Making money through blogging experiment – second month November earnings report
Following up on the “WordPress SEO : Jump-starting a new blog - from zero to 600 unique visitors/day in one month” problogging experiment I’m currently running with a fellow blogger and the "The problogging experiment - first month earnings report" I issued after last month, here are some details about the second month of the experiment. You can take a look at Wispid and see how it's setup. A very simple and straight forward strange world-news blog.
A few things happened during this month.
- The biggest one was the earthquake Google PR update that penalized Pay-per-post and Text-ad-links with a PR drop, sometimes going straight down to PR0. While some bloggers maintained that they suffered no major traffic lose, I've noticed how those PR drops impact the blogs they link to and their authority. Wispid's authority came from a few other problogs that got a PR drop from 5-6 to 0, and the traffic began to drop, showing 50-60% decrease in incoming Google traffic.
- The second thing we did is that we stopped submitting posts to social websites, which was a massive source of traffic that helped previously boost the blog to over 1000 daily pageviews. Why? we thought it was time to try other sources of traffic and it was honestly making us tired. But, we did incorporate some of the blog's post into other blogs through semi-auto related-posts entry, and so the incoming traffic switched from being mainly about Google Search and social submission sites to getting direct traffic from fellow blogs. It's interesting seeing the variance in traffic behavior and how those move around in the blog. Traffic is now about 450-500 unique a day with double+ pageviews. Subscriber count went down as well ...
The earnings stats are not very impressive, but they do - surprisingly - continue to go up (previous month compared against current month):
- Google Adsense - from 32US$ down to 15.60US$.
- Kontera - from 19US$ up to $42.15US$.
- Widgetbucks (still experimenting) - from 10US$ up to 26.92US$.
- Shoppingads (still experimenting) - from 4US$ stayed the same with $4.43US$.
Report:
- Combined CTR went up from ~%6 to ~7%, but ECPM went down. Total earning were ~90US$, up from 65US$ last month. With the traffic decrease and all the changes we made, that's not half bad.
- Less incoming Google traffic means less people clicking on Google Adsense ads.
- Kontera continues to do extremely well on that blog. I'm not sure why.
- Widgetbucks went up 250% and it has a lot to do with a small experiment I did using sexy Widgetbucks ads that seemed to attract a lot of clicks. There was a massive decline in earnings towards the end of the month, and I could only attribute it to the Widgetbucks announcement on ProBlogger that they're only receiving clicks from US-Canada traffic.
- Shoppingads just doesn't seem to work out. They've been having spam issues, their ads disappearing and reappearing spontaneously. I mailed them twice and on both occasions got an apology reply after a few days saying they're making adjustments. I don't know, it doesn't look good, but it might change.
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Got some feedback or want to share your thoughts? I’m interested. Hopefully, more next month.