May 2009 was a record-breaking month for HowToMakeMyBlog.com. I had the most-visited day ever, the best month in terms of unique visitors and also the highest revenue ever.
25126 unique visitors total and I sold 20 copies of the Thesis WordPres theme and 17 copies of my Twitter Marketing E-book during May.
WordPress Thesis Theme happenings
- Thesis Theme – 20 sales – $726.66 revenue
Thesis released an upgrade in late April. That always attracts attention. Also Thesis really stepped up their promotion this month. Several videos were published on their site and that makes it easier to promote it via the Thesis affiliate program.
I also published a video review of Thesis 1.5 on the last day of April. That got a bit of attention while my old Thesis design tips articles still get decent amount of traffic.
In total 816 people have clicked on my Thesis link during May. Sales were pretty much evenly distributed over the month. If you use Thesis, then selling it via the affiliate program is the most organic way you can monetize your blog.
See more on how I monetize my blog with Thesis affiliate program.
Twitter Marketing E-Book sales
- Twitter Marketing E-book – 17 sales – $339.15 revenue
I released my first ever premium product, an e-book about marketing on Twitter, on May 19th. Until the end of May I sold 17 copies of the e-book and I received a lot of great feedback on it.
As I suspected, creating products is a great way of monetizing your site. I only charged $19.95, but imagine if I created a couple of videos along with the book and charged $39.95 for a premium version or created a membership site, as some probloggers suggested, and charged $29,95 per month for a minimum of 3 months. Then you can understand why all these membership sites are popping up all over the bloggersphere.
58 bloggers signed up for my book’s affiliate program, where I pay 50% of all sales, but unfortunately none had much success yet. If you think you can do it better, join Twitter Marketing E-book affiliate program and start promoting.
Blog Traffic Trend
I started HowToMakeMyBlog on October 25th 2008 so November was the first full month. Here are the monthly stats:
- November 2008 – 933 unique visitors
- December 2008 – 8966 unique visitors
- January 2009 – 14266 unique visitors
- February 2009 – 10938 unique visitors
- March 2009 – 15756 unique visitors
- April 2009 – 23600 unique visitors
- May 2009 – 25126 unique visitors
Also 4 of the top 5 best days in terms on unique visitors were in May:
- May 26th – 3602 unique visitors – WordPress plugins article went viral
- April 3rd – 2799 unique visitors – Twitter plugins post hit Digg frontpage
- May 27th - 2400 unique visitors – Day after WordPress plugin article
- May 21st – 1840 unique visitors – Stephen King’s blogging tips post
- May 29th – 1739 unique visitors – How I got retweeted 250+ times article
Top 10 Sources of traffic
Organic Google traffic is still growing strong. My Twitter and StumbleUpon strategies continue working as well. A large part of the “direct” traffic is coming from different Twitter clients. I wish Analytics would be able to track Twitter correctly soon.
Delicious and Digg sent me some traffic because of the best 18 WordPress plugins post. Official Thesis site linked to me again plus MattFlies linked to me from his viral article 100 Thesis resources.
| Source/Medium |
Visits
|
Pages/Visit
|
Avg. Time on Site
|
% New Visits
|
Bounce Rate
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. |
google / organic
|
7,781 | 2.03 | 00:02:33 | 77.24% | 65.70% |
| 2. |
(direct) / (none)
|
5,626 | 1.92 | 00:02:30 | 68.75% | 71.54% |
| 3. |
twitter.com / referral
|
3,036 | 2.19 | 00:02:50 | 57.97% | 65.45% |
| 4. |
stumbleupon.com / referral
|
2,177 | 1.48 | 00:01:00 | 89.48% | 79.42% |
| 5. |
delicious.com / referral
|
1,020 | 1.48 | 00:01:28 | 85.78% | 82.55% |
| 6. |
diythemes.com / referral
|
775 | 2.67 | 00:04:37 | 42.32% | 51.23% |
| 7. |
google.com / referral
|
606 | 2.18 | 00:03:07 | 46.37% | 66.34% |
| 8. |
digg.com / referral
|
550 | 1.56 | 00:01:04 | 68.36% | 78.73% |
| 9. |
mattflies.com / referral
|
344 | 2.64 | 00:04:24 | 45.64% | 44.19% |
| 10. |
trkk.us / referral
|
263 | 1.38 | 00:01:11 | 83.27% | 80.23% |
Monetize by carefully choosing products to sell
One important lesson is that you do not have to sell every product there is. I see many bloggers who post generic promotions for different membership sites regularly.
You might be able to “scam” couple of readers with the fake personal recommendation and you might get some money out of it, but it will not work in the long run. Your readers are not stupid and you will lose their trust.
I hope this article inspires you to try to go a different way than just having Adsense, banner ads, or a generic promotion on your blog. Find couple of items you use and you love and concentrate on them. Be an evangelist of a product you love to use or consider creating something yourself. It is a great learning experience and your readers will appreciate it.
Conclusion
Very satisfying month. I think it will be hard to repeat such a high number of sales via Thesis affiliate program in next couple of months. A new upgrade and a lot of buzz about the theme is needed for so many sales from a small blog like mine.
