At the start of every month, I take a look back at how this blog performed over the previous month. I also look at my income from freelance blogging. These income reports do not detail income from other projects of mine such as Rise Forums.
Apologies for the delay in publishing this report. I was unable to publish this report last week as I was getting ready for running the Belfast marathon
Traffic Statistics
Unfortunately, traffic stats for April are not complete due to a 403 error that was generated by W3 Total Cache. I did not resolve the issue until May, therefore the first week or so of traffic stats for May will also be affected.
You can see that stats stopped being reported properly after 22 April.
During last month, Google also changed the terminology that is used in Google Analytics. Visits are now known as sessions and unique visits are now known as users.
Obviously, the 403 error means that reported traffic should be around 25% less. This does not excuse the extremely low traffic that my blog received. Though it is to be expected since I spent more time writing for others than I did for my own blog.
- Sessions (Visits) – 5,815 (-23,944)
- Users (Unique Visits) – 4,977 (21,466)
- Pageviews – 8,945 (-51,334)
Readership & Social Media
You all know that I am not active on social media, however it is important for me to track my growth on social media as it reflects the growth in this blog.
These stats were taken yesterday (8 May), therefore the figures will be slightly higher than they would have been last week. As I sent some emails to my newsletter followers regarding Rise Forums, I saw an increase in unsubscribes. This is perfectly natural.
GetResponse shows that I had 106 new subscribers in April, however my total list size has only grew by 44. On a positive note, my overall list size did grow :)
- Email Newsletter = 2,043 Subscribers (+44 subscribers)
- Facebook = 1,067 Followers (+12 Followers)
- Twitter = 1,990 Followers (+13 Followers)
- Google+ = 938 Followers (+43 Followers)
- YouTube = 36 Subscribers (No Change)
Income & Expenses Details
I took on more writing jobs in April. This was not something I had planned or sought out myself. The clients that I had requested more articles and I did my best to oblige.
Due to time constraints, I was not able to do oblige everyone. I probably turned down around $1,000 of additional freelancing work as I could not fit the writing into my schedule of writing, updating this blog, and working on Rise Forums.
In total I earned $5,371.81 in April. I also paid out $223.90 for two guest posts, therefore my total profit was $5,147.91. This represents an increase of $1,983.96 from March 2014.
Income
- Freelance Blogging = $4,819.65 (+$2,163.75)
- Consultation = $50 (no change)
- My Books – $158.71 (+$36). This includes digital and printed book sales.
- Affiliate Income = $243.45 (-$41.89)
- Advertising Revenue = $100 (-$50)
Expenditure
- Guest Posts = $223.90 (+$123.90)
* Difference in income and expenditure from previous month shown in brackets.
Overview
I kind of have mixed feelings about last month’s performance. Making some extra money through freelance writing was good, though it is something that I have always had the opportunity of doing at any time. Affiliate income has not increased to the level I want and advertising income remains low too.
My initial plan was to use any additional income that I earned to bring in people to help update this blog and post every week for me. Sadly, that has not happened. I spoke directly with over a dozen or so bloggers.
Accounts were created for several enthusiastic people, who then failed to actually submit anything. The general standard of those who did submit a post was very poor with grammatical mistakes prevalent throughout the post. I don’t mind the odd spelling error, but an article still needs to be readable. Thankfully, I had good posts from Joe Fylan and Sourav Kundu.
Moving forward, I would like to bring in additional writer or two who are good enough to submit high quality posts on a consistent basis. It can be time consuming reviewing new bloggers, though it is something that needs to be done if I want this issue resolved.
Hope you enjoyed this income report. As always, leave a comment if you have any questions :)
Kevin
