eXtra For Every Publisher

I just wanted to take a minute to express my awe and excitement over August’s stats for this site. This site began in the middle of July, and has only been around for a month and a half. During the two weeks in July, the site only received 272 unique visitors. Things sure have surged since then.

So many people told me not to take on this project because their are numerous high profile people already in this niche, but I knew that my experiences were unique, and that some of the things I have learned might help others either achieve their dreams in blogging, or realize before they over committed that blogging for money wasn’t for them.

I am not sure if I have really helped anyone yet, but it seems that you all like what I have been saying, and that really excites me.

Raw Stats

Without further adieu, here are the August stats as reported by Awstats:
5,008 Unique Visitors
17,889 Page Views
713.94 MB Bandwidth Usage
Visitors were mostly from the USA, Europe and Canada.
For search engine hits, it went MSN, then Google, and then Yahoo.

Popular Posts

My five most popular articles in order of traffic received were:
Mistakes in Design: Problogger.net
Con’s of Being a Problogger
The Five P’s of Improving Your About Page
Blogger Doesn’t Mean English Major
Text Link Ads

Traffic Sources

My two biggest sources of traffic were StumbleUpon and Copyblogger.

RSS Subscribers

According to FeedBurner, the highest my subscription rates went was 48 subscribers, and it is currently hovering around the mid-low forties. This is up from 11 subscribers on August 3rd. Over 50% of my RSS readers are using one of Google’s feed related services, with another 20% using Bloglines, my RSS reader of choice.

Share

John Chow has released his August 2007 income report, and it is pretty amazing. The summer is usually a rough time for bloggers, as advertising income drops to record lows, but not for John Chow as August saw him bring in $17,828.61.

To put that into perspective, that is half a year of my income, generated by his site in one month.

Affiliate sales continues to be the blog’s biggest money maker. I promote a bunch of different programs, with an emphasis placed on programs that pays a residue income. The best performing affiliate program for August was Text Link Ads, accounting for $2,500 of the $7,244 affiliate income. Yes, I make more from the TLA affiliate program than I do from the TLA links.

Google AdSense posted its second worst performance ever. It now accounts for less than 3% of blog income. This month it will account for zero. Yes, the ad network that started John Chow dot Com will be eliminated from the blog. This illustrates the importance of spreading out your income sources.

There is only one John Chow, and so I doubt I will make that kind of cash from my projects seperate to my employer, but I can assure you that building one tenth of what he has done is achievable by anyone with persistence.

Share

One of the bloggers I hold in high esteem, Liz Strauss of Successful Blog, has a weekly badge handout for those bloggers she thinks are worthy of being considered Successful and Outstanding Bloggers or SOB’s. I recently asked her to look at my project here and was pleased to see my name on this last week’s list.

I am officially a SOB as part of her week 97 badge handout.

Some other blogs listed in Week 97 include:
Emerging Customer
North x East
Small Business Trends

Check out the full list over at Successful Blog.

Share

Earlier this year, I attended a conference in Toronto, Ontario Canada called Mesh. There were lots of great people there from all walks of life, and during one session a person I was sitting near and myself began to talk. He had an office job and was interested in the whole blogging “thing”.

I told him that I was a full time blogger, and that my boss had paid my way to be at this conference. He was shocked. To him, problogging meant being able to pay for his coffee bill every month. He thought that the market was too saturated now, and he would never be able to shed the confines of the nine to five world, and blog about his passions.

It was really hard for me not to get too excited about what I do. I tried to calmly explain to him that there are still huge areas that people had not explored, and that there are new content publishing companies starting every week. I also made sure to tell him about all the pitfalls, problems and virtual walls in the way of attaining his goal.

At the end of the conversation, he seemed rather pleased. He knew that the road would be difficult, but sometimes just knowing that the opportunity is there, no matter how remote that possibility is gives certain people a reason to carry on.

So if you are having doubts about blogging for money, and are worried about market saturation, or the number of bloggers out there, then you are focusing on the wrong things. You should be showing your passion, networking, and constantly learning about how others have made it to where they currently are. If you give it everything you have, then there is no reason that you can’t make it as a problogger.

Share

David Airey, who does amazing logo design work and someone I have been trying to get to know better, has set up an absolutely amazing contest for his blog’s anniversary.

He has set it up to include some great prizes from a variety of different people and amassed an amazing number of products and services for the prize draw.

His Gold Award package makes me super excited as it includes:

• Logo design from David Airey.
• Custom WordPress theme design from Nate Whitehill
• Personal marketing / advertising plan from Maki of Dosh Dosh.
• One year’s hosting and blog setup from John Boardley
• Signed copy of Blogging Tips by Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress.

The other prizes include USB Thumb drives, telephone conversations with some amazing people, and advertising.

The advertising prizes interest me as well, especially since Xfep is still very young. The advertising opportunities include:

• 728px by 90px banner ad for 30 days above the fold on The Blog Experiment, courtesy of Sara. This is quite a new forum for bloggers, but already there are approximately 5,000 posts! You must supply your own artwork.
• 125px by 125px image ad for 30 days on Smart Wealthy Rich. An excellent donation from top blogger, Jonathan.
• Ad icon located site-wide in the top left of Blog-Op, courtesy of Chris Lodge. Another kind gift from a fellow blogger in Scotland.
• 30 day text link ad shown site-wide on Contest Blogger. This is a great way to advertise your very own blog contest. Blogging is about giving something back, so get your contest featured.
• 125px by 125px image ad for 30 days on Freelance Folder. Another superb offering from Jonathan a.k.a Smart Wealthy Rich.

The great thing is that anyone can enter David’s contest, and getting one entry is as simple as subscribing to his RSS feed or e-mail feed, and then contacting him with a secret code that you’ll find within.

A great contest, and good luck to everyone that enters.

Share