Stats & Analysis for January 2008
Oooh a new year *bounce* how exciting! What a contrast to December! I’ve had a fantastic month in every way and far exceeded all my goals. So let’s get on with the number crunching…
Blog Stats
RSS Subscribers
Last month I ended just under 1000 and it was my goal to break through that barrier. I far exceeded that ending the month on 1389 subscribers - a growth of about 400 new people! *wave* :-)
I already showed most of January’s RSS stats in yesterday’s post in which I revealed my theory on the secret of sucessful blogging. In that post I suggested that the reason for increase in subscribers was due to the way in which my writing reflects my personality.
January has been a good month for me personally and this has carried over into my work. I have been feeling really hyped up and enthusiastic, I released my ebook which also gave me a ton of publicity and its quite possible that an unknown number of people have arrived at the blog from the ebook that they have downloaded from elsewhere. The traffic stats reveal more clues about that…
Traffic Stats
For the first few weeks in January the traffic shows a few gentle peaks which is where some of my posts got a bit of attention here and there. You can clearly see the big spike near the end of the month - this is the day after my big email marketing campaign for my ebook.
I actually still haven’t finished that campaign and I sent out emails over a period of several days but on the first day I did almost 100 and that included all of the biggest blogs. What is nice to see is that the traffic levels have stayed high after the spike and I believe this will continue for some time as I still have a lot more marketing to do.
Also, I’ve been writing better posts and these are getting attention from the blogosphere which is always a good thing as that leads to traffic, inbound links, and ultimately new subscribers.
Traffic Sources
This graph is really interesting this month for two reasons. Firstly look at the direct traffic - this is traffic that has come from either a saved bookmark or a link that is not from a website, such as a link embedded in an ebook perhaps? Direct traffic has increased quite dramatically this month accounting for over 4000 visitors!
The second reason this is interesting is that my search engine traffic is also showing a large increase from 7% last month to almost 12% this month. When I first started this blog traffic from search engines accounted for less than 3% and that has risen steadily.
The only reason I can think of is that my PageRank has taken another jump recently, and I am now PR5. Or could it be that because the blog is now 5 months old that it’s coming out of the Google Sandbox? I’m not really an expert on these things but it’s good news anyway as I like to have my traffic sources from multiple streams.
Keywords
I am amazed that 327 visitors came from the keyword “caroline middlebrook”! It astounds me to think of that many people looking for me - does wonders for my ego!
My second highest keyword is “twitter guide” so I had a peek at Google and noticed that I rank number #1 and #2 for that term in the UK at least which is very, very cool.
Something else I noticed - I keep making sales for the Zen to Done ebook even though I reviewed it about 10 weeks ago. When I look through my keywords I am seeing quite a few searches coming to my blog from Google related to “zen to done”. I am now starting to see the power of long term search engine traffic.
Another interesting thing that I saw is that no less than 100 of the searches started with the phrase “how to” and these are obviously people looking for information on how to do something. If I take the time to take a good through that list I’m sure I’ll find lots of inspiration for topics to blog about that would be really useful to people, for example “how to make a Twitter signature”.
Lastly, over 1300 of the keyphrases used to find my blog were used only once, this is true long tail traffic!
Here is my selection of the funny keywords for this month:
such cuteness
Oh I know, what can I say? 
big juicy boobs
Haven’t we had this one before??
cheesy millionaire graphics
Hmmm, move along, nothing cheesy to find here!
evil ways to make money online
Um, shouldn’t this one have gone to John Chow?
lolcats look at my balls
Reminds me of when I took a photo of my cat’s balls just before he had ‘em chopped off!
one more pointless blog
Not mine I hope!
yaro, ouch, yaro
That is giving me mental pictures that are not suitable for a family blog like this one! Yaro, what have you been up to?
you tube so far away caroline
So far and yet so near - what??
Referral Traffic Breakdown
Here are my top 10 referrers, I have excluded Google and Bloglines from the list.
- StumbleUpon (2,932)
- Twitter (1,292)
- Shoemoney (1,078)
- Techipedia (654)
- 45n5 (372)
- Dosh Dosh (337)
- Lifehacker (290)
- Courtney Tuttle (248)
- Search Engine Guide (239)
- Delicious (227)
It amazes me that I am still getting traffic from the likes of Lifehacker and Search Engine Guide even though those posts were written 2 months ago.!
I’d also like to thank Josh Spaulding, Carl Ocab, Mubin Ahmed, and Yaro Starak for the publicity they have given my ebook - all of them sent a significant amount of traffic my way.
Business Stats
Income
I’ve been seeing emails coming into my inbox fairly steadily this month telling me that I’ve earned money and it’s been a fantastic feeling! I have been looking forward to adding it all up for about a week now
- BlueHost - $715
- Teaching Sells - $285
- Direct Advertising Sales - $143.25
- Blog Mastermind - $140
- Zen to Done ebook - $42.75
- SEO Book - $25
- Explosive Cash Flow System - $21.24
- Adsense - $10.26
- DealDotCom - $4.89
Grand Total for January 2008: $1,387.39!
Oh My Gosh! I knew I had hit my $500 target and I estimated that it was about $700 but I did not expect this at all! For starters I totally forgot that Blog Mastermind is a monthly membership so I will continue to get payments for the people I referred for as long as they stay members.
I also found money all over the place unexpectedly and then yesterday I did a bit of an advertising push and got 3 advertisers at the last minute.
Advertising Rates Now Doubled
I announced in yesterdays post that I planned to double my ad rates from today. Note that this has nothing to do with blog stats. Earlier in the month I had an email saying that I had been paid $95 from Teaching Sells. This totally confused me as I haven’t promoted it at all and then I remembered that I plug the free report on the blog in the sidebar.
Similarly, while most of the BlueHost sales come from my WordPress ebook, two of them were not and must have come from the banner that I placed. Note that BlueHost pays out $65 per referral so by charging only $50 for an ad spot, just a single sale would be more than I was earning directly through advertising.
I’ve only got three advertisers right now so I can continue to plug affiliate products and I imagine that their effectiveness will wear off over time but I want to continue to experiment with both methods of monetization.
So from March onwards, sidebar ads will cost $100 each and the top banner will be $140. I’ll update the advertising page accordingly.
Plans For February
I think January will be a tough act to follow because there is no doubt that the bulk of my traffic, subscribers and income has come as a result of my ebook marketing efforts and although there is still more work to be done, I estimate that I have seen the best of it already.
Having said that I have a good feeling in my gut about February, particularly in relation to RSS numbers. I’d really like to hit 2000 subscribers. I know that’s a stretch and I have no idea how I would get over 600 new subscribers in one month but its entirely possible so we’ll see
Other than that, I am totally winging it in February! I have no plans other than quite a lot of blog posts - ideas have just been pouring in from all over the place recently so I have a lot of material ready to go.
