Growing a Blog Business – December 4, 2008

By dougnau on Dec 4, 2008 in Blog Growth

The month of November was overwhelmingly occupied with the birth of my son Joseph Douglas Nau on November 8. The birth and delivery all went smoothly, and I am pleased to say we’ve got a beautiful and healthy baby son! I’ve taken several weeks off from coaching to spend time with the family – having two children is a different experience than having one, so as you might imagine – my focus has not been so much on growing this blog business this month. Its been great to have the chance to be off for 4 weeks to really focus on family time. Nevertheless, I’ll return to a more typical schedule next week, and I’ve been slowly easing back in to writing articles this past week. Therefore, I appreciate that you recognize this entry might be a bit thin on detail.

Updates for November

In lieu of the big events this month, I’ve deliberately shifted some of my attention away from developing any new significant software changes or materials on the site. Here’s a brief overview of what I did have time to accomplish.

Added 4 new blog posts to the website
Delivered monthly newsletter

Learnings/Observations

I have had a few observations this past month which seem quite promising. The e-book which I completed and published in late October seems to be having an impact on the number of subscribers to my newsletter. In the first month, it seems to have tripled to quadrupled the number of people that have been signing up. My web traffic was relatively stable from October to November, so this was the only real change that could account for the different subscription patterns.

I was also very encouraged to see that my web traffic remained relatively the same (actually increased marginally), even though I spent little to no time adding new content or optimizing the site. Eventually as I look to have this website be self sufficient (ie: make enough money to operate itself and eventually pay me a salary), a question I’ve often considered is whether or not my efforts will be cumulative in nature. Basically – will I incur a substantial drop in revenues if I were to stop writing for a period of time,or will the site remain viable. At least for this month, I am inspired that traffic remained steady and so did ad revenues without putting in a lot of new effort into it.

Here are detailed website results for the month of November:

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

September - Unique Visitors

October - Unique Visitors

November- Unique Visitors

As you can see from the graphs above – there are very few changes to the absolute unique visitor count for the month of November relative to my record month of visitors in October.

Here are my AdSense Revenue’s

September - Ad Revenue

October - Ad Revenue

November- Ad Revenue

Once again, my total clicks, Adsense revenues, page impressions, and unique visitor count all went up for November (although marginally). As I’ve mentioned in the past, I am not making a killing with this yet, but with another $15/month or so I’ll be able to cover costs for my internet access that I need to publish the site :O)! On a more serious note, one observation that I am very interested in is my Page CTR. The click through rate (CTR) for he past two months has hovered around 3% which is substantially higher than the 1-1.5% I had seen in the months leading up to October. I believe that this corresponds with the relevancy of some of the ads for the articles I’ve written on wellness coaching. My website has seen a significant jump in traffic on the keyword wellness coach as my article How to Become a Wellness Coach is listed #2 on Google for the search term ‘Wellness Coach’.

Alexa Ranking

I’ve been watching my Alexa ranking pretty closely and its been a really interesting picture to paint. While my traffic seems steady and increasing, some days my 1 week Alexa ranking is where I’d expect it to be given my history (at or below 500,000), but its jumped as high as 1.9 million on the weekly average as well. Unless the internet has seen a four fold increase in the amount of web traffic over the past week – this seems pretty unlikely to be reliable data to me.

As I am learning more about Alexa, I am thinking that this is a metric that I’ll probably look at once a quarter from now on to see where its headed, but I much prefer the other metrics I am reading above as an indication for the progress of the website. Here’s the Alexa report as of Nov 4, 2008.

Google Page Rank

The Google page rank stays steady at 2. I did notice that my articles page has been assigned a page rank of 3. I find this interesting as its not my landing page, and according to Google Analytics, the home page is much more popular. I don’t understand the query, but I’ll take it.

Goals Moving Forward

Given the time off with the baby, I’ve had little time to consider the next steps. At the moment I’ve got a list of ideas for what to do next that needs a thorough review as to what is the most important to complete. Starting next week I’ll have the opportunity to sit for a full day and go through my business items. I’ll craft a better list of goals then.

December