Blog Performance Update: April 2008

I blog for fun, but as with most games it's more enjoyable to keep playing if you 'keep score'. In the case of blogging the simplest performance indicators are visitor stats and revenue figures. In case anyone is interested, I've listed the latest monthly figures for April (despite having written in January that I'd only do this annually, I can't resist tabulating the data, so I might as well post it). Previous values [from January] are noted where relevant:

READERSHIP:

----------------------------------APR-------JAN
Google Pagerank...................2.........0
Technorati Authority..............82........114
Feedburner Subscribers............85........70
Alexa Rank........................340,266...993,197

Sitemeter monthly visitors........5,352.....9,289
Quantcast visitors................2,341.....4,048
Quantcast Ranking.................717,143...404,259
Comments left on blog.............23........22
Number of Posts...................23........27

Overall the number of visits was down compared to January as I haven't been making as much effort submitting posts to the social networking sites (Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon). Also, I'd submitted all the best posts from the 2006/7 during January which generated a few large spikes in traffic.

REVENUE:

----------------------------------APR-------MAR
AdSense...........................$14.27....$15.76
Adsdaq............................$_4.33....$_2.18
JumboAffiliates...................$_0.00....$_0.00
AmazonAffiliates..................$_0.00....$_0.00
ClickBoothAffiliates..............$_0.00....$_0.00
PayPerPlay........................$_0.07....$_0.05
LinkWorth.........................$_0.08....$_0.00
TOTAL.............................$18.75....$17.99

I've only listed semi-passive income (depends on getting visitors, but no direct action required). I haven't listed income from sponsored posts of paid adverts as these tend to be either "one off" payments, or require me to write copy to earn the fee.

Most of the amounts listed are "pending" payments which will only be paid out (via Cheque or Paypal) if I reach a required threshold (often $25 or $50) AND the company that owes me money stays in business ;)

Generally speaking, Pay-per-impression no longer seems to exist, Pay-per-click generates some revenue but requires large traffic volumes (and the rates are dropping), and Pay-per-Action isn't generating any income (some readers click on the Ads, but apparently aren't buying anything. I try to only list Affiliate Ads for products that seem genuine and *might* interest readers of this blog, but I don't expect to generate many sales).

Sponsored posts can generate reasonable income in relation to the amount of work required, but there are limited opportunities that are relevant and I find interesting enough to write about.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2008

Blog Performance and Monetization Update: February 2008

Readership got a boost in January when I started promoting some of my "best of" posts using StumbleUpon. This had less effect in February when I'd gone through all my best posts and only promoted the three or four posts during the month that would probably appeal to a general audience. Visitors are now averaging around 100 per day (80-90 if I don't post new material, 110-120 when I post), and sometimes spikes up to 200-300 visits if a post is promoted using StumbleUpon.

Revenue from blogging has reduced to only $15-20 per month from Google AdSense. Although I haven't yet reached the $100 payment threshold, so I may never even see this money. Google recently sent me an email warning that they may revise the payment calculations as they had detected some traffic coming from "paid-to-surf" or similar sites. I can only guess this was due to a small amount of traffic that was coming from TrafficSwarm, where I had setup an account to get some extra people to visit the site. As far as I can tell, this only produced a handful of visitors each day, and none of them appear to have been clicking on the AdSense ads anyhow. I've now disabled the link from TrafficSwarm, so hopefully this will fix the potential angst with AdSense. I'll have to wait and see if my AdSense account balance is actually adjusted - it's currently sitting around $95, so I'm hoping to hit the magic '$100' threshold this month and get some income from AdSense in April.

PayPerPost no longer has any suitable opportunities for me to blog about - the drop in my Google PageRank to 0 makes this blog ineligible for most PayPerPost opportunities. The new PayPerPlay system went "live" last month (with very limited numbers of ads playing per site - my site got to play only 20 ads after 15,312 hits), and my grand total of accumulated payment due from PayPerPlay is only $0.07 - I doubt I'll ever see any payout from PayPerPlay! There are a few sponsored post offers coming through from Blogsvertise, but many of those aren't for services I'd be happy to write a neutral or positive post about, so I can't count on any revenue from sponsored posts in future.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

Blog Performance and Monetization Update: January 2008

This monthly summary post of site traffic and blog earnings is getting tedious to write, so I can only imagine how boring it is for most readers ;) Therefore, this will become an annual post from now on. The previous posts provide a good guide to how traffic and revenue figures may develop for a blog with relatively modest readership, and live traffic data from Quantcast and Sitemeter can be obtained from the links in my sidebar.

