Monetising my travel blog: traffic and income report May 2014

It’s been two months since I last wrote about my travel blog’s monetisation journey and I thought that made it time to check in again. You might remember that last time I listed quite a few bloggy tasks to do and I have definitely made some progress but at the same time, the monetisation progress does seem kind of slow. Probably also a consequence of having not many spare hours to spend on it, but anyway … here’s the news!

Traffic not growing

One of my not-so-favourite things this time round is that the traffic to my blog seems to have stagnated. I’ve not done anything super-spectacular to promote my blog more, but at the same time I’ve kept up with a lot of the regular stuff (such as tweeting and Facebooking archived posts). You can see the stats below and if you compare to last time you’ll see it’s not an exciting comparison!

Not A Ballerina traffic statistics – at a bit of standstill at the moment!

I’ve been joining in with a really nice link-up called Instagram Travel Thursday with a bunch of other travel bloggers and I know I’ve had some extra traffic through here (plus it’s a lot of fun) but obviously it hasn’t made much impact! However, I am working on a not-so-secret weapon this month which I’m hoping will help with this traffic situation, and it is:

Using Pinterest to build traffic

I have seen heaps of articles and heard from fellow bloggers lately that of all the social media, Pinterest is the one that actually drives a lot of traffic to your blog. This makes perfect sense because it’s a very different social media platform – one that’s based on finding information rather than finding people.

So, I enrolled myself in the Practical Pinning course to get this figured out (not a sponsored link! I can tell you I’m enjoying the course a lot so far, a week and a bit in). I must be doing something right as over the last week my follower numbers both on my business Pinterest account and my Not A Ballerina account have been rising rapidly, and I’m hoping that in the next couple of months I’ll be able to see these impacting on my blog traffic – fingers crossed!

Not A Ballerina on Pinterest at pinterest.com/amandatravels

This Pinterest section should come with a warning though: it’s crazily addictive 😉

Sponsored posts

There is a lot of discussion in the blogger world about sponsored posts (just google it and you will disappear into a rabbit warren of opinions). I don’t do them very often, and when I do, I insist that I write a normal post that would appear anyway on the blog and then include the sponsorship at the bottom. If the brand doesn’t agree to that, then I don’t do it. And I hope it goes without saying that I don’t do any from irrelevant, unrelated brands. The reason I do any at all is because thanks to the longevity of my blog and its reasonably high page brands are interested in the link and because, quite frankly, I need to pay my mortgage! I would say I do less than one a month on average.

As an aside, I had an interesting email conversation with a potential banner advertiser who told me that their requirements were 20,000 page views/month before they’d consider an ad deal. (I’m rather a long way off that at the moment!)

Income

And so, to income. I did promise to talk about this right back at the start of this series, not just traffic. My big, big must do in the next couple of months is to finish work on the e-products I want to promote though the blog because I’m very keen to diversify (and increase) the income sources. In the meantime, this period included:

Adsense: $25
Nuffnang: $113
Sponsored posts: $550
Total: $688

This is just direct income; the existence of my travel blog is also the reason I’m able to run blogging courses and have a consulting business, so in effect it earns much more for me, but this is the online, purely blog-based income.

What’s next for Not A Ballerina’s monetisation journey?

So I have just had a look at that long to do list from last time, and I’d say the three most important points are:

1. Continue working on building up my mailing list (with giveaway – now in place – etc)
2. Complete the Pinterest course and develop strategy to grow traffic to blog from Pinterest
3. Complete work on e-products.