Hello fellow bloggers, for those who are new to our site I’m Sean and I handle the tech/blog marketing side of I Heart Arts n Crafts.
In our monthly income reports you can expect an overview of all our different income sources along with traffic and referral details. Hopefully you can gain some helpful information or even some inspiration from these Income Reports and don’t forget to leave a comment if you have any questions!
This post contains affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy.
Income
Adsense – $317.74
BlogHer – $45.38 – This will change once our net with BlogHer is updated most of the revenue has yet to update for August!
Amazon Associates – $9.44
Sponsored Posts – $200.00
Total Income – $572.56
Expenses
Aweber – $20.00
Total Expenses – $20.00
Total Revenue – $553.56
Income Breakdown
So for August we saw a drop in revenue but there is good news! We had already expected this to happen due to a lot of changes we have been making to our ads. The main change some of you may of noticed is that Jackie finally decided to join BlogHer, which is something I’m excited about because I’ve heard really good things about the network and they have better targeted ads. Unfortunately, we did not get to set up their ads until sometime in the 3rd week of August and I had to make countless adjustments to the ads in order to meet some of BlogHers contract requirements.
Our affiliate sales were also slow but we spent a lot of time in August brainstorming new affiliate marketing strategies. We managed to find some awesome new affiliates that we’re going to be utilizing over the course of the next couple months, so hopefully we should see an increase in affiliate sales sometime in October.
Traffic Report
Traffic Overview
Referrals Overview
Traffic Breakdown
Despite having a lower revenue than July, I’m extremely happy with our traffic for this month. As you can see in our traffic overview, the traffic was almost double what it was in July but we did receive lower pageviews. I’m not too worried about that though, because most of August was spent changing the sites layout and moving a lot of things around while we switched over to Genesis. We also started applying new tactics to increase our pageviews and pages per session. One of the changes I’m excited for is a new plugin we installed called Shareaholic.
I also spent some time trying to make our website more responsive considering a majority of our traffic comes from mobile devices. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to make sure your website is responsive. StudioPress has an amazing program which lets you view your website on different mobile device screen sizes. This has been wonderful in helping me make sure our readers are getting a pleasant experience when viewing our site on the go.
Plans, Closing Remarks, and Some Rambling…
As I discussed earlier we had finally signed up with BlogHer after noticing a lot of other bloggers using them and hearing positive things about the network. This month we didn’t see much income from them due to us trying to move things around to comply with some of their requirements. At first this seemed like a pain but so far for September it is looking like it has payed off because I’m already seeing some nice CPM rates for the month.
So far the only thing I haven’t been too pleased with is BlogHer’s requirement to sign a 1-year contract. I’m not a fan of getting into such long term contracts because if things don’t work out with BlogHer I will have to wait a while to change Ad Networks. I’m trying to stay optimistic with them which is why I devoted a lot of time into getting our viewability rates to the required amount. This seemed like it was going to be challenging at first, but BlogHer offers a lot of help which is a good note on their part. The main thing I changed with the BlogHer ads that have been an improvement was disabling the sidebar and leader board BlogHer ads on mobile devices. After disabling the two ads, I installed their mobile footer ad and so far it has increased our viewability tremendously, which I’m hoping should also increase the revenue for September.
Besides BlogHer, I also installed a wonderful new plugin I stumbled upon called Shareaholic as I mentioned earlier. For any blogger out there I recommend trying them out. The social buttons they apply to your posts are more attractive and it gives you the option to customize different things such as placement.
Lastly, don’t forget to leave a comment if you have any questions or even some advice, I’m always looking for some pointers!
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Hi guys! I didnt see a spot to commenton the september recap so I’m writing here. Just wanted to thank you for being so open to share your numbers and insight as it allows other bloggers like myself to evaulate themselves and have something to compare themselves to or know what to review for their own bloga. Love your crafts too! 🙂