Monthly Income Report - June 2014

Welcome to my Monthly Income Report – June 2014! Every month I post an update on the growth of my blog. I post this report even if I’ve made nothing! I do this for two reasons:

the month I didn’t post a report, I was “called out” by a reader! And,
while writing these reports, I learn something, thus (hopefully) teach others!

I’ll get right to it: I made $56.00 in the month of June. I made this money as a guest blogger on other blogs, which you can read right here:

Creative Income Blog – 3 Tips for Organizing Anything
Recipe Chatter – Man-sized Meatloaf Muffins

These two blogs are owned and operated by a powerhouse publishing network called Prime Publishing. They own numerous crafting and recipe sites and these sites are the two blogs for those various crafting and recipe sites! Guest posting on other sites is just one of the ways that blogs can make money.

While this amount isn’t much, it is $56.00 more than I would have made if I hadn’t been a guest blogger. Because while I have advertising running on my site through Google AdSense and affiliate advertising on the sidebar, too, plus an Amazon shop, I don’t get paid by most of them until I reach a $100.00 threshold.

For example, last month I was paid by Google AdSense after finally reaching their threshold. And, it took me more than a year to reach that threshold!

Why?

Because for more than a year, I only had one Google AdSense ad on my site. I got wise to this oversight at a blogging conference and now have 4 Google ads on my site! So, I expect that I’ll receive future payouts about every 3 months based on my current traffic. Let’s talk about traffic…

This is my Google Analytics Audience Overview Report for the month. I know its hard to read, but here are the important numbers:

Sessions: 10,083
Users: 9,132
Pageviews: 14,511

In a nutshell, my traffic has declined over last month. But, I know I’ve been less active on Pinterest, thus the decline. This just proves to me that staying active on whatever social media network drives your traffic is important. So, for these last two days (the first two days of July), I’ve spent more time on Pinterest (about a half hour a day). We’ll see how that plays out in next months numbers.

If you are interested in learning more about Google Analytics as relates to blogging, today’s your lucky day! I wrote a 5-part series on the basics of Google Analytics and you can read those posts here:

If you are new to blogging or if you’ve been blogging for awhile and really haven’t paid attention to your Google Analytics, this series is a must-read!

This report is only one report available under the Audience category in Google Analytics. It makes obvious sense that the majority of my audience comes from the United States since I’m an American blogger. I have friends in the United Kingdom and Australia, so that makes sense, too. I love that our neighbor, Canada (a beautiful country) is well represented! And, of course I’m thrilled that I’ve have visitors from other countries, too! Thank you to all my visitors!

This is one view of the Acquisition Report. This reports tells bloggers from where their traffic comes. In the past, Pinterest has been the major driver of traffic to my blog. But, as you can see, they are now in the 3rd position! As I explained before, I’ve been less active on Pinterest of late. Not that anything’s changed in the way I feel about Pinterest (I love Pinterest!), it’s just that there are only so many hours in a day and I’ve been working on making a few subtle changes on my blog.

For example: I read a post written by another blogger about Categories and Tags. I wrote about this in last month’s report and rather than rehash it again for faithful followers of my Monthly Income Report series, if you want to know more about this, read last month’s report here: Monthly Income Report – May 2014. So, because of what she wrote, I analyzed how I’d done my tags previously, completely deleted them all and started over! Now this was a bit of an arduous task because I have over 700+ posts!

Anyway, the net result is that Google’s search engines are now driving more traffic to my blog than in the past, so I’m only theorizing that this re-tag project played a part!

You know, the Universe works in mysterious ways – at least it does for me! What I mean is that I read her post sometime in early May and then probably decided to delete all my tags and start over around the middle of May. On May 20th, Google released their updated Panda algorithm change and the food blogging world exploded! What I mean is that many food bloggers, including very big food bloggers, suddenly lost 50% of their traffic!!!

But, this didn’t happen to me. My Google traffic increased! I’ll never really know if it was because I deleted my old tags or not (Google keeps these things secret), but it does make me wonder why I read that post on that particular day, made a decision a few days later and then began rebuilding my tag structure (which took me several weeks).

In the number 3 position in the above report is All Free Casserole Recipes. They are one of the sites owned by parent company, Prime Publishing. I’ve been working with them for almost a year now (in August), so their numbers continue to build!

Fave Healthy Recipes, The Best Dessert Recipes and Recipe Lion are also part of the Prime Publishing family. If you add those numbers together, they drove 3,686 visitors to my site making their visitors rank higher than Google Organic! Many thanks to the editors (Emily, Natalie, Danielle and Emily) over at those sites; I appreciate our collaboration!

By the way, Google Organic means that visitors typed in a few key words in their search engine bar and landed on my site. For example, if readers type in “Peach Pineapple Dump Cake“, they will more than likely get my site at the top of the search results. Same is true for my “Coffee Banana Protein Smoothie“!

The Behavior Report (above) tells what visitors are reading when they land on my site. You can see that nine out of ten are still recipes! Don’t have a clue why #6 is blank, but if you know, please give me a “lesson” in the comments section, okay?

Here are links to all these recipes in case you want to check them out!

Anyway, that’s a wrap for this month’s report! Thanks for dropping by!

Tootles,

(other Monthly Income Reports)

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