July 2017 Income Report

After my less than stellar June, I was really need of a serious motivation boost, which thank God, came in the form of a verrry profitable July!

I did phenomenal on RewardStyle during the first week of July, when my conversion rate was 1%! This is considered a “good” conversion rate according to their team. The rate continued to fluctuate and even went up to 1.23% throughout the month.

AdSense income went down considerably, which I think is due to the fact that I added Native Shopping Ads from Amazon to my sidebar which was previously “sticky” when the height was able to fit within the screen view. Because the height is now taller, it disappears as you scroll down the article, so there is less chance to click the ads. Unfortunately adding Amazon ads didn’t fully make up for the loss of AdSense income so I may play around with this next month, but it’s not a huge concern for me at this point as AdSense isn’t a major source of my income.

Not a bad month overall! I guess July is a great month for furniture & home shopping as I generated 47 sales during the month, with a .90% conversion rate through RewardStyle.

Expenses

My expenses are mostly the same every month! I purchased my domain from Namecheap, my hosting from A2, and I use a yearly Tailwind subscription.

Links

This month, I got some really good links to my blog. I’ve never paid for a link or even asked anyone to link to my blog, and for the longest time, no one really was, however this month, two major, major home interior blogs (Design Love Fest and Brit.co) linked to my site!! I checked and the links were do-follow as well, which is amazing. In case you don’t know, a do-follow link is essentially a recommendation. By linking to my site, the publishers of these well-established sites, are telling Google they give my site a thumb’s up. This is a really good thing for SEO and hopefully over time, the “recommendation” so to speak, from these sites will pay off bringing me more organic traffic.

Oddly enough I also received a link from Buzzfeed in one of their “community” articles, which brought me a bit of traffic but nothing substantial as the article had about 100 other photos linked. I guess this is my month for links!

Traffic

I hit my goal of averaging 1,000+ pageviews per day in July for a total of 33,259 during the month! 🙂

This past month, I wanted to focus on joining more group boards in my 3 niches – travel, home decor, and blogging. I found a really fantastic way to find relevant group boards which I’m going to share on the blog in an upcoming post! (Be sure to subscribe below if you want to be notified)

Right now Pinterest is my main source of traffic, but it’s never a good thing to rely on just one social media platform for your traffic. A lot of people’s businesses are ruined each time Facebook modifies their algorithm, so it’s always good to diversify your traffic streams. That’s why I’m super happy that my Google referrals are growing – as long as I continue to receive inbound links, this trend should continue.

Content Creation

What I struggled this month was finding a balance between creating content on a daily basis and creating content less often that will bring me the most traffic in the long run. For example, in June my top 10 most highly trafficked articles totaled to 15,074 pageviews, or 60% of my traffic. At the end of June I had 168 articles. So as you can see, 5% of my articles brought in 60% of my traffic. Pretty crazy, right? The same trend continued in July.

When looking at these numbers, I’m starting to think that creating content less often, but of higher quality, is the way to more pageviews. That being said, I’m wondering if I will actually lose readers due to the fact that I can’t update as often if I focus on posting more in-depth articles, as opposed to the short and sweet ones I post when I simply don’t have time.

Goals

My goal for August is to take some time to analyze why my top 10 articles are performing so well, and how I can replicate that success. Pinterest SEO Analytics is also something I’d like to find time to look into so if you have any article or course recommendations, please send them my way!