i.nconspicuo.us

The first month of the new year has been completed, and once again, it seems that most visitors find my site, read what their looking for, and leave. I’ve currently got a returning visitor percentage of 7.16%. Obviously, I’d like to see this change, because the longer I’m able to keep a user on my site, the better the chance I have of generating revenue from clicks. Though most of my visitors (about 90%) only view a single page upon each visit, I was still happy with the amount of traffic generated.

Over the course of the month, I had a total of 2,543 visitors for 3,236 total pageviews – this equates to a pathetic 1.27 page views per visitor. I have noticed that when traffic spikes, it typically doesn’t fall of to the level it was prior which tells me that for each “brilliant” article that I dream up, I actually am able to gain a reader or two. After seeing these statistics, my new goal is going to be:

To double my number of
pages per visit from 1.27 to 2.5

As a new site, I think this is an acheivable goal, and I am hopeful that it’ll happen by the end of February… stay tuned! Between the addition of new content, and cross linking between my articles, doubling the number of pages per visit shouldn’t be out of reach.

Next up: Where does all of my traffic come from? Still, the large majority of all my traffic comes from Google. Why wouldn’t it? Google is the largest search engine in the world. Digg.com and MSN.com are still on the list, and this month we’ve also got a new referrer – AVSforum.com (the Audio/Video Science Forum) – I’m not sure why they’d be linking to me, but if you find the page that does link to my site, please send me a link… I’m curious to see who/what/why is linking to me.

This site could obviously use some more inbound links, so don’t be afraid to link to me! Don’t worry, I’ll return the favor!

How much money did the site generate?

During the entire month of January, Google Adsense tracked 3,004 pageviews as opposed to the 3,236 tracked by Google Analytics. Why the discrepancy? I don’t know, if you’ve got any insight on that, please fill me in. Anyhow, of the 3,004 page views, I got a total of 58 clicks on advertisements (a 1.93% Click-Thru-Rate). These 58 clicks earned me a whopping $9.54 (about 16 cents per click). All I have to do is figure out how to increase this… by 1,000%!!!

Oh, don’t forget AdBrite - I implemented a header advertisement on the 27th and Adbrite helped me earn a total of $0.80 – 80 cents! That’s almost enough to call my wife from a pay phone.

So in total, I made $10.34 from my website in January – retirement… here I come. At least I hit double digits in the first month of the new year. My new goal is to have this site earning at least triple digit income by the end of 2007 – is this attainable? Are there better ad networks that could increase the revenue? I don’t know now, but I’m going to find out. And I’ll let you all know!

Okay, so this site has now been online for almost 2 months (Monday, January 15th) so I wanted to give a brief recap of traffic, referrals, and ad revenue.

As soon as I launched the site, I submitted it to Google and luckily, my site was indexed fairly quickly. As you can see by the chart below, Google accounts for more than 75% of all the traffic that I get.

Digg also sends a good amount of traffic, but no other site really even comes close to the amount of referals that Google sends. Look at MSN… can you see it? It’s the faint little sliver between the green and khaki colored spots on the graph.

In the 2 months that the site has been up, it’s been fairly consistent in terms of page views, typically averaging just under 100 views per day. It’s become painfully obvious to me that my visitors view the page that the searched for then just leave… click around the site people… I know most of this shit is boring, but take the time to read some of it!!! Below you can see a graph of Daily Visits and Pageviews.

Check out Thursday, 1/11 on the above graph – that’s the day I posted an article about the Apple iPhone… pretty good traffic leap from prior days. Too bad I don’t have more time to write about hot shit.

And now to the Adsense income portion of this little recap. In about 60 days of having the site live, I have generated $40.22 of income so far, strictly from Google Adsense. I’m averaging $0.69/day right now and I definitely think that this can be increased with more content on the site. Out of the 60 days, about one-third of them brought in $0.00 in revenue – without those duds, my average income would be just over $1/day. Not bad, I’ve already covered the cost of hosting the site

Stay tuned for a January recap and monthly recaps thereafter. I’ll be tweaking ad placements, trying different ad networks, and assuming I have the time, I’ll document it all here.

Hope you’re all having a Happy New Year!

With the number of people who have blogs now, do any of them profit from their blogs? I know for a fact that most of the owners of large blogs make quite a nice profit from their site. That is the purpose of this site, I’m going to test out different advertising networks and different advertisement placements.

My short term goal(s)

• Determine which ad network provides the best payout
• Determine which ad network provides the best reporting
• Find the optimal placement for ads on a website

My long term goal(s)

• Generate enough monthly revenue to cover my car payment

So where do you start when you want to create a blog that can (and will) generate revenue from 3rd party advertisers? I’ve learned from experience that “Content is King”. The more articles you’re able to put on your site, the more visitors you’ll attract. I think that’s going to be my biggest hurdle… finding enough time to write enough noteworthy articles. My starting point was to setup my blog with Categories that interest me.

• Entertainment
  • Television Shows – Heroes, 24 (there are plenty other shows that I like, but we’ll save that for another article )
• Finance & Investment
• Gaming (I’m a big fan of the Xbox 360)
• Photography
• Sports & Recreation
• Tech & Web Stuff

Now that I’ve got my categories laid out, my first step will be to create content for each of them. Once I’ve got content in each category, I’ll be focusing on getting my site crawled and indexed by all large search engines. Once my site is indexed on a couple search engines, I’ll begin documenting the revenue that I generate from this site.

Until next time.