It is time again for our monthly income and traffic report!

Welcome to the first month of this year's report!

This is our fifth month of reporting Foxy Folksy’s traffic and income report. Why do we publish this? Simply, to give you a glimpse into what is going on ‘behind the posts’ at Foxy Folksy and for us to keep track of the developments on our attempt in making Foxy Folksy an income-generating blog.  Hopefully, sharing this will also help others who are interested in creating their own blog or those who are also trying to find their way in making money from their existing blog by learning from our mistakes and successes.

Please note that Foxy Folksy has been up and running since January 2014 but only as a hobby blog. We only really started thinking of trying to make some bucks from it early last year. You can see how Foxy Folksy was doing on previous months from my previous report.

Below are the numbers for the month of January:

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and all of the products listed below are products and services I have personally used or still using.

INCOME:

• Adsense - $113.53
• Youtube - €7.91
• Monumetric  - $370.93
• Sovrn - $30.09
• Swoop - $1.98
• Amazon Associates- $5.98
• Hostgator - $50.00 -->  this is from affiliate links on the page: How to create a blog

Total Income: $580.40

EXPENSES:

• Hostgator - $11.84
• Boardbooster - $5.00
• Monthly Giveaway - $55.53
• Facebook Ads -  $7.50

Total Expenses: $79.87

NET INCOME: $501.53

TRAFFIC:

These are actual screenshots from Google Analytics:

TRAFFIC SOURCES:

RPM FOR THE MONTH:

 $4.66

What is RPM you say? Well simply put, it is how much you've earn per 1000 Pageviews and you calculate with this formula:

(revenue / pageviews) x 1000

Why is it important? Well, it is a simple way of tracking how the blog is performing from month to month when it comes to generating income. With this, you are also able to compare your own performance to other bloggers who are also publishing their income reports. The goal is, of course, to get this number to increase or in the least stable. A decrease in RPM means some improvement in your income strategy is needed.

RPM FOR THE PAST 12 MONTHS:

 

FACEBOOK : 1,275 (up by 129) 

INSTAGRAM : 441 (up by 255)

PINTEREST : 3,221 (up by 248)

TWITTER : 1,262 (up by 233)

YOUTUBE : 411

 

• This month's pageviews increased by 13.28% from 109,890 in December to 124,454 this month. Which is great but still slightly lower than last November's traffic. We only had a total of 6 posts for January, tsk! tsk! because of the long holiday that I had in the Philippines and it took me a while to get back to my blogging routine when I got back to (snowy) Germany.

• Income for the month has significantly decreased by as much as 35% (not good!). Good thing Monumetric has given us the heads-up that Q1 usually has the lowest performance rates of the year for ads, so we were not so surprised... disappointed? of course! But it is what it is! We just have to think of other ways to earn money other than from Ads. We thought about sponsored posts, but I think it is a bit difficult for a non-US resident blog like us to get sponsorship deals even though the largest chunk of our traffic comes from the US.

• So enter Affiliate networks or programs.... Another way bloggers earn from their blogs and even on social networks is thru affiliate links and we are thinking that maybe it is the time that we should also give this some attention. I have been an affiliate of Amazon for some time now but only really started on building the links on my site just recently and as you can see we started to get some results, maybe not (yet) so much but I haven't gotten around placing the links on all my post. We only started with the most popular ones. Note! If you decide to become an affiliate for Amazon, do not forget to add a disclosure on your site required by Amazon, like this one on Foxy Folksy.

• Still on Affiliate...we recently joined 2 big Affiliate Networks -- ShareASale and FlexOffers. We are still in the process of searching and applying for merchants and products that are a perfect fit to Foxy Folksy. Joining these 2 networks was easy.

ShareASale is a popular Affiliate Network among bloggers. They have over 4,000 programs to choose from and you can earn thru pay-per-sale or pay-per-lead. There is a low payment threshold of only $50, which is good. Payment is made via check or direct deposit on the 20th of the month for the previous month’s commissions.

If you also have a business, big or small, and would also like to start affiliate marketing to sell your products or Drive more traffic to your online store using performance based marketing, then a partnership with ShareASale is the way to go.

 

FlexOffers has over 10,000 Advertisers/Merchants in their affiliate network. The best thing I like about it is that they are grouped into categories and you can easily view all the merchants in each category to search for the merchant you want to apply for. Payments are sent to publishers on a NET 30 basis or NET 7 basis for qualifying accounts.  A $100 minimum threshold is required to send out payments. Payment can be sent via Direct Deposit (USA only), PayPal (international only), and wires (over $5,000 international only). By default, all USA publishers are paid by check and international publishers are paid by PayPal.

• Lastly, we are also thinking of making more videos.  The one I did for "How to make Siopao" months ago is really doing good in terms of views and the additional income is also not bad.
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That's it for now! Until the next reporting!

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Thinking of starting your own blog, you may want to visit my blog post on How To Start A Blog with a checklist of the things you should know before actually creating one and How to create a Blog for the step-by-step procedures on building your blog. You may also want to check out my Resource Page for the tools you need for your blog.