Monthly Income Report – December 2013

On the 28th of this month, Toot Sweet 4 Two will celebrate our 18th month as a blog!  It’s hard to believe that we are no longer in our infancy, but are now toddlers in the blog world!

We’ve had highs and lows over the last 17 months – mostly highs.  Some of the highs have been:

• meeting amazing new people and making new friends because of this blog
• reconnecting with old friends because of this blog
• attending fabulous conferences with equally fabulous motivational and inspirational speakers
• constantly learning new things about running a blog, helping us to stay in tune with the fast-paced, ever-changing tech world!

The lows have been from a monetary aspect.  We made zero dollars in the month of December.  Zero. Zilch. Nada.  But, rather than focusing on the fact that we made absolutely nothing from any revenue stream, I choose to focus on the positive things that happened in December and all of 2013.

So, here we go…

The above graph is our traffic for the month of December.  Comparing this graph to November’s graph is a little disheartening because our traffic numbers are down by about 12%.  I’m taking a wild guess that the numbers are down for two reasons:

1. I wasn’t very active on Pinterest this past month (too busy!)
2. Other people (our readers, visitors) were in the same boat – too busy to read blogs, look for new recipes, etc. {grin}.  I read somewhere that blogs’ traffic numbers typically go down in December.  Everyone’s shopping on-line instead!

The chart above is December’s “acquisition” chart.  This chart tells us the source of our traffic.  Since June 2013, more than 50% of our traffic has been coming from Pinterest.  December is the first month that more traffic has arrived via Google’s search engines than through Pinterest.  While I love Pinterest, am a HUGE Pinterest fan, this fact does not bother me.  Why?  Because it’s best not to put all your eggs in one basket!

In other words, I’m glad to see that organic search engines results are catching up to Pinterest traffic referrals.  If Pinterest suddenly goes away, we will lose half of our traffic immediately!  Now, I’m pretty confident that this isn’t going to happen and that Pinterest is here to stay, but just look at MySpace!  So, continuing to see traffic numbers increase through organic search engine results is a positive thing!

I’m done with December.   Why dwell on the negative?  So, let’s talk about the numbers for the entire year of 2013:

The above graph is all of 2013.  I’m so excited that for 2013, we have more that 50,000 unique visitors to our site and those visitors read over 100,000 pages!  I know in the blog world, these are paltry numbers, but for us, this is amazing!  What is even more amazing is that our numbers started going through the roof in June.  This is all because of Pinterest!  Like I said, I’m a huge fan of Pinterest.

The graph above is from the date we installed Google Analytics on our site (mid-October 2012) to the end of 2013.  This shows that from installation day (October 2012), until June 2013, our numbers were, basically, nowhere.  Almost non-existent!  And, then Pinterest became a factor and for the last six-months, we have seen significant growth.

For example, in May of 2013, we had 238 visitors land on our site via Pinterest.  In June of 2013, we had 3,540!  That’s almost a 1500% increase!  Through Pinterest!

The above chart is the 2013 “Acquisition” chart.  Pinterest drove almost double the amount of traffic to our site than Google organic (#3)!  Note that more people landed on our site directly (typing in our URL) than arrived via a Google organic search!  Even that is astounding to me!  15,000+ times in 2013, readers made a conscious decision to check in and see what is going on!  Love that!

Note, too, that 2,000+ accessed our site through an RSS feed.  This means that they “subscribe to us” via an RSS feed and then choose to come to our site through the daily feed!  Love that, too!

BTW – you can subscribe to us in a couple of ways:

1. Subscribe to Us by entering your email into that box on our sidebar
2. Connect to us through an RSS feed

You can, of course, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+.  Follow us everywhere!  Do it now! {grin}

Seriously, we would love to have you subscribe to us via email or an RSS feed.  There is another way, too:  Bloglovin’.  But, I’m saving that for another post; if you can’t wait, you can head over there right now and follow us through Bloglovin’!

