughWealth.com

Readership in September didn't increase beyond that of June-August, but then picked up considerably in October. Regular posting and topic rotation (personal, local and general investing) seems to have helped convert casual visitors (via search engines) into regulars. Posting comments on the Freakonomics or Dilbert blogs, Kiplinger forum and Yahoo! Answers has also provided traffic, as has contributions to PF-oriented blog carnivals.

My Technorati 'authority' has increased from 105 in September to now be 115 [good] (but 'rank' has sliped from 49,721 to 55,948 [bad]).

My Alexa rank has risen [bad] considerably above the 1-million-mark to 1,261,875 (from 969,013 in Sep), although over the past couple of weeks (where number of daily visits has increased) the Alexa rank is down to 764,630 [good]. I'm not sure how reliable the Alexa figures are, as the report for my site doesn't include any "links in" data, and my site isn't registered in OPD/DMOZ yet. I might add the Alexa rank widget to my blog template as this allegedly helps increase your Alexa ranking (for what it's worth). I would also like to add the Alexa toolbar to my browser, but there isn't a version yet that's compatible with Vista.

The latest PF Bloggers ranking post by FireFinance now includes Enough Wealth, although that may change next month (the recent google algorithm changes that affected a lot of sites dropped my pagerank from 4 down to 2 [bad]).

I get quite a lot of casual traffic from google search results, so I was a bit concerned by the drop in pagerank (to the extent of rejigging my blog template to move my blogroll off the homepage and onto a 'links' page). However, this doesn't seem to have affected to number of visitors coming from google search. I've started monitoring my position on the google search results pages for some terms where I currently rank quite well (top 10) - wealth, enough wealth, wealth blog.

Quantcast estimate of my readership is:
Global: 1,968 uniques (~visitors) per month
US: 1,082 uniques per month
My QuantCast rank is 1,017,055

Feedburner Subscriptions is increasing very slowly, currently sitting at 57 subscribers.

I've stopped mirroring my posts onto the EnoughWealth.SavingAdvice.com site as google tends to penalise sites that have'duplicate' content. I had tried just posting the start of each post, and including a link to enoughwealth.com for the full version, but the SavingAdvice.com administrators started deleting these posts. As SavingAdvice.com gets all the adsense revenue from the blogs they host I wasn't too impressed by this attitude, and I've started deleting my old posts off that site. This change will reduce the number of visitors recorded for that blog and the combined totals, so I'll be mainly focusing on just the enoughwealth.com site stats in future. I may change the graphs to reflect this once I've removed all the content from the enoughwealth.savingadvice.com site



MONETIZATION:

I prefer sponsors that make payment direct into my PayPal account, as a USD cheque costs a lot in fees to bank in Australia. The last US cheque (from KAGI) cost around $40 to have processed by my credit union!

My income from PayPerPost has trailed off as there were getting to be fewer and fewer topics that fitted into the scope of my blog. Also, the reduction in google pagerank reduced the number of 'opportunities' on offer.

I did get two sponsorships for my blog, which generated $270 revenue.

AdBrite revenue from interstitial ads continued to only be around 2c-3c per day, I increased the estimated CPM rate. This means that AdSense gets displayed most of the time. I also added an unobtrusive AdSense banner at the top of the blog. This seems to have been more successful, with AdSense revenue increasing significantly. It appears that Google Adsense only becomes worthwhile once you have copious amounts of content and reasonable traffic levels.

Newsroom continued to accumulate revenue from display of their feeds, but the amount of revenue is negligible and there isn't much content that suits my blog. Newsroom currently pays out monthly by cheque once you hit $50 (which I won't reach for a long while), but will "soon" start making payments via PayPal.

My Amazon affiliate earnings haven't increased since a few books were purchased by a blog visitor last year, I removed the half dozen recommended books off my RH margin. I had intended to do book review posts of my favourite PF books, but for some reason the amazon widgets don't work correctly when embedded within blogger posts. Since Amazon now charges a $15.00 admin fee for each cheque payment I won't try using Amazon as a revenue stream any more.

Feedburner revenue is accruing (slowly) for ads that get attached to feeds of my post distributed via the IBN group. I recently linked the FAN setup to my Google Adsense account. I'm not such exactly what that will do, but hopefully it can't hurt.


PAID [PayPal] PENDING ACCRUED [CHQ] ACCRUED [EFT]
Advertisers: USD $270.00 - - -
PayPerPost: USD $443.25 - - -
Blogsvertise: USD $114.50 USD $ 10.00 - -
SponsoredReviews: USD $ 16.25 - - -
ReviewMe: USD $ 60.00 - - -
AdSense: - - - USD $ 27.04 [$100 threshold]
AdBrite: - - USD $ 34.14 - [$100 threshold]
Newsroom: - - USD $ 1.01 - [$ 50 threshold]*
Amazon: - - USD $ 2.71 - [$100 threshold + $15 fee applies]
Feedburner: USD $ 2.12 USD $ 2.32 - -
------------ ------------ ------------ ------------
TOTALS: USD $906.12 USD $ 12.32 USD $ 37.86 $USD $ 27.04
Grand total: USD $983.34

It's good that AdSense may be finally starting to generate a noticeable amount of revenue. My goal is to move away from sponsored posts and get all blog revenue from Advertisers (Site Sponsors) or AdSense/Adbrite/Feedburner. This would mean that the income is "passive" in the sense that it doesn't rely on specific paid posts (although it would still rely on the blog having fresh content to attract readers). At the moment my blog income is around 1% of my salary from my "real" job, but I'm spending around 15 hours per week on this "hobby" - so the "pay" from blogging is around $1.18 an hour.

EXPENSES:

Around USD$51.23 pa. The income generated is now significantly more than the out-of-pocket costs of maintaining and promoting the site.

Annual domain name registration with Dotster USD$14.95, plus $10.00 for the redirection required to have my blog hosted by Blogspot but still use my domain name.

PFBlogs "Friends" fee: USD$2.00 per month.

Google AdWords: USD$0.76 for 4 clicks. Budget is set at max. $7.80 per month, but so far only getting around 1 click per month at $0.19 per click.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007



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