READERSHIP: EnoughWealth.com

Readership had a growth spurt during December as I was invited to join a group of financial bloggers and got some help with using social networking to attract new readers. My google pagerank is still 0, but this hasn't affected the ranking of my blog for relevant search terms in google, so it's only obvious impact has been the lack of PayPerPost opportunities available to me and possibly an adverse impact on my rating with various "top PF blogs" lists (if they use pagerank as an indicator of blog draw). My feedburner subscriptions have plateaued around 70.

My Technorati 'authority' has dropped from 126 back to 114, perhaps other sites have removed links to me in response to my moving my link lists to a sub-page in attempt to resurrect my pagerank. Who knows?

My Alexa rank has dropped to 993,197 due to the recent spikes in visits some days, and the weekly rank figure is 459,838.

Quantcast estimate of my readership is:
Global: 4,048 uniques (~visitors) per month
US: 2,670 uniques per month
My QuantCast rank has improved from 761,374 to 404,259

Despite no longer posting new content to the enoughwealth.savingadvice.com site it still gets similar visits and pageviews as before. I can only assume that savingadvice.com attracts lots of fresh readers who browse through all the archived pages and aren't existing readers looking for fresh posts.



Hopefully I'll be able to achieve 6,000 visitors in during this month:



MONETIZATION:

AdBrite revenue from interstitial ads continued to be around 2c-3c per day, even though I had increased the estimated CPM rate so that AdSense ads get displayed instead of AdBrite most of the time. AdSense revenue was variable, on some days there were many clicks while on other days similar traffic wouldn't result in a single click. I've deleted the intersticial full-page AdBrite ads as they pop up after a visitor has browsed more than a couple of pages and could be annoying - especially as the ad was for an off-topic product!

Newsroom continued to accumulate revenue from display of their feeds, but the amount of revenue is negligible ($1.08 in total - up only 4c this month) and there isn't much content that suits my blog. Newsroom currently pays out monthly by cheque once you hit $50 (which I won't reach for a long while), but will "soon" start making payments via PayPal.

Feedburner revenue continues to accrue very slowly from the ads that get attached to feeds of my post distributed via the IBN group.

PAID [PayPal] PENDING ACCRUED [CHQ] ACCRUED [EFT]
Advertisers: USD $270.00 - - -
PayPerPost: USD $443.25 - - -
Blogsvertise: USD $124.50 - - -
SponsoredReviews: USD $ 16.25 - - -
ReviewMe: USD $ 60.00 - - -
AdSense: - - - USD $ 59.99 [$100 threshold]
AdBrite: - - USD $ 36.37* - [$100 threshold] 
Newsroom: - - USD $ 1.08 - [$ 50 threshold] 
Amazon: - - USD $ 2.71 - [$100 threshold + $15 fee applies]
Feedburner: USD $ 2.12 USD $ 3.96 - - 
------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ 
TOTALS: USD $916.12 USD $ 3.96 USD $ 40.16 $USD $ 59.99
Grand total: USD$1020.23

Increase for month $23.51

As the income from Feedburner and AdSense Ads is proportional to traffic (and click through rate) this monthly income should increase over time. However, the recent increase in traffic from social networking sites hasn't resulted in much of an increase in CTR, so obviously the type of reader visiting the site is important. ie. quality of traffic, not quantity, matters.

EXPENSES:

Around USD$51.23 pa. The income generated is now significantly more than the out-of-pocket costs of maintaining and promoting the site.

Annual domain name registration with Dotster USD$14.95, plus $10.00 for the redirection required to have my blog hosted by Blogspot but still use my domain name.

PFBlogs "Friends" fee: USD$2.00 per month.

