Subscribe Feed (RSS)Start Your Month Off By Looking at Last Month: Traffic & Profits
June 1st, 2007 by Joshua Dorkin | Filed under Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Traffic Building, Websites.
I’m always excited when a month comes to a close because it presents me with the opportunity to look back at what happened last month. This is especially important because I have the opportunity to see how I’m doing in attaining my goals for my sites. In particular, I’m most interested in traffic and financial trends.
Traffic Analysis
In looking at site traffic every month, I go immediately to my AWStats server software to learn how succcessful I’ve been. . .
- Did each of my sites see growth?
- What kind of growth was it?
- Did unique users increase or decrease?
- Did page views go up?
- Were there any major strains on my bandwidth (i.e. was anyone hotlinking to images on my sites)?
- What keywords were most successful in drawing traffic?
- Were there any keywords that fell in the rankings?
- How did the sites fare on the different search engines?
- Did I start to make progress on any one of them?
- Did I begin to lose ground on another?
I haven’t been especially active in tracking the number of sites linking in, the PR of my pages, or my Alexa rankings, because I don’t find them to be anything I can really control. Since I focus mainly on organic growth for my sites, I let the links come instead of undertaking a true link building program. With quality content, the links come in naturally. PR is really meaningless IMO, and Alexa rankings are extremely inaccurate. I have two different sites . . . one typically will rank on a daily basis similarly to another one, yet one of the sites gets between 10 and 20 times the traffic of the other. The one with less traffic that ranks well on Alexa is popular with webmasters and others online – people who likely have the Alexa toolbar or other tools installed on their browsers. It amazes me that this has become one of the standards for monitoring traffic because it is simply so innaccurate.
In terms of blogs, I’ll also look at numbers from places like Feedburner (# of subscribers to my feeds), Technorati (# of sites linking in), and MyBlogLog (number of people who have joined my community) in addition to the basic numbers.
May was a good month! I saw growth in all areas and by all metrics. I can’t really ask for anything else, especially considering I no longer run any keyword advertising programs. I’ll just say that I’m serving many millions of page views a month across the board!
Financial Analysis
The first of each month is also important because it allows me to reflect upon the financial status of my company over the past month. Between direct advertisers, ad networks, and affiliate programs, I draw income from various sources. In any typical month I spend a good amount of my time focused on how I can increase revenues from one or all of these sources. Because of this, I’ve been able to create a company that has seen steady growth financially since inception (with a few minor flat spots).
May was a good month and I’m looking forward to see what we can pull off in June! I guess we’ll find out next month!
I do agree with you that Alexa is not the best but it’s still “one” of the benchmark that we must live with. Review site use it.
But if you want to improve your Alexa, put the widget on your blog.
I have a post on this on my blog(got numbers of my site) and see the amazing result in just a few week. I will be able to ask more fro reviews when my ranking is updated next time.
Improving your site ranking on Alexa
I started to diversify my streams of income more lately
Every cents(USD or CAD) counts 
Congrats on a good month! I don’t know if you discussed it in the past or not, but is there a reason you don’t post any specific numbers?
Thanks Dave! I don’t discuss actual numbers because it really is no one’s business. It amazes me that people put themselves out there and share the exact details on their personal finances. The only people who have a right to know this info are our investors. Please don’t take this as any kind of attack at you, because it is absolutely not one.
As for traffic, using inaccurate tools like Alexa and Compete, people can easily look at traffic data for any site. I prefer to keep my exact numbers proprietary.
Thanks again Dave!
Joshua
I know exactly what you mean by the numbers on Alexa. One of our overlap markets is miserable for Alexa and it is costing me every month. If the numbers matched up with the reality the revenue on the site from a couple of sources would jump significantly.
Steve, thanks for the link on the Alexa tools, I will try a couple.
Tom
The thing that amazes me about these sorts of stats is how few people actually use them!
Really, it is almost unbelievable how many are out there trying to make money online, with little or no comprehension of how they are doing on a weekly or monthly basis.
There again, some of those people are probably our competition, so we shouldn’t really complain!
Steve
PR might be meaningless and alexa might be inaccurate but they both are used by advertisers. If you are trying to monitize your blog, those are important, unfortunately.
i use google analytics. i like how they give me even how long each keyword or referring sites stick around. With awstats it just gives you a average of your sites time but no details. Traffic is so hard to predict but i know one thing i rather have natural traffic flow over any type of traffic boosting to my site. I have noticed that traffic that comes quick like from digg or stumble they mess with the average time to my site because they don’t stay long just brows for less then a minute and there gone and rarely come back. I like that i am gradually acquiring readers and my traffic continues to rise as long as i continue to post daily. If i had one draw back to blogging is in order to keep readers you must continue posting no matter how insignificant you think your post is someone is reading it.
You’re all right that Alexa is important, because advertisers use it. Web publishers, as a result, are forced to try and manipulate their Alexa data.
good gracious! thanks for this informative information.keep it up,goahead.
I’m considering doing a roundup of my blog’s monthly results next month. You’ve done a great roundup what the traffic and financial analysis ought to look like!
Very informative blog. I’ve been monitoring my blog’s performance for the past weeks since I’ve started it. I think one of the mistakes that bloggers do is to give less attention on analyzing their blog’s performance, comparing their actual performance with that of their blog objectives. Even worse, some bloggers do not have an objective to start with.
Thanks for the post. Really useful.
cheers!
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Good post. It is very informative. It is not easy to earn good money from blogging. Seeing your stat is attractive.
Yeah…good Post.And i want to learn more about affiliate marketing…and i want to know about how to index a page in alexa,alltheweb and alltavista..
Please provide some information for the above question.
Hi, I didn't know the importance of Alexa ranking till now. I was bothered only about the page ranks and totally ignored Alexa. I would start analyzing my blog the way you mentioned.
Thanks for the nice information.