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My Monthly Income Report: July 2012

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Why did I start publishing my monthly income reports?

Blogging is never about talking the talk.

That’s what politics are for.

It is my goal for these reports to show that walking the walk and actually bringing in income from our online ventures is possible and within reach for all of us, whatever the niche.

As you’ll see, traffic and perceived popularity doesn’t always automatically translate into cash.

I’ll show you my traffic stats, let you know what I’ve done in the previous month to improve them, what worked and didn’t work, and how much went into my bank account in terms of earnings as well as left it in terms of expenses.

July Highlights

July proved to be a challenging month for me.

Coming back to Traffic Generation Cafe to pick up the broken pieces after an almost three month absence was anything but easy.

I Had a Dream… post will explain what I am talking about.

However, being back feels fantastic!

My brain is slowly coming back from a near-atrophy.

I turn everything I see around me into a blog post.

I, once again, have to stop myself from signing credit card receipts with “@” symbol.

I was even thinking of immortalizing my blogging passion with a tattoo, but someone already beat me to it:

html tattoo

Or is that a magic marker?

July Traffic at a Glance

All modesty aside (like I have any…), July showed that there’s a reason I run a blog in traffic generation niche.

I am good with generating traffic.

traffic generation increase

Compared to June, my July traffic went up over 67%.

I attribute this jump to the authority I’ve built up over the past couple of years.

As a matter of fact, I firmly believe that building your online authority is the single most important thing you can do to grow your business.

Listen to what I had to say on the topic of growing your blog by growing your authority in this podcast by Dan Norris:

More great reads on the topic of online authority:

I do realize that most posts on the topic are pure rubbish and makes us say “Blah, blah, blah - whatever“, but it IS important.

More Traffic Stats

I am happy to report that Google has finally come to its senses and gave me my rankings back and then some.

(For those of you who are not keeping up with TGC as much as you should, the latest Penguin update pretty much erased my search engine rankings).

My overall search engine traffic grew over 108% compared to June.

Even though I am extremely excited about my newly restored rankings, I am not too happy to see that Google traffic now dominates my other traffic sources.

Not putting all your eggs in one basket is PARAMOUNT when it comes down to developing your traffic sources.

What would happen to my traffic if Google throws another fit tomorrow?

Another curious statistic for the last month:

  • My Pinterest traffic grew over 841%!

Learn more about using Pinterest for your business:

Thumbs Up to These Blogs

I really appreciate everyone who mentioned me in any shape or form last month.

These five blogs were my top blogging referral traffic sources:

  1. Nick’s Traffic Tricks
  2. WPSubscribers
  3. 2 Start Blog (new face in my referrals - thanks, Zeeshan!)
  4. Site Sketch 101 (haven’t seen Nick around for a while; thanks for the traffic!)
  5. Point Blank SEO

Yes, I’d love to mention your blog in this line-up as well.

Keep mentioning Traffic Generation Cafe posts and, who knows, maybe one of these days it’ll be my turn to send YOU my traffic!

July Bottom Line

Let’s get on with the best part.

By the way, as I write this post I have no idea how much I made, so I am in anticipation as much as you are.

Note: these are all paid earnings, meaning I might’ve actually made those sales in the previous month(s), but got paid for them just before publishing this income report.

My July Income

Here are my income sources for the past month:

1. Affiliate marketing

********

Subtotal: $1101

2. Paid Advertisements

  • Banner Ads – $150

I used to enjoy a much better income from banner advertisements, but this well has dried up significantly since my traffic went down.

Will see if if comes back next month.

*****

TOTAL: $1251

My Expenses

Posting gross income doesn’t really do us any good - what if my expenses put me in the red no matter how much money I made in the previous month?

With that in mind, let’s see how much running Traffic Generation Cafe cost me:

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links to the products I love and use for my own business.

I appreciate your patronage, should you choose to purchase any of them through me.

TOTAL: $154 (rounded up)

********

NET INCOME: $1097

Traffic vs Income

About a month ago, as I was working on my previous income report, my husband said to me:

“Wouldn’t it be funny if your income actually goes down now that you are back?”

“Funny” is not exactly the word I’d use now that it actually happened.

Even though my last report included all three months of my online inactivity, the average income per month was still higher than July income.

↓ $500

Obvious conclusion:

It’s much more profitable to have a small but loyal readership than floods of cold traffic.