Google AdWords: USD$0.76 for 4 clicks. Budget is set at max. $7.80 per month, but so far only getting around 1 click per month at $0.19 per click.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

New Blog Monetization Opportunity - Pay Per Play

I'm moving away from sponsored posts (such as PayPerPost, REviewMe and so forth) to more scalable revenue streams such as AdSense. Although the revenue is minimal when you have low readership levels, it allows you to concentrate on writing the content you want, and will begin to generate revenue if you succeed in creating useful content that attracts a substantial readership. A new form of Internet advertising that guarantees that you will get a 100% conversion rate on 100% of your website traffic is now available - Pay Per Play. It differs from most Ad programs in that every visitor gets played the audio ad, so you should get some revenue from every visitor, not just those that click on an ad link (such as AdSense).

Although the audio ads won't start being "broadcast" until February, it would pay to join up via the link provided asap in order to have a chance to get some second and third level income from referrals (for that reason I'd appreciate it if you used my referral link to join up rather than direct to the site). The ads are supposed to be context-sensitive, so your readers should only get relevant ads, and no adult or offensive content.

Only time will tell if this program ends up being a major player like AdSense, or if it dies on the vine like Agloco, but it won't hurt to give it a go if you're at all interested in monetization of your blog. If you currently don't have any ads on your site, this is one program that would provide some revenue without displaying any ad content on your site, thus retaining a "clean" ad-free appearance. After all, if your readers don't like ads they will probably have their PC sound system set to "mute" and won't even know if you are using Pay Per Play on your website!

Update: There are a few anti-PPP posts around, and it's unclear if PPP has any real advertisers lined up yet. But that would fit in with their model of getting as many websites as possible to join up before the Feb 'go live' date. Apparently they are getting their "reach" independently measured during this pre-launch phase, and will use that info to sell to advertisers. For this reasons there aren't any ads being served by PPP until Feb, so no income being generated. Hence this isn't a sponsored post (although I hope to make some money from PPP if it eventually suceeds).

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

AdSense Payments on Hold

When checking my AdSense account for this blog there was a new notice that "Your payments are currently on hold. Action is required to release payment." This seemed a bit odd as I've only earned around $20 from AdSense in November and December, and my total is still well below the $100 threshold I selected for receiving payment. I had read tales of bloggers having their AdSense account closed for click fraud, or other breaches of the AdSense rulebook, but my CTR seems normal, at around 0.50% of pageviews.

Drilling down into the details of the notification it turns out that AdSense is changing their security to require a PIN number be entered to "release payment". This is probably a good thing, but the printed PIN number card is "in the mail" and should arrive within the next three weeks. Since I don't expect the reach the payment threshold for at least another four months this won't be an issue, but it still would have been less of a surprise if the PIN number had arrived in the post BEFORE it came into force!

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

Blog Performance and Monetization Update: December 2007

READERSHIP: EnoughWealth.com

Readership continued to increase slowly during November. Although my google pagerank suddenly decreased from 4 down to 2, and then to 0, my sitemeter stats show that I'm getting quite a lot of casual traffic from a variety of personal finance search terms. Fortunately some of these casual drop ins must like what they see as my feedburner subscriptions has increased from 57 to 70 this month.

My Technorati 'authority' increased from 115 to 126 and 'rank' has improved to 50,119.

My Alexa rank has dropped very slightly from 1,261,875 to 1,177,098 but there seems to be a problem with tracking recently as there are no figures for the past week. I'm not sure how reliable the Alexa figures are, as the report for my site doesn't include any "links in" data, and my site isn't registered in OPD/DMOZ yet.

Quantcast estimate of my readership is:
Global: 2,256 uniques (~visitors) per month
US: 1,222 uniques per month
My QuantCast rank has improved from 1,017,055 to 761,374

Depite no longer posting new content to the enoughwealth.savingadvice.com site and removing several months worth of recent posts that site still gets similar visits and pageviews as before. Not mirroring posts onto that site hasn't improved my google pagerank yet (some reports suggest that pagerank only gets recalculated every three months), so I'll just leave that site dormant from now on.



MONETIZATION:

I didn't do any more PayPerPost sponsored posts this month as the reduction in pagerank to 0 meant that there are no relevant opportunities available! I also didn't get any more sponsors, although I had one enquiry.

AdBrite revenue from interstitial ads continued to be around 2c-3c per day, even though I had increased the estimated CPM rate so that AdSense ads get displayed instead of AdBrite most of the time. AdSense revenue was variable, on some days there were many clicks while on other days similar traffic wouldn't result in a single click.

