Growing a Blog Business – November 3, 2008

By dougnau on Nov 4, 2008 in Blog Growth

I am very excited to have completed a milestone in the development of this website – this is the addition of my new eBook and audio book. I’ve been working on this for quite a while so its delivery brings about a new stage in the direction of this website. I’ve had lots of ideas on ‘what next’, but everything’s been on hold until the final adjustments and delivery were made with this project. Here’s a more detailed description of the accomplishments in October.

Updates for October

There are a few technology adjustments that I’ve made – specifically related to the delivery of the eBook. I’ve been looking for ways to allow people to download my book from a password secured page, and I played with some free source code that some programmers made available, but finally I figured out that the best way to do this was just to create a password secured folder on my website, and let the book reside in that directory. This was a nice free way for me to deliver the eBook. Since I am not charging for its download, this technology works very well. Here’s a summary of the accomplishments this month.

Completed and posted eBook
Completed recorded audio version of eBook & posted for sale on payloadz.com (they have a nice free service which works nice if you are uncertain of product sales volume).
Added 7 new blog posts to the website
Delivered monthly newsletter

Learnings/Observations

Even an eBook has a lot of steps for publishing. While there was no need to go through a publishing agency, creating the artwork, posting to the site, developing the content, editing/finalizing etc, are months and months of work. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the process and am so excited that my readers may benefit from this materials. I know the topic is unique and has a high value it today’s ‘stressed out’ world.

Technically speaking, the website continues to have monthly gains in page views, unique visitors and ad revenues. While my aspirations are very high for future readership, I am very pleased where its at now. Since I just posted the book earlier today, I’ll share more learnings/observations on this addition next time around.

Here are detailed website results for the month of October:

According to Google Analytics, here is my unique visitor results for the past 3 months.

August - Unique Visitors

September - Unique Visitors

October - Unique Visitors

The traffic in the month of October was very steady ranging from 15-45 unique visitors per day. As you can see from the charts above, again, I’ve had another record month with a total of 714 unique visitors. Almost all of the traffic is coming from Google searches on the topic of wellness coaching or developing personal/corporate vision and mission statements.

Here are my AdSense Revenue’s

August- Ad Revenue

September - Ad Revenue

October - Ad Revenue

Despite only having a couple hundred more page impressions for my Google Adsense ad’s, my revenues increased substantially on a percentage basis. For the first time, this site could almost support me for a full dinner (for one), rather than just a snack this month. On a serious note, the click through rate increased to 3.29%, which is a real spike and it seems to be holding steady since October. Clicks more than doubled, but cost per click went down (perhaps with the down turning economy). I am hoping that the increased click through rate means that people are generally getting more value out of the articles I am writing and the ads are relevant to supporting them in finding what they need.

Alexa Ranking

As you’d expect with increased traffic, my Alexa rank continues to grow as well. The 3 month average went up another 110,000 spots – great to see, but again as I learn more about Alexa’s ranking system, it is not necessarily the best indicator of website popularity. Regardless, I’d like to see this site in the top 100,000 next year, and think that will be a significant accomplishment.

Google Page Rank

The Google page rank stays steady at 2. Again, this is not a typical metric for me to monitor, but its kept up with the gain from last month so its worth a mention.

Goals Moving Forward

November

Write 8 blog articles
Craft a plan for the next addition to i-grow.net (potentially the addition of a forum)
Submit 2 articles to 3 article directories
Have a baby (yes my wife is pregnant and we are expecting in November, so I suspect it will be a busy month)

Long Term Goals