I want to take a minute to talk about the graph above – our lowest day, ever, and our highest day, ever.  Our lowest day, July 21st, happened because our hosting company had some kind of failure.  So, it wasn’t just our blog, but many blogs and websites using that host and that particular server.  A sad day for us, but can you imagine how even more sad it was for sites that are larger than ours?  We probably lost 300 readers that day.  Other websites lost thousands!

Our highest day, August 25th, is coincidentally my father’s birthday.  I did a motivational quote that day called Love Begins at Home, so I’m sure it wasn’t that particular quote that drove 623 visitors to our site.

Or was it?

Was my dad smiling down at me and saying “today, Carole, I’m going to give you a little boost, so that you don’t miss me so much!”  The Universe works in mysterious ways.  You see, my dad died on January 19, 2013 and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss him.  In those first days following his death, I shared many stories about him and his impact on our family and you can read them starting with this post:  High Flight.

This is the “Referral” chart.  It’s all about Pinterest.  Four months ago, we were contacted by All Free Casserole Recipes and they asked if they could post some of our casserole recipes on their site and link back to our site.  We said “yes” and over 1,000 visitors have come to our site through them!  In four months!

I’ve mentioned Lovelyish before in an earlier Monthly Income Report, but, basically, they linked to my Coffee Banana Protein Smoothie and that has driven a little bit of traffic to our site.

Your Marketing BFF is our blog designer, Tana.  Back in July, Tana did a post on her site called Blogging Alliance Tips and linked back to us!  It drove some traffic to our site; thanks, Tana!

This chart is all about Social Networks.  You can see that we really do a poor job on almost all other social network sites except Pinterest.  I’ll share, frankly, that it is a time issue.  I just don’t have the time to engage in other social networking sites (I have a real job in real life!), so I’ve picked one, Pinterest, to concentrate my efforts.  I’m hoping that I’ll be able to engage in some of these other sites in 2014, so we’ll see what happens!

In spite of me saying over and over and over again that we are not a food blog, I have a confession to make:  we ARE a food blog!  The above chart is proof of that!  So, even though I don’t focus on food when creating content for Toot Sweet 4 Two, recipes are what is driving traffic to your site!  Out of the top 20 direct landing pages, only two are not recipe related.  One shows that people landed specifically on our home page (#10) and others came in because of Tiffany’s post from last Christmas (2012) called Sally Snowflake:  20 Things to do with The Elf on the Shelf (#19)!  The other  18 in the top 20 are ALL recipes!

The Number One and Number Two recipes, Creamy Mashed Potatoes and Charlie’s Layered Mexican Casserole are recipes from 2012 and the photos were taken with my iPhone (pre-fancy, dancy camera days!).  It astounds me, the power of Pinterest!  Even not so good photos get pinned and referrals come when the “content” is what readers are looking for!

This chart is interesting to me because while 87% of our readership is from the United States, I love seeing where others are visiting from!  And, I really love the map below:

All of blue areas are visitors to our site!   I can’t show you in this photo, but on Google Analytics, when you hover over a country, a pop-up tells you the name of the country and the number of visitors!  So cool!  I love this map because it shows that we’ve practically covered the whole world!  Isn’t that truly amazing?  Teensy, tiny, little itty bitty us has been viewed by people in so many different countries!

I can’t wait to see what 2014 has in store for us!  The last 6 months of 2013 have been pretty darn amazing!

P.S.  While we didn’t make any money, at all, in December we’ve made $1,442.01 in 2013 from the moment we collected our first “paycheck” in May through the end of December!  Pretty cool in my book!

Tootles,

Related Posts:

(other Monthly Income posts)

• Monthly Income Report – February 2013
• Monthly Income Report – March 2013
• Monthly Income Report – April 2013
• Monthly Income Report – May 2013
• Monthly Income Report – June 2013
• Monthly Income Report – July 2013
• Monthly Income Report – August  and September 2013
• Monthly Income Report – October 2013
• Monthly Income Report – November 2013