Traffic and Earnings Report for July 2012

July 2012 was a hard month for me personally, there were numerous family health issues that prevented me from being able to do blogging for much of the month.  If it wasn’t for the fact that in early July I hired about 5 more writers and I am now up to 11 writers for the site, I would have had gaps in posts as I couldn’t contribute nearly that many articles myself in July 2012 compared to previous months.

This means I was unable to accept and apply for sponsored opps in SocialSpark and other platforms and my income level dropped quite a bit as a result.  Fortunately I managed to make some up in WordPress services toward the end of the month and Amazon and Google AdSense alone provide a fair cushion of passive income though AdSense is down due to my site traffic being down from previous months.

July 2012 Traffic for DragonBlogger.com

So from my snapshot of some analytics pages you can see in July my site had 45,322 unique visitors which is about 10k less than the previous month.  You can see the ratio of search traffic is still in the 70% range  but one interesting thing is StumbleUpon which was my #1 traffic referrer for the past 20 months now dropped to #6 (thousands of visits per month gone, and Facebook is now my #1 traffic referrer).  This shows that with around 5,500+ Facebook fans and 2400+ friends on Facebook, it has more drawing power than my 14k+ followers on Twitter.

You can see my top 10 articles vary across entertainment, gadgets, and gaming so I have a pretty good mix of varying content in my top 10.

July 2012 EarningS

July 2012 saw slightly more earnings than June 2012 but around 50% less earnings than my all time high of $1300 for May of 2012.  I was not nearly as active in July as previous months and this cost me some income.  I did manage to do some WordPress services which earned me $215 and was a lot of work during a few Sunday/Monday nights.

AdSense is still the largest single income factor though is down about 20% from the previous month as the traffic diminishes, there were various other ways I make money online and they all contributed a little bit to bring my total income to $749.46 for July 2012 which means after paying my blogging expenses I had $628.92 net profit.

But don’t think I keep that money, in the first week of August already I paid more than $400 in blogging expenses ($300+ to writers) so very little of it is kept as true profit, it just rolls to cover expenses the following month.

In Summary

Though DragonBlogger.com had 65 articles published in July 2012 it still suffered a loss of income due to my being absent a good portion of the month to handle some family health issues and a vacation in early July.  The good thing is that my site earned almost all of it’s income passively, if I did 0 work on my blogs, I probably make about $300 in a single month just from AdSense and Amazon Affiliate on older articles which is good.

I intend to ramp up heavily in August and plan on focusing more on social media promotions as well as building quality backlinks to help improve my Alexa and hopefully regain some PageRank if Google will reconsider and stop punishing me for testing Intellilinks and Teliad last year.

Social Spark which tends to have great opportunities was dry in July 2012 and I had to estimate the Social Spark Ads income as their charts were down, but still they earn more than a BuySellAds slot in the same spot.

-Dragon Blogger