To all of you, who supported me in the past by purchasing various products through my affiliate links - my sincere and hearty THANK YOU.

My Toolbox Updates

It’s amazing how much we miss if we turn our heads away from our businesses for a few days, let alone a few weeks/months, isn’t it?

July turned out to be a month of looking into the latest and the greatest plugins/tools/products that launched while I was on my house-remodeling vacation.

Here are just some of them.

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

This plugin creates a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time.

Often times, WordPress sites load slowly because of poorly configured plugins or because there are so many of them.

By using the P3 plugin, you can narrow down anything causing your site to run slower than it should.

This is one of those plugins that you don’t have to run all the time - activate it when you wan to check up on your other plugins and keep it deactivated any other time.

Hat tip to Astro Gremlin from BlogsNewsReviews.com for this one.

Pin Button Attraction

As I mentioned earlier, my Pinterest traffic is quickly becoming one of my largest referral traffic sources.

Much of the credit goes to the new Pinterest Pin button plugin by Chris Guthrie - Pin Button Attraction.

While I think that Chris could’ve definitely come up with a less awkward name for this plugin, I do agree with his thinking behind it:

  • Place the pin button where it counts the most: in the image itself;
  • Pull the image title as the pin description to save your pinners time and effort;
  • Pick and choose which images you want the pin button to show in.

I’ve tested some free plugins before I bought this one (it’s only $19) and found that they all fell short in some ways, like this one:

Free pin button flaw

See how that “Pin It” button covered my “Tweet This” image? Not good.

If you want to take advantage of some 20M Pinterest users (and I don’t see why you wouldn’t), I’d definitely recommend to get Pin Button Attraction.

Author Hreview

This plugin is quickly becoming one of the best ways to make my product reviews stand out.

Let’s face it: most of us get at least some of our income from affiliate marketing.

Doing product reviews is one of the major ways to drive our sales.

However, those product reviews need to be visible to both our readers (in a non-obtrusive, yet very obvious way) and search engines (as in ranking on Google under the product name).

Author Hreview by Hesham Zebida (FamousBloggers.net) does exactly that.

You can see it at work in my sidebar under “Ana’s Roasting Profile”, in the search engines as in:

SEMRush review

…or in my reviews, like this one: Do I still Use MarketSamurai?

Author Hreview offers a lite free version, which is fine to start with, or two paid versions to choose from.

I’ll probably do a full review on this plugin in the future, but you can see the paid version at work in my CommentLuv Premium review, where you can even send me your testimony about the product and get featured in that post.

CommentLuv Premium

Speaking of CommenLuv Premium, just in case you missed me mentioning it in every single post I wrote this week:

If you are ready to buy it, I’d suggest you wait a bit longer.

It’ll go on sale as of August 23, but there’s a catch.

The sooner you buy it, the less expensive it’ll be.

Get more details and get on the early bird list to get the best price here.

I am still working on testing a few more plugins and will let you know what I think of them.

I might have to do a “review week” of sorts…

Marketing Takeaway

There’s no such thing as free bacon.

Making money blogging is entirely possible, as I was surprised to learn from my own experience.

Just takes time, determination, and a lot of work.

Inspired and exhausted,

 

38 Comments (click here to leave a comment)

  1. thats a great income report Anna , nice to see that google have given you back your lost rankings and traffic thats a big gain , many sites are getting thrown out because of panda but after getting hit by panda people tend to loose interest in blogging but bloggers get to see a great reason why they should continue to blog because when it comes out of penalty its better than ever!

  2. Very inspirational post Ana, Thanks for sharing. I can only dream that monthly traffic and money stats. Pinterest really sucks for me. I rarely get visits from it. What matters most in Pinterest Ana, the image or the content?

    • You know we all start from zero, right, Naser? You’ll get there.

      Good question about Pinterest: I am not quite sure.

      I think the power of image comes first - after all, that’s what catching someone’s attention. But then your description of the image has to be good enough for them to actually click on it.

  3. Hey Ana,

    You did really great job by sharing your monthly income and traffic report here because I motivates others to do the same hard work as you do here. It is something which made me leave a comment here.

    You’re doing really a great job. Nice to see your traffic increased this month cause you deserve it!

  4. I’m loving these income statements and even more the traffic stats. You are rocking it for sure!

    Are you still actively pushing to get more traffic or are these numbers from work you’ve already done?

