Blog Performance and Monetization Update: January 2008

This monthly summary post of site traffic and blog earnings is getting tedious to write, so I can only imagine how boring it is for most readers ;) Therefore, this will become an annual post from now on. The previous posts provide a good guide to how traffic and revenue figures may develop for a blog with relatively modest readership, and live traffic data from Quantcast and Sitemeter can be obtained from the links in my sidebar.

READERSHIP: EnoughWealth.com

Readership had a growth spurt during December as I was invited to join a group of financial bloggers and got some help with using social networking to attract new readers. My google pagerank is still 0, but this hasn't affected the ranking of my blog for relevant search terms in google, so it's only obvious impact has been the lack of PayPerPost opportunities available to me and possibly an adverse impact on my rating with various "top PF blogs" lists (if they use pagerank as an indicator of blog draw). My feedburner subscriptions have plateaued around 70.

My Technorati 'authority' has dropped from 126 back to 114, perhaps other sites have removed links to me in response to my moving my link lists to a sub-page in attempt to resurrect my pagerank. Who knows?

My Alexa rank has dropped to 993,197 due to the recent spikes in visits some days, and the weekly rank figure is 459,838.

Quantcast estimate of my readership is:
Global: 4,048 uniques (~visitors) per month
US: 2,670 uniques per month
My QuantCast rank has improved from 761,374 to 404,259

Despite no longer posting new content to the enoughwealth.savingadvice.com site it still gets similar visits and pageviews as before. I can only assume that savingadvice.com attracts lots of fresh readers who browse through all the archived pages and aren't existing readers looking for fresh posts.



Hopefully I'll be able to achieve 6,000 visitors in during this month:



MONETIZATION:

AdBrite revenue from interstitial ads continued to be around 2c-3c per day, even though I had increased the estimated CPM rate so that AdSense ads get displayed instead of AdBrite most of the time. AdSense revenue was variable, on some days there were many clicks while on other days similar traffic wouldn't result in a single click. I've deleted the intersticial full-page AdBrite ads as they pop up after a visitor has browsed more than a couple of pages and could be annoying - especially as the ad was for an off-topic product!

Newsroom continued to accumulate revenue from display of their feeds, but the amount of revenue is negligible ($1.08 in total - up only 4c this month) 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.

Feedburner revenue continues to accrue very slowly from the ads that get attached to feeds of my post distributed via the IBN group.

PAID [PayPal] PENDING ACCRUED [CHQ] ACCRUED [EFT]
Advertisers: USD $270.00 - - -
PayPerPost: USD $443.25 - - -
Blogsvertise: USD $124.50 - - -
SponsoredReviews: USD $ 16.25 - - -
ReviewMe: USD $ 60.00 - - -
AdSense: - - - USD $ 59.99 [$100 threshold]
AdBrite: - - USD $ 36.37* - [$100 threshold] 
Newsroom: - - USD $ 1.08 - [$ 50 threshold] 
Amazon: - - USD $ 2.71 - [$100 threshold + $15 fee applies]
Feedburner: USD $ 2.12 USD $ 3.96 - - 
------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ 
TOTALS: USD $916.12 USD $ 3.96 USD $ 40.16 $USD $ 59.99
Grand total: USD$1020.23

Increase for month $23.51

As the income from Feedburner and AdSense Ads is proportional to traffic (and click through rate) this monthly income should increase over time. However, the recent increase in traffic from social networking sites hasn't resulted in much of an increase in CTR, so obviously the type of reader visiting the site is important. ie. quality of traffic, not quantity, matters.

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