Newsroom continued to accumulate revenue from display of their feeds, but the amount of revenue is negligible and there isn't much content that suits my blog. Newsroom currently pays out monthly by cheque once you hit $50 (which I won't reach for a long while), but will "soon" start making payments via PayPal.

Feedburner revenue continues to accrue very slowly from the ads that get attached to feeds of my post distributed via the IBN group.

                  PAID [PayPal]  PENDING        ACCRUED [CHQ]  ACCRUED [EFT]
Advertisers:      USD $270.00        -             -              -
PayPerPost:       USD $443.25        -             -              -
Blogsvertise:     USD $124.50        -             -              -
SponsoredReviews: USD $ 16.25        -             -              -
ReviewMe:         USD $ 60.00        -             -              -
AdSense:              -              -             -           USD $ 38.84    [$100 threshold]
AdBrite:              -              -          USD $ 34.96*       -           [$100 threshold]  
Newsroom:             -              -          USD $  1.04       -           [$ 50 threshold]  
Amazon:               -              -          USD $  2.71       -           [$100 threshold + $15 fee applies]
Feedburner:       USD $  2.12    USD $  3.05       -              -        
                  ------------   ------------   ------------   ------------   
TOTALS:           USD $916.12    USD $  3.05    USD $ 38.71    $USD $ 38.84
Grand total:      USD $996.72

Increase for month $13.38

As the income from Feedburner and AdSense Ads is proportional to traffic (and click through rate) this monthly income should increase over time.

EXPENSES:

Around USD$51.23 pa. The income generated is now significantly more than the out-of-pocket costs of maintaining and promoting the site.

Annual domain name registration with Dotster USD$14.95, plus $10.00 for the redirection required to have my blog hosted by Blogspot but still use my domain name.

PFBlogs "Friends" fee: USD$2.00 per month.

Google AdWords: USD$0.76 for 4 clicks. Budget is set at max. $7.80 per month, but so far only getting around 1 click per month at $0.19 per click.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

Blog Performance and Monetization Update: November 2007

READERSHIP: EnoughWealth.com

Readership in September didn't increase beyond that of June-August, but then picked up considerably in October. Regular posting and topic rotation (personal, local and general investing) seems to have helped convert casual visitors (via search engines) into regulars. Posting comments on the Freakonomics or Dilbert blogs, Kiplinger forum and Yahoo! Answers has also provided traffic, as has contributions to PF-oriented blog carnivals.

My Technorati 'authority' has increased from 105 in September to now be 115 [good] (but 'rank' has sliped from 49,721 to 55,948 [bad]).

My Alexa rank has risen [bad] considerably above the 1-million-mark to 1,261,875 (from 969,013 in Sep), although over the past couple of weeks (where number of daily visits has increased) the Alexa rank is down to 764,630 [good]. I'm not sure how reliable the Alexa figures are, as the report for my site doesn't include any "links in" data, and my site isn't registered in OPD/DMOZ yet. I might add the Alexa rank widget to my blog template as this allegedly helps increase your Alexa ranking (for what it's worth). I would also like to add the Alexa toolbar to my browser, but there isn't a version yet that's compatible with Vista.

The latest PF Bloggers ranking post by FireFinance now includes Enough Wealth, although that may change next month (the recent google algorithm changes that affected a lot of sites dropped my pagerank from 4 down to 2 [bad]).

I get quite a lot of casual traffic from google search results, so I was a bit concerned by the drop in pagerank (to the extent of rejigging my blog template to move my blogroll off the homepage and onto a 'links' page). However, this doesn't seem to have affected to number of visitors coming from google search. I've started monitoring my position on the google search results pages for some terms where I currently rank quite well (top 10) - wealth, enough wealth, wealth blog.

Quantcast estimate of my readership is:
Global: 1,968 uniques (~visitors) per month
US: 1,082 uniques per month
My QuantCast rank is 1,017,055

Feedburner Subscriptions is increasing very slowly, currently sitting at 57 subscribers.

