Dragon Blogger Traffic and Earnings Report for December 2011
Monthly I share my traffic and earnings report for blogging related activities in an effort to help show other bloggers what earning potential one can make running blogging and online promotions. This month my traffic was higher than some previous months but lower than my highs of over 100k unique visits in mid Summer.
December 2011 Traffic Report
The site had 65,921 unique visits for December 2011 with 74% of those visits coming from search engines. My top 10 pages however switched out dramatically when answers.yahoo.com became my 2nd highest referral site after it never placing in the top 10 before. This was directly related to my Kindle Fire articles solving problems and answering those problems on Yahoo.com and is a great way to bring in referral traffic and help spurn post idea’s. I had over 1200+ visits from answers.yahoo.com alone in December 2011.
BlogEngage is still in my top 10 referral sites for the month and always remains in the top 10. Some other blogs like TwoPeasInaBucket and Swagbucks also referred some traffic after I posted my Kindle Fire Giveaway contest to those sites.
I also started getting more referral traffic from YouTube as I expand content and promotion for my YouTube channel.
December 2011 Earnings Report
Along with one of my highest all time earnings records I also had some of my highest blogging related expenses in December 2011 as well.
My total earnings for blogging related activities in December 2011 were $1041.24 and this was my highest single month earnings of all time. September 2011 was my previous highest at only $941 dollars.
You can see that in December 2011 my AdSense earnings reached over $300 in a single month for the first time ever! In addition my Amazon Affiliate earnings also reached an all time high of $220. This means over $520 came from passive income earning basically just banner ads on my site either in posts or in sidebar. This is a tremendous amount of passive income and this was the first time my site had over $500 combined from these 2 programs.
Social Spark continues to be a strong factor for earning money for reviews, and I have been with IZEA Social Spark for over 3 years. They have earned me thousands over the past 3 years and it is my favorite blog earning program for doing reviews by far.
I sold 3 more Formidable Pro WordPress form plugins through my referral link which was always a nice thing. These mostly come from random retweets of older review articles and requires no active promotions on my part anymore.
The rest of my income is pretty much randomly distributed through many programs including:
SponsoredTweets is pretty much the only program I use to earn money from Twitter anymore, MyLikes has poor quality opps and just haven’t found anything worth promoting in the system in a while that matches my technology niche. That being said Twitter contributes a fair portion of referrals to Amazon affiliate and some of the Formidable Pro clicks which lead to sales.
This was an exciting way to end 2011 and I do know that my Amazon affiliate income was boosted by the holiday season and will likely drop off a bit for January. My blogging expenses were also higher in December 2011 and reached $290 dollars for a single month. This included paying my writers, my memberships and also paying to test out the Triberr social media promotion platform. I also purchased several Fiverr gigs to test out some promotion for my Kindle Fire Giveaway and boost some followings for some new experimental Facebook fanpages I am building out. This is a good way to quickly get a boost of followers to allow you to quickly set a custom URL/Name for your fanpage instead of asking people for 25 likes and worth the minor $5 investment if you intend to create a professional or business Fanpage.
Future Goals
My goals are to continue to focus on improving the passive income earning networks as these require the least investment and just earn without much involvement. This means focusing on traffic and tightening up promotions. As my social media following continues to grow it will also help lead to boosts in Amazon affiliate and some other things. Simply promoting a free android app game on Amazon for the Kindle Fire has given me some cross sell affiliate income. So I am not even selling anything, just merely giving the link to a free Android game and some people stay and purchase something and I get benefit. This is a passive sale, a way to earn income without actually pitching for anyone to buy anything and is a win/win.
I am also experimenting with IZEA Social Spark Ads on JustinGermino.com and WandererThoughts.com this is a banner ad network using Google Adsense behind Social Spark and so far it is providing more income for my personal blog than having a plain Google AdSense ad on the site. DragonBlogger.com does not qualify because of 51% or higher US traffic not being met, but should be curious to see how it pans out.
I have also hired two additional writers, one in December 2011 and one in January 2012 and this will also bring more site expenses. I need to make sure their articles they contribute bring enough traffic to help offset the additional expenses. I also want to focus on more tech giveaways, I have seen the power of giveaways recently with my Kindle Fire Giveaways. This has caused a HUGE burst of growth in Facebook fanpage following (800+ new fans in 1 month) and also leads to more engagement and excited readers/fans. I intend to do more and also partnered with @BlogEngage to give away more BlogEngage membership plans to other bloggers looking for a traffic, backlink and attention boost.
-Dragon Blogger
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I see your income report is continuing to move forward, which is really very inspiring. It is also very interesting to know that your top referrers is Yahoo answers. I actually abandoned using them for quite a while now as I was not really getting too much traffic from them. Makes me realize that it really depends on how you use it :)
I am curious as to what Ivin just said about "red links". They are not good? Ooppss, all my links are red, lol. Seriously, I would like to know why? Care to eleborate Ivin Viljoen ?
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