      • Wow, I owe you a big thank you for that one! I had no idea.
        Learn something new everyday!
        I’ve made the change (on all 3 of my sites) .
        So hopefully I’m good now.
        I know what to look for also.
        What comes around goes around and I’ll be watching to see if some unsuspecting commenter on my blog has the same issue and I’ll jump in with the save paying it forward (back?) LOL

  5. Ana thanks for the recommendation I really appreciate it.

    “you can really make money except you sell to the American market as you do.”

    I don’t agree with this at all. I would think it will be easier to sell to fellow Nigerians since knowing you’re in the same country kind of immediately build some credibility for you because the buyer can easily meet up with you if they so desire before they do business with you.

    The only reason I don’t like targeting local audience is that then I’ll have to do things manually - Like to sell my product to a Nigerian now, they’ll have to go pay into my bank account, then send me a payment notification, after which I’ll have to manually send my product to their email; compare to the automated process available when I target a worldwide audience.

    Most average Nigerians are still not that familiar with surfing the net talk more buying from the net.

    Anyway I think Kayus haven’t put in any real effort to make money blogging, he only think he has.

    I found 2 blogs he has written for both on blogger and together both blogs have 6 posts with Amazon products displayed.

    Even if he uses WordPress he still wouldn’t be making money blogging with just 2-4 posts.

    The problem I have with many Nigerians here who claim to be interested in making money online is that they say it but when you put in the time to try to guide them, they don’t take any action.

    I have a neighbor here who has concluded I am a wicked person because according to him I am selfish with my knowledge. This guy tells me regularly how he likes the idea of making money online. Then I asked him to take the time to learn the business but he wouldn’t. I even sent him to my site to use all the free resources there but he didn’t. Then one day I got fed up of him calling me a bad person and decided to give him an assignment. I told him to write down for me all the topics he thinks he knows well and people will be interested in. He said that was easy that he’ll have it ready for me in a few minutes; but 24 hours later I asked him about it and he said “wow, that’s tough”. Just coming up with the topics is tough for him so how will someone like that survive the tasks of making money online?

    This guy ended up putting up a one page blog with ads everywhere. And the one page was scraped from people’s content. And he was proud to tell me about it!

    Just imagine that.

    Now I also have a friend on FB also a Nigerian that nags me to teach him the business. But when I did a special birthday offer where I offered 70% offer the price of my book for 72 hours, he didn’t jump in. Instead he came back to FB to leave me a message about how he’ll really like me to teach him how to make money online.

    So it’s really frustrating. Too many of them are too lazy. Not ambitious; at least not when it comes to submitting themselves to proper learning. They dream a lot at night but wake up and expect someone to hand them the life they have dreamed about.

    Funny enough there are many of them who put up with lots of crap at their work place - long hours, multiple tasks and working on weekends all for a very merger salary at the end of the month. But you ask them to learn about profitable ways to make money from home and start to grow an extra income they freeze on you.

    On the flip side the people of Nigeria are very hard-working IF they set their minds to it. I think the idea of online business to them means quick way to wealth where you can set up a page and put ads and products everywhere and you suddenly make money.

    So these days I almost don’t feel encouraged to talk to a Nigerian about work home opportunities especially make money online.

    Anyway, I’ll try to reach out to Kayus. I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. So I’ll assume he’s really serious about wanting to learn how to make money blogging.

    He has a G+ profile but unfortunately he didn’t add his contact details. I’ll try to find him on FB and also make a post on his G+ profile let’s hope he’s active there and responds.

    Kayus if you read this get in touch with me. If you’re really serious about learning how to make money blogging, I surely can guide you to a right start.

  6. Great. Thanks for sharing your income details with us. It really helps in getting info and idea to make more money. And yeah! thanks for sharing the song at then end. I really loved it and downloaded it. 🙂

  8. hello ana,
    i am a regular visitor of your site and like the way you write. i remember the previous report when your search traffic was 24k and now it has increased 108%. amazing. you are doing a great job.keep it up.

  9. First off, welcome back from your time away. I like the tattoo idea - very clever. I agree with Sathishkumar. 1,000 a month isn’t bad at all. Surprised that you had a drop off with the increase in traffic though.

  10. Hi Ana. Awesome post like always.

    Specially liked “It’s much more profitable to have a small but loyal readership than floods of cold traffic.”