I've stopped mirroring my posts onto the EnoughWealth.SavingAdvice.com site as google tends to penalise sites that have'duplicate' content. I had tried just posting the start of each post, and including a link to enoughwealth.com for the full version, but the SavingAdvice.com administrators started deleting these posts. As SavingAdvice.com gets all the adsense revenue from the blogs they host I wasn't too impressed by this attitude, and I've started deleting my old posts off that site. This change will reduce the number of visitors recorded for that blog and the combined totals, so I'll be mainly focusing on just the enoughwealth.com site stats in future. I may change the graphs to reflect this once I've removed all the content from the enoughwealth.savingadvice.com site



MONETIZATION:

I prefer sponsors that make payment direct into my PayPal account, as a USD cheque costs a lot in fees to bank in Australia. The last US cheque (from KAGI) cost around $40 to have processed by my credit union!

My income from PayPerPost has trailed off as there were getting to be fewer and fewer topics that fitted into the scope of my blog. Also, the reduction in google pagerank reduced the number of 'opportunities' on offer.

I did get two sponsorships for my blog, which generated $270 revenue.

AdBrite revenue from interstitial ads continued to only be around 2c-3c per day, I increased the estimated CPM rate. This means that AdSense gets displayed most of the time. I also added an unobtrusive AdSense banner at the top of the blog. This seems to have been more successful, with AdSense revenue increasing significantly. It appears that Google Adsense only becomes worthwhile once you have copious amounts of content and reasonable traffic levels.

Newsroom continued to accumulate revenue from display of their feeds, but the amount of revenue is negligible and there isn't much content that suits my blog. Newsroom currently pays out monthly by cheque once you hit $50 (which I won't reach for a long while), but will "soon" start making payments via PayPal.

My Amazon affiliate earnings haven't increased since a few books were purchased by a blog visitor last year, I removed the half dozen recommended books off my RH margin. I had intended to do book review posts of my favourite PF books, but for some reason the amazon widgets don't work correctly when embedded within blogger posts. Since Amazon now charges a $15.00 admin fee for each cheque payment I won't try using Amazon as a revenue stream any more.

Feedburner revenue is accruing (slowly) for ads that get attached to feeds of my post distributed via the IBN group. I recently linked the FAN setup to my Google Adsense account. I'm not such exactly what that will do, but hopefully it can't hurt.

                  PAID [PayPal]  PENDING        ACCRUED [CHQ]  ACCRUED [EFT]
Advertisers:      USD $270.00        -             -              -
PayPerPost:       USD $443.25        -             -              -
Blogsvertise:     USD $114.50    USD $ 10.00       -              -
SponsoredReviews: USD $ 16.25        -             -              -
ReviewMe:         USD $ 60.00        -             -              -
AdSense:              -              -             -           USD $ 27.04    [$100 threshold]
AdBrite:              -              -          USD $ 34.14       -           [$100 threshold]  
Newsroom:             -              -          USD $  1.01       -           [$ 50 threshold]*  
Amazon:               -              -          USD $  2.71       -           [$100 threshold + $15 fee applies]
Feedburner:       USD $  2.12    USD $  2.32       -              -        
                  ------------   ------------   ------------   ------------   
TOTALS:           USD $906.12    USD $ 12.32    USD $ 37.86    $USD $ 27.04
Grand total:      USD $983.34

It's good that AdSense may be finally starting to generate a noticeable amount of revenue. My goal is to move away from sponsored posts and get all blog revenue from Advertisers (Site Sponsors) or AdSense/Adbrite/Feedburner. This would mean that the income is "passive" in the sense that it doesn't rely on specific paid posts (although it would still rely on the blog having fresh content to attract readers). At the moment my blog income is around 1% of my salary from my "real" job, but I'm spending around 15 hours per week on this "hobby" - so the "pay" from blogging is around $1.18 an hour.

EXPENSES:

Around USD$51.23 pa. The income generated is now significantly more than the out-of-pocket costs of maintaining and promoting the site.

Annual domain name registration with Dotster USD$14.95, plus $10.00 for the redirection required to have my blog hosted by Blogspot but still use my domain name.

PFBlogs "Friends" fee: USD$2.00 per month.

