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 meant that I had to give up my job to give my 101% attention to Foxy Folksy.
Last month, I started to post Foxy Folksy's monthly traffic and income report 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 this year. You can see how Foxy Folksy was doing in previous months from my previous report.
Below are the numbers for the month of October:
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 - $133.41
- Gourmet Ads - $79.68
- Sovrn - $41.68
- Swoop - $3.35
Total Income: $258.13
EXPENSES:
- Hostgator - $11.84
- Boardbooster - $5.00
- Monthly Giveaway - $23.00
Total Expenses: $39.84
NET INCOME: $218,29
TRAFFIC:
These are actual screenshots from Google Analytics:
TRAFFIC SOURCES:
RPM:
$2.80
I also included here the monthly RPM. What is RPM you say? Well simply put, it is how much you've earned 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. The decrease in RPM means some improvement in your income strategy is needed.
FINAL THOUGHTS...
The total number of post for October was 5, which is still too less compared to what is my target monthly post of at least 10, but it was a busy time for me as I had only three weeks to turn over everything to my replacement at my previous work. But start of November, I am a full-time blogger! Wow saying that feels weird and exciting at the same time.
As you can see at the moment, the main and only source of income for Foxy Folksy is thru Ads. Towards the end of October, Foxy Folksy got accepted to join GAMUT (Cox Media). Hurray!!! But we did not want to clutter our sidebars with more ad spaces. So we did some experimenting with the so-called 'Waterfalling' or also known as 'daisy chaining'. I got this idea from Nagi of Recipe Tin Eats.
A Backfill Waterfall is where you set up a chain of ads so when ads from your first Ad Network are not displayed, then it will automatically display ads from your second Ad Network. And when ads from your second Ad Network aren’t displayed, ads from your third Ad Network are displayed. And so on.
The concept of Waterfall, which is to maximize the earning capacity of each ad space is, of course, brilliant! And thanks to Nagi's comprehensive post on how to set up a Waterfall, setting up ours was done in a few minutes. Here is the Waterfall we did for Foxy Folksy in October.
The implementation though can be a bit tricky. After setting all up, I noticed that some of my Ad spaces were not filled/empty. So I did a little checking and it turned out it was the same for all the ones with Gamut Tags. I told them about the problem and they checked it quickly. It turned out there was a mistake (mine) with creating the Ad space because I checked the header bidding box and Gamut is running tag based solution and not header bidding. This simple mistake blocked Ads from showing in my site so I had to remove Gamut from my Waterfall until it was resolved so it was not included in this month's report, and because of this, we already lost some possible income for 4 days.
I also removed an ad space at the bottom of the sidebar to reduce the clutter, thus the decrease in RPM from last month's $2.88 to $2.80 this month. So we will see how this Waterfall will perform in the coming months.
So that's it for now and thanks for taking the time to check out this month's income and traffic report!
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.
What do you think?