Some months ago, Armin and I decided to take Foxy Folksy to the next level and maybe try to earn (hopefully, serious) money from it.

This is our third month reporting Foxy Folksy’s traffic and income report to give you a glimpse on 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 this year. You can see how Foxy Folksy was doing on previous months from my previous report.

Below are the numbers for the month of November:

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 – $153.87
• Gourmet Ads – $56.16
• Monumetric  – $39.95
• Sovrn – $66.36
• Swoop – $4.38

Total Income: $337.13

EXPENSES:

• Hostgator – $11.84
• Boardbooster – $5.00
• Monthly Giveaway – $30.00

Total Expenses: $46.84

NET INCOME: $290.29

TRAFFIC:

These are actual screenshots from Google Analytics:

TRAFFIC SOURCES:

RPM:

 $2.68

I also included here the monthly RPM. 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 come 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. Decrease in RPM means some improvement in your income strategy is needed.

FINAL THOUGHTS…

Hurray!!! This month we were able to break 100K Pageviews for the first time! It was definitely a big leap from 92,203 last October to 125,805 for the month of November. Armin and I can hardly believe it!!! It is also my first month of blogging full time, so I would say not a bad start at all.

We were really grateful for the big jump in the pageviews but we were also curious what caused it, so we did some digging using Google Analytics. If you compare November’s traffic source from the previous month, you will notice that the extra traffic came from Facebook.

When I checked further, I saw that there were increases in pageviews on old recipe posts. My Pichi pichi recipe having the highest increment of more than 600%. So I could only deduct that someone with a lot of followers in Facebook shared my posts and this resulted to the added pageviews! So whoever you are, big big thanks from Foxy Folksy!

There were also some changes in this month…

We had a total of 12 posts for November, which is more than before. One of the targets we’ve set since we decided to make Foxy Folksy a money-making blog is to increase the number of posts every month with at least a minimum of 10 posts monthly.

The good and the bad…

In the beginning of November, Gourmet Ads told me that I have to switch from their traditional Ad Tags to their new Asynchronous Tags. The transition resulted to decrease in impressions, thus, lower income for the month. It was, of course, disappointing especially because we were expecting a higher income due to the higher Pageviews.

Also at this time, I got an invitation from Monumetric (former- The Blogger Network) thru email. I was skeptic at first but after I did some research and based on the reviews I’ve read, they seem to be legit and pays really well. After our disappointment with Gourmet Ads, we decided to give Monumetric a go. We earned $39.95 for three days which is more than half of what we got from Gourmet Ads for the whole month of November. Not bad at all!

Joining Monumetric means I had to give up the ad spaces previously used for other Ad Networks, like Gamut and Gourmet Ads. But at the moment, I am still using a Waterfall for SOVRN and Adsense in addition to Monumetric and it seems to be doing well. We will see the results on the next income and traffic report…

If you ever want to start 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.