Monthly Income Report - November 2013

Monthly Income Report – November 2013

I know that our Monthly Income Report – November 2013 looks like it’s all about Christmas because of the picture above! Since these reports are really a “look back” over the prior month, I probably should have created a cover photo with Thanksgiving nuances instead.

But, I’m really into the holiday spirit right now and wanted to use the fun things that PicMonkey has added to their photo editing site for the holidays! So, forgive me for the slight confusion and discrepancy between the name of this post and the cover photo, okay?

Don’t you love our beards, hats and rosy red cheeks? Can you name Santa’s reindeer? Don’t sweat it – here they are:

Dasher
Dancer
Prancer
Vixen
Comet
Cupid
Donner
Blitzen
Plus Rudolph!

Enough rambling – here we go with the report: we made $100 in the month of November solely though sponsored post opportunities. Both of us have been very busy over the last several months and haven’t, yet, had time to “make stuff happen” on the blog.

Yep. We have to “make stuff happen” or it just rolls along doing its thing with the search engines. That isn’t a bad thing – just rolling along doing its thing with the search engines. But, we still don’t have the traffic numbers that bring extra revenue through advertising.

What do I mean “make stuff happen”? Well, there are multiple ways to generate income on blogs that we are not yet pursuing. Some of those opportunities include:

Advertising through Google AdSense – we are signed up with them, but our traffic numbers have not risen to the numbers that benefit from this source of revenue.

Affiliate advertising program with Amazon – we are Amazon affiliates and have been for many, many months. But, unless visitors access Amazon through our site and make a purchase, we don’t receive a commission.

Affiliate advertising networks – we are also signed up with an affiliate advertising network. Those are the ads you see running along our sidebar in addition to the Amazon ad and the Google AdSense ads. But, again, it’s all about the traffic numbers, so we gotta work on that {grin}.

Sell your own ad space directly to advertisers – heck, we can’t keep up with what we are already doing, so trying to sell our own ads just isn’t in the stars right now!

Sponsored posts/reviews – we’ve done several of those over the last 6 months. But, they don’t (normally) just land in our lap. We have to apply to the advertiser through a network (like filling out a job application) and compete for the opportunity against other bloggers. Again, this is a time issue for us. Because it takes time to fill out the applications, submit them, wait and then, 9 times out of 10, be rejected! We are developing a tough skin!

Sell merchandise – that’s a dream in the far off future!

Become a professional blogger or guest blogger – this means blogging for other people on their sites and being paid to do it! Again, we can’t keep up with our own site, much less work for someone else!

Join a blogging network – this is something I know very little about, so I can’t “speak” to it with any authority. So, that means it is something new for me to explore! In my spare time…

Ask for donations – not sure how I feel about this one. While the intent of our blog (other than having fun and providing interesting, useful content), is that some point in the future we “break even” and actually start turning a profit, not sure I’m comfortable about asking readers/visitors to “donate”. But, you can put a “Donate” button on your blog that runs through a PayPal account.

Ebooks – I’ve got several in progress. But, this past May, I had a computer hard drive issue and while my stuff is “saved”, it’s on an external hard drive I’ve yet to connect to my computer (again, the time issue thingy). So, until they are actually done and on our site for sale, no possibility for revenue there!

Sell access to an on-line course – several successful bloggers have created courses that you can purchase from them. They run the gambit of topics, but most sell the courses for either a one-time access fee or an access fee for a limited timeframe. Of course, you have to create the course, set it up, promote the heck out of it, etc. before you see financial gain. So, while this can be a lucrative possibility, it also requires a lot of work up-front and time to create it.

Over time, we hope to explore all of these different ways to add income to the Toot Sweet 4 Two coffers. In the meantime, baby steps…

Writing these reports helps me in multiple ways:

Gauge where we’ve been as a blog by using it as a comparison tool for previous months.
Analyze traffic to our site from social sources, organic sources and referrals sources.
Analyze what drives traffic to our site, so that we can continue to do what is successful.
It also motivates me to try to squeeze in extra time to explore opportunities. But, in the meantime, we trudge along…

Here are this month’s traffic numbers:

November 2013 Visitors Graph

Here are last month’s numbers so that you can compare:

October 2013 Monthly Overview – Google Analytics

I’m really surprised and happy about the “uptick” in our visitor traffic. Surprised because I really haven’t spent much time on Pinterest this month and yet, even though I’ve shirked my Pinterest participation, we have had increases in our traffic across the board. That’s the “trudging along” part I referred to earlier. Even though I haven’t been as diligent in promoting our blog, because our blog is now a decent size with lots of content, visitors are finding us!

I’ll do the math for you (November vs October):

We had 1,651 more visits to our site.
We had 1,533 more unique visitors to our site.
Our visitors viewed 1,771 more pageviews.

November 2013 Visitors

Here’s a close-up of November’s Visitors pie chart. The percentages remain about the same – our new visitors far exceed our returning visitors. I’m okay with that – to me it means that we are getting out there in the universe!

November 2013 All Traffic Referral Sources

This chart tells us from where our traffic is coming. Pinterest is still the leader. Organic search engine results through Google is in second place. Third place is “direct” to our site, which means that visitors actually type in our URL. That’s so cool! Thanks, sweet peeps!

November 2013 Referral Source

I want to take a moment and send a “shout out” to the website All Free Casserole Recipes. They approached us (I love when that happens!) and sent us a link to their site and said they would like to add a few of our recipes to their site via links back to our site. They told us that this would bring traffic to our site and they were right! They chose about 5 of our casserole recipes (we don’t have a lot of casserole recipes on our blog – yet!). So, we are excited about growing this opportunity through them! Thanks, All Free Casserole Recipes team! We love you!

November 2013 Acquisition

This graph is just another tool to analyze the different ways traffic is arriving on your site. Ours is “social”, which is driven by Pinterest (see below).

November 2013 Social Networks

I’ve never heard of #5 – Naver. I’m going to have to check them out at some point!

November 2013 Pages

This is a breakdown of what readers were accessing through the social networking sites. Seven were recipes and I’m guessing those came through Pinterest. Number 4 doesn’t identify the particular post (I don’t understand how this happens, so can’t explain it!) and 617 came to see our Elf on the Shelf post from last year, so I think that, too, those readers arrived through Pinterest.

I’m really proud of #7 – Sister Mom. 403 people clicked on that post to read it through a social networking site. I’m guessing most were through Facebook, although our November Facebook numbers don’t match this number. Read the post; it will warm your heart!

November 2013 Key Words

This is probably the last time I’ll include a graph about “key words”. Per my report last month, Monthly Income Report – October 2013, more and more, Google is not providing information in the way of “key words” because of privacy issues. So, this graph really is no longer useful in analyzing data. But, it does tell me, on a very limited basis, that visitors are searching “yellow cake mix cookies” with some frequency! I have 5 recipes I posted last year at Christmas time starting with a lead-in post called A Box of Yellow Cake Mix: 5 Cookie Bar Recipes You’ll Love and I’m thrilled that people are finding those recipes through Google’s search engines!

November 2013 Country

This is a fun one! Shows where our readers are located. In a gesture of full disclosure, I have very dear friends in England and a blogging friend in Australia (Vanessa; I’ve posted several stories about Vanessa – I’ll list them for you at the bottom of this post!).

Anyway, thanks for dropping by, thanks for reading this excessively long post, thanks for everything! I’m just in a thankful mood {grin}!

Tootles,

(other Monthly Income posts)

(other posts about Vanessa)

(recipes mentioned in this post)

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