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:

• SponsoredReviews
• BlogsVertise
• SocialSpark
• PayPerPost
• LinkWorth
• ReviewMe
• Intellilinks
• Teliad

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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Analytics Report for August 2011

The traffic was tremendous and this is in a large part due to the Persian Poetess covering the Pottermore phenomenon with breaking news and updates throughout the month.

You can see that we had over 97k unique visits and over 129k pageviews for the month of August 2011 here on DragonBlogger.com.  69% of the traffic come from search engines with my highest visited content all being related to Pottermore articles with one article reaching almost 29k pageviews by itself for the month.

Pottermore definitely took over on DragonBlogger.com for the month of August 2011 and helped establish Dragon Blogger as not just a blogging and technology blog but also for covering entertainment items as well.

The top referrals after search engines were Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter and BlogEngage.

Earnings Report for August 2011

Earnings was another winner and this is the first time in 3 years I have managed to bring in over $1,000 in a single month from blogging related activities.  Of course my income sources are extremely diverse and AdSense leads the pack as the single highest income generator.

I also heavily promoted the AWESOME Formidable Pro WordPress form plugin and managed to make some decent commissions from this plugin sales.  I also sold a copy of WP Touch Pro WordPress mobile plugin and continued to make money form some direct published reviews and link sales on Intellilinks, LinkWorth and Teliad.

SocialSpark had some incredibly great opportunities which allowed me to review some great companies and products including Carbonite online backup and earned me $140 in August 2011.  If you like doing product reviews and earning from them, there is no program better than SocialSpark.

I also sold more BSA Ads in August 2011 than any previous month due to the higher number of impressions as well as earning a little on Twitter by doing SponsoredTweets.

Lastly, I entered a BloggersCompete contest on my personal blog and my entry won and it earned me $75.00 which I added since it had to do with blogging and writing a blog post to win the money.  I will be doing more about BloggersCompete soon as we will be teaming up and hosting a cash contest for bloggers to enter starting sometime in September.

My blogging related expenses were also very high for the month, this involved higher writer payouts and I had to pay to switch to a new web hosting provider and paid the year in advance.  I also ran a few campaigns on MyLikes to see if I could increase my earnings and accidentally forgot to PAUSE my campaign which caused it to drain far more money than I intended.  MyLikes should allow you to set start/stop dates for your campaigns and not require a manual PAUSE to end a campaign, this is a really poor oversight and I am sure I am not the only one who overspent as a result of them doing this.

In total my NET income after paying all expenses was $766.22 which is the highest month of net earnings so far since starting my blogs back in 2008.

In Summary

August 2011 was a stellar month for DragonBlogger.com and the site is growing at a faster pace than ever.  As a result of this traffic growth I experimented with various CDN networks and will do a follow up article on which one I ended up using for the long term.

Though I started blogging as a hobby back in August 2008, the amount of effort and time it takes to research, write, promote and interact really make this more like a 2nd job for me.  I still managed to keep my hours to around 20 per week related to blogging activities so this would make my average $ per hour earnings about $14.00 hour which is actually the highest $ per hour earnings in the entire 3 years so far but far from being able to do blogging as my full time job.

-Dragon Blogger

No related posts.

Now on to the statistics.

July Blog Analytics

DragonBlogger.com had another super month in July 2011 with analytics and traffic that exceeded all expectations.  This included an all time high of 56,852 unique visits and 72,552 pageviews for the month.

All time highest traffic hit a point of over 4200+ visits on a single day thanks to StumbleUpon and one of our writers covering the Pottermore buzz and doing a fantastic walk through on how to get access and figure out the clues.

For the month of July 2011 and according to Google Analytics DragonBlogger.com had an average of 1,833.94 visits per day which is quite a bit higher than the 1655 visits per day average in June 2011.

Even more impressive was that I stopped using MGID traffic exchange in the middle of July 2011 and even with that service bringing in between 3k and 4k visits per month I was still able to post gains in traffic for the month.  Had I not stopped MGID, I might have crossed 60k unique visits for the month but it was the best choice overall for the long term.  I will do a future article on why I quit MGID in the next week or so for those who are interested.

July Blog Earnings

Earnings for my blogging enterprises took a huge dive in July compared to June 2011 and actually I earned 42% less money in July than in June which shows you how volatile the nature of blog earning is.  I earned a total of $568.89 in July 2011 from my blogging ventures total.

You can see though that I had $409.89 in blogging related expenses which brought my total net profit to only $158.80.  I had a far higher amount of writer expenses in June 2011, and I pay out my writers 30 days in advance so my July payments to writers were for articles written and published in June 2011.

This combined with some experimentation with Refollow, Twiends, and a Facebook ad campaign plus my long standing BlogEngage RSS Syndication rounded up my total expenses for the month.  For those who wonder about web hosting fees, I pay these annually as a lump sum so don’t include them in each month.

AdSense was still over $200 in a single month though the earnings was a little lower than June 2011 they were pretty close.  SocialSpark continues to be a good source of income and this will only get better now that DragonBlogger.com is named a SocialSpark Staff Pick site.

I sold some copies of Formidable Pro WordPress Plugin and the WPTouch Pro WordPress plugin which I highly endorse and use myself for my WordPress forms and mobile themes respectively.

Amazon Affiliate still brings in some income from 19 sales or so, but it is still a fraction of previous month where 1 sale of a high dollar item brought a very high commission which skewed my monthly reports.

Overall though because DragonBlogger.com was penalized and dropped to a PageRank 0 from a PageRank 4 in late June, I lost the advertisers interest in purchasing backlinks.  I was making about $200-300 with the occasional link being included in articles and this income loss was very noticeable.  Google has since given DragonBlogger.com a PR of 2, but I still don’t get the advertiser interest like I was when I was a PR4 site.

