April 2014 Traffic and Income Report

April wasn’t about breaking new ground but rather about preparing for the future. Abby and I spent the month preparing for the launch of her eBook. Fortunately it wasn’t me writing over 170 pages and 28 chapters. I had the much easier job of preparing a launch strategy and working through technical issues. Next week you’ll get a behind the scenes look into our launch (including income) but for now make sure you stop by Abby’s site and take a look at her eBook:

Building A Framework: Everything I Learned My First Year of Blogging

April 2014 Traffic and Income Report

(*asterisk denotes affiliate link)

April Recap

April was spent hidden away, out of sight, preparing for June 10th. You wouldn’t believe how much goes into writing and launching an eBook! Maybe we went overboard with our launch strategy but this was our first time so we wanted to do it right! It remains to be seen how it turns out.

Let’s get right into the numbers…

Income

• Google Adsense – $633
• Evernote Essentials Affiliate* – $108
• Amazon Associates – $128
• PicMonkey Affiliate*- $16
• Restored 316 Themes Affiliate* – $9

Total Income: $894

Expenses

• Synthesis Hosting – $67
• Mailchimp* – $65
• Fizzle.co* – $35
• Viral Tag – $12
• Adobe Creative Cloud – $11

Total Expenses: $190

Net Profit: $704

Income Analysis

Our income has gone down for the second straight month. I’m ok with that. In February when we netted over $2,000 it was largely due to one blog post that did extremely well. It was great but I knew it was a mountain peak and not a steady plateau. We learned a lot from that post and have been working hard to re-create the success but there is always a significant lag. The hard work we put in now may not pay off for many months. We are certainly feeling those effects right now with a very lackluster April. To be honest, we’re hoping all our hard work in April will pay off in June.

Traffic Report

• 84,217 Unique Visitors
• 101,688 Visits
• 182,304 Page Views
• 77.67% New Visitors

Not much change here. I’m thinking next month I’ll do away with a few of the metrics. I’ll keep tracking page views and unique visitors but I think reporting on all four metrics here is overkill.

There was no real big content push in April. Abby’s creative juices were flowing into her eBook more so than her blog in the month of April.

Email Subscriber Statistics

• 932 New Subscribers
• 3,657 Existing Subscribers
• 4,589 Total Subscribers

The changes we made in February keep paying off! I’m thrilled with the rate our email list is growing. This list has been incredibly valuable to us as we went through the eBook launch process. You can’t always rely on people coming back to your blog, but if you have their email address you can always reach out to them en-masse. Overlook email lists to your detriment. By the way, we LOVE Mailchimp*. Every day I find a new feature that blows me away. With some web apps I can’t wait to get out of them. With Mailchimp I leave it open in my browser all day long. The ease of use and design factor is the best in the industry.

If you want to read about the details of our email opt-in strategy look at the “Email Subscriber Statistics” section of our February Traffic and Income Report.

RPM

RPM is a metric to track revenue per thousand pageviews. Bjork of Food Blogger Pro explains:

RPM shows you how much you make from every 1,000 page views on your blog. It’s commonly used to measure the performance of your ads, but I like to use it to measure the overall effectiveness of a site’s income generation.

This number needs to approach $10. Talk about not living up to the potential of our traffic! The only way we are going to hit $10 RPM on a consistent basis is by maximizing multiple revenue streams. I need to setup ad layering, we can be better about our affiliate relationships, and most importantly… We need to sell our own product! That last one is happening right now so we’ll see how the June numbers play out with Abby’s eBook launch.

and to recap our income…

Click here to see a running tally of all past income reports.