Google AdWords: USD$0.76 for 4 clicks. Budget is set at max. $7.80 per month, but so far only getting around 1 click per month at $0.19 per click.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

Blogging My Way to Fame and Fortune

It's been an eventful week in Blogland. The Money Editor at news.com.au is writing an article about how the web is changing the way people deal with money and has requested an interview (she emailed me via my NetWorthIQ page). I've agreed to answer questions that will be emailed to me on Monday - it will be interesting to see what the questions are. I've no idea what sort of mention I'll end up getting in the article, but as news.com.au has an alexa rank around 780 so a mention of enoughwealth.com would be nice.

On the financial side, EnoughWealth.com got it's first "real" sponsor this week - I'm getting paid for displaying a text ad for 12 months. It's not a huge amount, but at least it's genuinely passive income - up to now the only worthwhile revenue from blogging has come from PayPerPost paid posts.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

Blog Performance and Monetization Update: September 2007

READERSHIP: EnoughWealth.com

Readership plateaued during July and August, remaining close to the June totals. Some slight spikes in readership sometimes occur when I post a comment on the Freakonomics or Dilbert blogs, and the monthly PF Bloggers net worth post is always popular.

My Technorati rating has increased from 63 in July to now be 105 (Rank 49,721).

My Alexa rank is hovering just below the 1-million-mark at 969,013.

After reading the PF Bloggers ranking post by FireFinance [which didn't include Enough Wealth!] I also signed up with QuantCast. Although the statistics have only started being gathered, at the moment Quantcast's estimate of my readership is:
Global: 1,666 uniques (~visitors) per month
US: 1,051 uniques per month
My QuantCast rank is 4,090,819

Feedburner Subscriptions is increasing very slowly, currently sitting at 54 subscribers.
I continue to mirror my posts onto the EnoughWealth.SavingAdvice.com site, as there seems to be little overlap between readership of the two sites. Stats for both sites and combined totals are shown below



MONETIZATION:

I prefer sponsors that make payment direct into my PayPal account, as a USD cheque costs a lot in fees to bank in Australia. I've banked the latest USD cheque I received from KAGI with my credit union - although the cheque may take 4-6 weeks to clear the fees may be lower than the A$20 I'd otherwise have to pay. I generally have a threshold of US$100 for payments by cheque, which means I won't receive any cheques for a while ;)

Google AdSense revenue was tiny, so I've set up a 'wrapper' of code from AdBrite which displays AdBrite ads in the place of AdSense (unless they can't beat the CPM rate I've estimated would be achieved by displaying the AdSense ads). AdBrite revenue from interstitial ads is only 2c-3c per day, but on some days the banner ad revenue jumps to around 25c - I've no idea why, as the same banner ads seem to be displayed on all days.
Newsroom has started accumulated revenue from display of their feeds, but the amount of revenue is negligible and there isn't much content that suits my blog. They've recently upgraded their business editorial content, so I may find some more worthwhile content to "mash". Newsroom currently pays out monthly by cheque once you hit $50, but will "soon" start making payments via PayPal.

My Amazon affiliate earnings haven't increased since a few books were purchased by a blog visitor last year, I may remove the half dozen recommended books off my RH margin and instead do book review posts of my favourite PF books. I could also link to the reviews with a permant link to a Reference Library page with the book ads and links to my reviews. SInce March Amazon has introduced a $15.00 admin fee for each cheque payment. Payment by Direct Deposit would be free, but it's not available for non-USA bank accounts.
Feedburner revenue is accruing (slowly) for ads that get attached to feeds of my post distributed via the IBN group.

                  PAID [PayPal]  PENDING        ACCRUED [CHQ]  ACCRUED [EFT]
PayPerPost:       USD $392.25    USD $ 19.00       -              -
Blogsvertise:     USD $ 94.50    USD $ 10.00       -              -
SponsoredReviews: USD $ 16.25        -             -              -
ReviewMe:         USD $ 60.00        -             -              -
AdSense:              -              -             -           USD $ 14.44    [$100 threshold]
AdBrite:              -              -          USD $ 31.66       -           [$100 threshold]  
Newsroom:             -              -          USD $  0.84       -           [$ 50 threshold]*  
Amazon:               -              -          USD $  2.71       -           [$100 threshold + $15 fee applies]
Feedburner:                      USD $  0.05       -              -           [$ 25 threshold]
                  ------------   ------------   ------------   ------------   
TOTALS:           USD $563.00    USD $ 29.05    USD $ 35.21    $USD $ 14.44
Grand total:      USD $641.70

EXPENSES:

Around USD$51.23 pa. So the income generated is slightly more than the out-of-pocket costs of maintaining and promoting the site.