    Made me remember something by Seth Golden about the (1000 true fans)! Means you only need 1000 true and loyal followers. The kind that make sure to buy from your affiliate links and promote your product for you.

    And congrats on your total traffic rebuild. Glad to see It’s paying off. You are truly one of the best traffic drivers I’ve ever seen. And this is something that I am working on personally.

    Would check your traffic generation using Pinterest post. I am curious to see how.

    You need to watch for the bounce rate though. It seems a little on the high side.
    It could be fixed with something as simple as a colour change. Orange/white and Red/ Black combo works great. And of course the ocean blue facebook style.

    Truly happy for you. Keep it up

    • Much appreciated, Mohamed.

      And yes, turns out Seth Godin does know what he is talking about. lol

      Bounce rate? I think it’s pretty normal for a blog, but I do need to work on that.

  11. Hi Ana
    It is somehow nice to see that even a great blogger like you also can struggle earning money from time to time even your traffic are improving. However I am sure that you will get back on track now that you are back almost signing credit card receipts with your Twitter name - lol
    Nice to have you back Ana

    • I got the traffic part down, but money is still not falling from the sky…

      Go figure!

      Thanks for the compliment, Thomas. 🙂

  12. I don’t think my blog would be at the point it’s at (which isn’t exceptional but imo not to bad for only being a year old) if it weren’t for all your helpful insights! I hope one day my blog will generate some revenue instead of just costing me. Until then I’ll keep trucking on and giving it my best.

  13. How much do you plan ahead in terms of income and traffic generation? A month, two months? More? I’d be interested to hear what your plans are to improve now that you have this data.

    • I can plan ahead all I want to, Michael, but life always gets in the way.

      I am more of a last-minute kind of person - for better or worse.

  14. Hi Ana,

    Great info on traffic, conversion and plugins! Sorry for your loss the last month but July is always a down month for most. I’m still building my blog and as much as I’m concerned about building traffic as much as your post grabbed my attention to conversion!! Which is a whole new game in blogging.

    Thank you for the plugins info as well. I was under the impression that CommentLuv is free…but I guess it’s not?

    Regards,
    Niveen

    • Conversion is just as important as traffic generation, Niveen - after all, what’s the point of getting traffic that doesn’t take the action we want them to take, right?

      I’ve got some great posts about traffic conversion, by the way.

      CL has a lite free version as well as a full-blown paid one.

  15. Hey Ana, thanks again for coming on and for mentioning it. Had a great response so far already over 1,000 downloads which is great for less than a week.

  16. Hey Ana, it’s really surprising to see that your july earning actually went down even with the increase in traffic, but that not withstanding, it’s still great considering the fact that some of us has not gotten to that stage, My prayer for you that your up coming months will be better than the previous.

    Do you have any other blog or is this income from TGC alone?…(sorry if I’m been inquisitive).

    Wishing you the best ahead and may God crown all your efforts with success and also crown ours too.

    • I so appreciate your wishes, Theodore!

      TGC is the only site I currently run. I have only about 4 hours per day I work at it and trust me, with a blog this size, it is a lot of work!

      I have some ideas for other ventures, but they’ll have to wait.

      • PS Just tried to leave a comment on your blog and got this error trying to submit it:

        “Click back and type in the correct password. (Spam Free WordPress)”

        Of course, you don’t seem to have a place to add a password of any kind…

        If I may, Theodore - I think you meant to say “sticky” and not “tacky” in your post on bounce rate.

        “Tacky” means “In bad taste”.

        Great post otherwise!

  17. Although its far from “funny” it is interesting that the income dropped despite the traffic going up.

    I’m sure you made more sales since returning, but since you report the commissions in hand it makes these reports even better.

    My blog income is practically nonexistent since I don’t like promoting anything there, but at one point I might just get over it.

    Thanks a bunch,
    -Gabe

    • We, the bloggers, really have only two solid monetization choices, Gabe:

      1. Affiliate marketing
      2. Create our own products.

      Either way, they won’t sell themselves without any promotion.

      I’d say you are right - get over it!

  18. Ana Nice to see your July Report…. Specially for Increasing Visitor. Hope you will get more and more Visitor and Income from this Blog.
    Thank you so much for sharing top class article with us through out this month.
    Thanks
    Cheers.