In Summary

These are the analytics and earnings of DragonBlogger.com for July 2011, I should point out that selling backlinks if you have a PR4+ site is a good way to make quick money but you can easily lose your PR very quickly.  I lost it by testing out a few services like Intellilinks, Backlinks.com and Teliad.  Never rely on a single source of income for your blog as it could vanish instantly, I have heard of users relying on Google AdSense only to have their account banned from someone click bombing them maliciously.  You must diversify your income sources and the path to really large income is through finding great affiliate products to market and promote, or creating your own product/service you can market and promote (which can’t be taken away from you!)

I expect in August 2011 my traffic to continue to rise, and I hope to see more life in SocialSpark from my new status.  I am hoping when my traffic rises higher the Amazon, AdSense and banner ad sales increase along with it.  Meanwhile, I am going to have to set proper limits on income vs expenses to avoid ever reaching a situation where my site brings in less income than I can pay my writers.  This is something all multi-author blogs need to think about.  You need to make sure your site incomes can cover your expenses and avoid running into the negative.

For more information on all the programs I use to make money online click on the link and read about every program I have tried and what works and what doesn’t for me.

-Dragon Blogger

No related posts.

As you can see from the picture, my site had 15,401 Unique visits, with just over 20k pageviews.  75% of my traffic comes from Search Engines which is very very high, only 12% of my traffic comes from referring sites like StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook and other referral networks.  12% of my traffic is direct which is via bookmark or email link from my feed.  My site has a 71% bounce rate which is much better than the 80+% bounce rates I was having, this is due to me adding more YouTube video demonstrations in my posts which keep a reader on the site longer.

My site has reached a visitor plateau for about four months now where my site traffic stays hovering around the 15-17k user mark and the 20-21k pageview mark.  Despite my search engine traffic increasing slightly, my social networking and promotion of my site just doesn’t have much impact to my overall site traffic.  If I were to literally stop using Twitter tomorrow, I would only see about 200 less visits per month to my site, which almost makes me question why I spend so much time on Twitter.  For me it just isn’t an effective promotional tool for this blog, however it is much more beneficial to my Poetry blog where almost 5% of my traffic comes from Twitter visits.

As I realize where my search engine traffic comes from, most of my traffic comes related to my technology / software related reviews and instructional articles.  It is ironic that 2 sponsored posts from SocialSpark account for the highest number of individual page views on single posts in my site.  This is good because it means my sponsored posts are being found and reaching users which is what the advertiser wants.

How did my fellow bloggers fare in traffic stats for April 2010?

-Dragon Blogger

No related posts.

1. Chartbeat

Chartbeat prides itself on allowing customers to “watch the dashboard in action!” By featuring realtime action that Google Analytics simply doesn’t provide, many people actually prefer Chartbeat. In one dashboard it actually incorporates the historical data that Google Analytics provides, but in its second dashboard the consumer is told the instant any action is occurring. Some of the most interesting features of Chartbeat are its unique scroll mapping and page pausing. These features allow the consumer to see exactly how far users scrolled down on their website page, as well as where they paused. Another cool feature – page density – lets the website author see how many visitors are viewing specific parts of your site at any instant.

2. Reinvigorate

Reinvigorate is also an analysis program that is realtime as well. Website designers who have a personalized desktop client and javascript installed can view exactly when visitors view their site. By seeing this analysis broken into time increments throughout the day, website developers can evaluate certain needs for their website with greater detail than their Google rival. Customers who use Reinvigorate are also immediately notified when visitors perform certain actions on their site. Also, heatmapping technology (similar to CrazyEgg) is integrated directly into the program. With hourly, daily, and monthly breakdowns, Reinvigorate allows website designers to configure their site to its specific needs. It also doesn’t hurt that you can track analysis directly from your desktop.

3. Piwik

Many companies dislike the data ownership policies of Google Analytics. Because of this, Piwik has surfaced as a user-friendly, open source alternative. One of the great benefits of using Piwik is that it runs on PHP and MySQL. Both are not very difficult to set up and begin running smoothly. Because it is purely web based, users don’t need to download any tedious programs to view their analysis. Perhaps the most impressive aspect about Piwik, though, is its speed. The dashboard is incredibly fast, especially when it is switching between screens. Some might say that this is because Piwik does not collect as much data as other alternatives. However, it is still an efficient way to analyze your website.

4. Engine Ready

Engine Ready is a fairly cheap alternative to Google Analytics. It has very effective visualizations that allow users to compare sales figures, returning visitors, and first time visitors in one graph. With a good pool of data, users will be able to identify trends that will ultimately better their company. One of Engine Ready’s greatest features is its simplicity. Using understandable graphics that are usually represented with different colors, anyone can understand the ways customers navigate through their website. Like Google Analytics, the basic stats that most services offer are also provided in a format that is easy to read.

5. Mint

Our last alternative to Google Analytics is Mint. Mint provides a comprehensive breakdown of site activity from the previous day, week, month, and year. Page views and unique visitors are some basic stats that Mint offers, but this program also has some complicated statistics as will. For instance, users of Mint can break down different referrers by seeing who is a repeat, recent, or unique customer. Mint is also cutting edge in that it lets users flag specific pages to assess traffic and content. By employing this tactic, website designers can determine which pages on their site are most effective. Finally, it definitely helps that this program is very easy to install. Once it is installed, Mint has an interface that reads very easily. Website designers don’t want to dig through their analysis for statistics. They want it presented in a simplistic way. Mint does just that. So have a mint!

Melissa Tamura writes about criminal justice degree online for the Zen College Life directory of online schools.

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