Introduction

To start off this month’s update on online income and traffic, I want to explain why I do this.  If you’re new to the blog, you might wonder why I’m talking about blogging on a blog about financial topics.  Well, my view is that creating secondary income sources is the most impactful thing you can do for your finances.  Furthermore, creating online income is probably the easiest and lowest risk opportunity for you to create another income stream.  This report is my monthly update on this journey.

As you can tell if you continue reading, I’m now bringing in over $1,000 in extra income every single month because of my blog.  This is my goal, and my continuing goal is to increase this monthly income as I move forward.  The end goal is to achieve full-time income replacement through online sources.  This would lead to a completely different lifestyle for myself and for most of you I would assume.  If you’re interested in starting a similar journey, I have plenty of information here on this blog to help you launch.  To start, check out the information on the Online Income page.

With regards to the month of June, I had two major changes.  First, as you can see, I did a design overhaul.  The results have been fantastic which I’ll get more into later.  Secondly, I joined a new advertising program which meant going away from Google Adsense.  The results have also been excellent for this and I will explain more in the income section.

Now to the specifics for June…

Traffic & Readership

I like to break my traffic down into three categories: visits, page views and eye ball time. Since page views per visit can depend on a look and feel and how a blog is organized, the eye ball time is probably the most accurate number when comparing blog to blog. Let’s look at each…

Total Visits

October 2009: 6,387 visits
November 2009: 6,996 visits
December 2009: 7,735 visits
January 2010: 12,354 visits
February 2010: 11,947 visits
March 2010: 13,208 visits
April 2010: 11,943 visits
May 2010: 12,050 visits
June 2010: 12,065 visits

Search Traffic

October 2009: 3,570 visits
November 2009: 4,075 visits
December 2009: 3,954 visits
January 2010: 5,922 visits
February 2010: 5,533 visits
March 2010: 6,710 visits
April 2010: 5,991 visits
May 2010: 5,035 visits
June 2010: 4,547 visits

Direct Traffic

October 2009: 1,245 visits
November 2009: 1,230 visits
December 2009: 1,738 visits
January 2010: 2,370 visits
February 2010: 2,035 visits
March 2010: 2,425 visits
April 2010: 2,319 visits
May 2010: 2,575 visits
June 2010: 2,819 visits

Referral Traffic

October 2009: 1,572 visits
November 2009: 1,691 visits
December 2009: 2,043 visits
January 2010: 4,060 visits
February 2010: 4,378 visits
March 2010: 4,071 visits
April 2010: 3,633 visits
May 2010: 4,440 visits
June 2010: 4,698 visits

Slight bump in traffic this month, but the important thing is that the last 2 weeks of the month saw a major jump, which means I’m trending much higher for July.  Next month should be a big increase.

Page Views

October 2009: 19,155 total page views
November 2009: 20,500 total page views
December 2009: 23,418 total page views
January 2010: 36,023 total page views
February 2010: 33,725 total page views
March 2010: 36,776 total page views
April 2010: 32,670 total page views
May 2010: 33,035 total page views
June 2010: 39,208 total page views

Eye Ball Time

October 2009: 1:44 per visit = 664,248 total seconds = 184.51 hours
November 2009: 1:57 per visit = 818,532 total seconds = 227.37 hours
December 2009: 1:48 per visit = 835,380 total seconds = 232.05 hours
January 2010: 1:49 per visit = 1,346,586 total seconds = 374.05 hours
February 2010: 1:43 per visit = 1,230,541 total seconds = 341.82 hours
March 2010: 1:34 per visit = 1,241,552 total seconds = 344.88 hours
April 2010: 1:45 per visit = 1,254,015 total seconds = 348.34 hours
May 2010: 1:25 per visit = 1,024,250 total seconds = 284.51 hours
June 2010: 2:04 per visit = 1,496,060 total seconds = 415.57 hours

My time per visit time per visit jumped big time (due to the design overhaul) which resulted in the highest “eye ball time” ever since I’ve been keeping track. This is a good trend.

Google Analytics is the source of all traffic data

Blog Income

As I mentioned above, I dropped Adsense from 20smoney.com near the middle of the month of June.  This means that the following Adsense numbers no longer really apply, but I do have a few “niche” sites that bring in some Adsense revenue.  So, this month’s Adsense revenue reflects a couple weeks of 20smoney.com ads plus other sites that I have.

Adsense Revenue

October 2009: $38.60
November 2009: $75.40
December 2009: $59.28
January 2010: $171.79
February 2010: $68.39
March 2010: $121.28
April 2010: $149.40
May 2010: $158.68
June 2010: $84.51 – From here on, Adsense no longer the focus

Advertising Revenue

November 2009: $285.00
December 2009: $90.00
January 2010: $90.00
February 2010: $290.00
March 2010: $435.00
April 2010: $910.00
May 2010: $1,148.75
June 2010: $1,350.75

Another jump in online income.  We’re cruising now, and it looks to get even better in July.  Furthermore, I brought in a few hundred bucks in freelancing (which is in part due to this blog). I may start detailing these numbers in the future.  As such, my total monthly income from online sources is over $1,500.00.

Overall Thoughts

If you remember last month, I talked about being thrilled with the income but frustrated with the lack of that “next leg up” in traffic.  Well, thankfully, over the second half of June, it looks like I’ve found that next leg up.  The numbers in July should reflect this increase assuming the trend continues.  Income should continue to increase as well due to the new advertising platform and the additional traffic.  I’m very excited about the current direction.

2010 Goals Progress

We are officially six months through 2010 (halfway!).

• Alexa ranking under 120,000 by the end of 2010 - Moving around alot, after being as low as 105,000, I’m over 120,000 now.  This goal is becoming less important compared to the others.
  
• Google Pagerank of 5 by the end of 2010 – Done
• 25,000 visits a month by the end of 2010 - I’m starting to think that this is possible with my current jump in traffic – if we hit 25,000 visits a month, we should be well over $2,000 in monthly income and maybe more.
• Averaging over $100 per month in Google Adsense income by the end of 2010 - Done
  
• Averaging over $400 per month in total blog income by the end of 2010 - Done
  
• 1500 RSS subscribers by the end of 2010 - I got rid of my external email list which had been counted towards my RSS subscribers. This dropped about 300 from my numbers which sets me back on this goal. I’ll need to recover and add numbers quickly in order to hit the 1500 mark by end of year.  It’s slowly growing.  Not too concerned if we don’t hit 1500.