Dragon Blogger Traffic and Earnings Report: January 2012

Written by: Justin Germino

February 11th, 2012 7:00 am - 11 Comments

Coming into January 2012 I had a surge of excitement for my blog, I mean the Year of the Dragon is a perfect theme for the Dragon Blogger and I was looking to start the year strong with a Kindle Fire Giveaway, Video Game Giveaway and Blog Engage Membership giveaway all in the month of January. I spend a lot of time trying various programs to make money blogging and some months pay off better than others. For January 2012, this was a great month compared to January 2011, but would be considered a disappointment if you compared it to December 2011.

January 2012 Traffic Report

Compared to January 2011, DragonBlogger.com had a 55% growth in traffic in January 2012. This shows you how much the blog has grown in 1 year.

You can also how my traffic sources have diversified a little as well with more of my traffic coming from search engines and a little less coming from referral sites.

In January 2011 I also was using the MGID traffic exchange widget which brought about 1300 visits per month to my site, you can see how my referral site traffic compared as well.

I will say that for the first time ever Facebook became #2 in traffic referrals in January 2012 coming in behind StumbleUpon. This is in large part due to my Facebook fanpage growing from 600 fanpage members in December to over 1900+ in January 2012. The contests have really grown my Facebook following quite a bit but still Facebook only sends about 800-1000 visits per month to my blog which is only about 1.8% of my site traffic.

Since my blog started in 2008, StumbleUpon network alone has brought more than 22,000 visits to my blog and continues to be the strongest referral network out of any social network I have used to date. Twitter where I have almost 13k followers usually hovers around 3rd place.

Overall my January traffic is a good strong start but down about 10% from December 2011 due to the holiday rush falling off. Also my Kindle Fire articles in December really got some huge boosts due to all the holiday rush around the Kindle Fire and people looking up tips and such.

January 2012 Earnings Report

Earnings came up a bit shorter than I had hoped in January 2012, with me earning less than 50% as much as I did in December 2011. This was largely in part due to a drop off of Amazon affiliate income (holidays ending and fewer referral sales) as well as AdSense income was down quite a bit too.

Combine this with my blogging expenses being the highest ever in the past year (due to paying my 1 year hosting provider fees up front in January as well as DNS domain renewals) and I took an actual loss on earnings for the 1st time ever since starting my blog in August 2008.

Fortunately my surplus from December 2011 allowed me to cover all writing expenses and float into February 2012. This does however mean I need to adjust strategies a bit and focus on bringing more income in for the site. Since DragonBlogger.com was dropped to a PR0 advertiser offers have come down quite a bit. Still, with my site earning pretty much an average of $300 per month in passive income I can cover my writer staff expenses as I experiment with new programs and try to optimize existing ones.

One example is that I have enabled monetization for many of my YouTube Video’s, I have over 80 of them and many get thousands of PageViews but didn’t have ads enabled. I am also going to work on more affiliate programs where I can, particularly around Formidable Pro which I am heavily vested in and use not only on my own blogs but some of my clients blogs as well.

I had also invested some money into e-Junkie to sell my audio poetry book as well as JustRetweet to help with some article promotions. I did sell more BSA ads in January 2012 than I typically do in a single month which is a strong sign and will grow more in this area as my blog increases traffic.

Summary

Overall I predicted that the sales rush of the holidays would taper off in January and they did, I didn’t predict a drop of about 60% in earnings and this did turn into a loss month for me. I do have earnings from previous months saved up to cover any potential losses, so overall I am not concerned. Earning money from a blog when you don’t have a clear product you created to sell is very erratic and you can have some truly spectacular months and others where you can be very disappointed. The key is not to give up and make sure you save enough from your surplus months to cover your underperforming ones.

-Dragon Blogger

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Article Written by Justin Germino (1579 Articles Published)

Working in the IT Industry for over 10 years and specializing in web based technologies. Dragon Blogger has unique insights and opinions to how the internet and web technology works. An Avid movie fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.

Follow Justin Germino on Twitter @dragonblogger

Technically Easy 6 pts

Year-over-year those are some pretty solid numbers. I had an unpleasant drop in traffic in January. My Amazon earnings dropped considerably, but AdSense still performed well. These months are always tough because of the holiday season being over, but hopefully it will being to pick up as the year goes on.

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blogengage 10 pts

So far Jan was huge for me, I had a lot of footer ad sponsors so it's been a great start! This month is also looking great but I'm also working a lot more at it seeing I'm full time working on Blog Engage now. I'm on path to make $2100 USD this month! But perhaps that just because I had a great start you never know what this month will bring in.

Dragon Blogger 213 pts moderator

blogengage A great income for a blog for sure, and some bloggers make a fair income selling their own products/services or affiliate selling other products. I don't push Wordpress plugin affiliate stuff so hard because this blog is too general and has too many gaming, entertainment and tech fans to be specific enough for me to push for Wordpress affiliate items. However I do make on average about 4-5 sales per month from some Wordpress plugins.

My latest conversation: Dell Launches Alienware X51 Gaming PC Starting from $699

Dragon Blogger I know it's off topic but every time I comment here I like this comment system more and more. Is there anyway you can allow spell check, I see some of them allow for spell check.

blogengage That is not something I can enable or disable in Livefyre, but Google Chrome has spell check on by default which should catch comments you try to leave no? So I think it just relies on the browser spell check. Most browsers have spell check now, so why bother needing it for the commenting plugin. Spell check is something that must run actively as you type, most commenting systems load and then don't process again until you click submit so don't actively run and monitor what you are typing.

My latest conversation: Poem: Anatomy of a Snowflake

Dragon Blogger well it shows the errors I just can't right click and fix it... but on some sites I can.

tonygreene113 36 pts

With regards to your losing rank due to LV/Teliad, will you be giving another type of solution for this or simply try to make up for it with sponsored stuff? Just curious. I removed Intelli and LV because of all of the space they took away from site and sometimes hung up in page rendition.

My latest conversation: Social Media Saturday: Susan's Barber Shop

tonygreene113 When the links expire I will remove them, but I am still under contract with some links and collecting some recurring revenue. Even with my PR down to 0, some links stayed purchased. My goal is to try and continue to increase Amazon Affiliate and Google AdSense revenue. I have little real estate for more banners, I need traffic to go up to really start bringing in additional revenue.

tonygreene113 Your 100% right tony, no traffic = no sales. this is the reality of working online. It's good you know this many bloggers don't.

Tuan

January is often a bad month for all bloggers as the holiday season has passed out. Fortunately I managed to keep profit positive so that I don't have to cover the loss. I guess you lost earnings mainly due to the hosting fee.