Annual domain name registration with Dotster USD$14.95, plus $10.00 for the redirection required to have my blog hosted by Blogspot but still use my domain name.

PFBlogs "Friends" fee: USD$2.00 per month.

Google AdWords: USD$0.76 for 4 clicks. Budget is set at max. $7.80 per month, but so far only getting around 1 click per month at $0.19 per click.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

Blog Performance and Monetization Update: July 2007

Readership continued to increase during June, managing to surpass the May totals even without the one-date spike that occurred in May. I did make some comments on the dilbert blog, which prompted a few of the dibert fans to check out EnoughWealth.

My Technorati rating has increased from 30 last month to hit 63. My Alexa rank managed to get below 900,000 a couple of times, but is generally stuck just above that level.

In terms of income generation, PayPerPost has generated the only significant amounts of revenue, paying out US$297.25 so far. Blogsvertise, SponsoredPosts, and ReviewMe provide similar revenue opportunities but with much less frequency. The best thing about these are that payments are made into my PayPal account, rather than having to accumulate a large enough credit to justify the costs of banking a USD cheque in Australia.

Google AdSense revenue is tiny, so I've set up a 'wrapper' of code from AdBrite which displays AdBrite ads unless they can't beat the CPM rate I've estimated would be achieved by displaying the AdSense ads. So far I've accumulated a credit for US$26.72, but I've set the threshold to be paid via Cheque to US$100, otherwise the cost of banking a USD cheque into my Australian bank account would take too large a chunk out of the revenue.

I've yet to achieve any credit from displaying the Newsroom content, and my Amazon affiliate earnings haven't increased since a few books were purchased by a blog visitor last year.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

Blog Performance and Monetization Update: June 2007

Readership continued to increase during May, with the bonus of enoughwealth.com site getting a big one-off boost from a specific mention and link to my site by one of the more popular personal finance blogs in the middle of May, which provided an extra 350 or so visitors on the day of the post. This spike trailed off rapidly and readership stats were back to normal after a couple of days. Hopefully some of the visitors liked what they read and have become part of the loyal band of regular readers who return day after day.

Cumulative visits (for sites enoughwealth.com and enoughwealth.savingadvice.com combined) passed through 25,000 during May. With monthly visits now above 6,000 EnoughWealth might reach a total of visitors by September, and has a chance of hitting the magic 100,000 mark by the end of this year!


After a period of initial rapid growth in visitor numbers from launch until Dec 2006, I stopped submitting posts to the various "carnivals" that are available each week. Coupled with a lull in producing daily posts in early January this produced a noticeable loss of momentum in gaining readers. Posting at least once a day in the last few months seems to have helped build up readership more quickly again.

I initially created the mirror site (hosted on savingadvice.com) late last year due to problems with "old" blogger at that time. Since then I've migrated to the "new" blogger, which is much more reliable, and setup the enoughwealth.com domain to redirect to the posts hosted by blogger. There are consistently about double the readers attracted to the enoughwealth.savingadvice.com site each month (eg. 2,910 in May compared to 2,018 visiting my "custom" domain. Hopefully if I resume promoting the enoughwealth.com domain via "carnival" submissions this month I may be able to increase readership of that site. The only reason I prefer readers to visit the enoughwealth.com site is because that site is monetized (savingadvice.com allows limited editing of the sidebar content). The only significant amounts of blog revenut have come from the odd sponsored post (PayPerPost and ReviewMe). With low readership numbers the amounts accumulating each day from AdSense and AdBrite are only 1c - 3c. The exception to this was few days after the mention by xxx which boosted my AdBrite revenue to over $1 per day, at which level ad revenue becomes worthwhile.

My Technorati rating is stuck around 30, as I haven't been requesting links from other sites for the past few months. My Alexa rank is slowly improving - hopefully it will be below 900,000 soon! A hearty thankyou to those of my regular readers who visit using the Alexa toolbar, marked this blog as a "favourite" in Technorati or added a link to enoughwealth.com on your website ;)

Enough Wealth