I hope to continue selling Twitter Marketing E-Book though. I have already sold 3 new copies of the book in the first 3 days of June so it looks promising. Make sure to check it out if you want to learn about how to use Twitter to promote your blog.
Image by Sburke2478.
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{ 30 comments… read them below or add one }
Love your blog. Just came across it about 2 weeks ago when I first purchased Thesis. I might have even bought it from your link. I even managed to implement some of your customization. Still some work to do though.
You have had a dramatic growth in your blog readers over the last few months. Congrate to your success
Right now what ‘am doing to increase me readership is working on facebook and twitter. Linkedln is also bringing me some traffic too.
I have also started posting blogs 3 times a week and also started creating YouTube videos to a targeted audience.
Love what you’ve been doing over the past few months. I hope to see some growth on my blog too.
Joyce
http://www.beawealthyentrepreneur.com/blog
@Joyc Oladip – That’s great. Posting regularly, posting videos, being active in social media, working on blog usability… just keep doing it consistently for a period of time and I am sure you will see great results.
@Alex – Glad this post inspired you. You should definitely consider creating a product at some point. If there was a series of articles that was really popular on your blog, consider expanding it into an e-book and either give it away for free to build traffic or charge for it to have a new monetization channel.
@Harrison Schmidt – I was never a member of his membership sites so I do not feel good promoting it. As said I like to promote products that I use and love to use personally. That works the best in my opinion.
@Frank – Great! I really think that is the way to go for bloggers. Have some free content but then expand some of the topics into premium e-books. Put it in your navigational menu as “Store”, place all the e-book there, and if you make a sale here and there it is great. Feels much better than selling membership sites of other people.
@Greg Ellison – Thanks!
Congrats on the success in May Marko! Your post has definitely inspired me.
It seems like your Thesis affiliate links are working out pretty well for you! I have gotten a couple of signups myself, but not even close to how many you got in May!
I am putting some serious thought into buying your Ebook (I’m actually almost positive I’m going to buy it later this month) because I use Twitter so much to promote my blog, and I feel like I could be doing a lot better than I am already.
Even after seeing your Ebook, I have also put some thought into creating my own Ebook for my blog as well.
Keep up the good work here man, posts like these are the ones that really motivate me to get my blog to the top!
Congrats on the good month. You might consider promoting Yaro’s Blog Mastermind clickbank program a bit as another form of monitization. They payout is high, its a high quality product, and I think it would fit your audience well.
Great post and congratulations on the growth of your site (and $$).
I have had fun selling an eBook on hiking The Overland Track in Australia (at a very low cost) – it is a great way to share interesting information and make a few dollars on the side.
Next book is “in production” now – have pitched it to a much broader hiking audience, excited to see how it goes!
Keep up the great work
Frank
That is cool to see your visitor and your income growing. Keep up the great work Marko. Greg Ellison
Congrats on the great month. See those numbers go up so nicely must really be satisfying. Good luck in your continued success!
Wow, your Thesis sales blew my hat off. I have only sold 2 the last 2 weeks and that was nice for me. You had a whopping 20 sold. That is just amazing, I am going to read your post about ‘How I monetize my blog with Thesis Theme affiliate program’. I would love to know how you did this.
Your other stats are also high, something for me to aim at.
Hey, Marko! Thanks for being so candid and open with your numbers. I can’t help but marvel at how quickly you went from 933 uniques your first month to many thousands every month after that! You really hit the ground running!
Very impressive!
is 25,000 total vistors per month? how many total visitors and page views?
Thanks for all the nice comments! I appreciate it and I hope this post is inspiring for you to try out new stuff on your own blogs as well.
More May month stats from Google Analytics @Nomadic Matt and other interested:
25,126 Visits
49,241 Pageviews
1.96 Pages/Visit
68.96% Bounce Rate
00:02:24 Avg. Time on Site
70.85% % New Visits
Hey Marko,
Don’t forget about your Alexa ranking too! It is at 45,000 right now. For a 7 month old blog, that is amazing
Impressive! I have been following your blog since I started blogging and have found many of your posts to be incredible. This post takes the cake! Nice job. Your traffic is extremely high, do you think the seo on your thesis theme helped you make those significant jumps in traffic so quickly?
@Seth W – I’m not sure really. They say the code in Thesis is very clean compared to other themes so that’s why it is SEO friendly. But I cannot prove it personally. I bought Thesis because of the reader usability, the cool design, and the easy customization. But if it gives me some SEO advantages on top of that, that’s even better!
Every Thesis theme blogs that I have visited so far look amazing!
Congrats, Marko! Looks like things are really taking off for you and HowToMakeMyBlog.com. Thanks for the link too!
Marko, It certainly looks like you are on a roll. Thanks for sharing all the details and statisitcs of your site’s growth. This is the type of real world insight that is so hard to find and learn from. Very, very helpful. Also, great job on the eBook.
Nice income report. $1k month, nice. Hopefully I will be there pretty soon. Keep it up man.
I came across your blog via twitter. And I really like this article, Im considering doing an ebook myself for visual blogging and what are the best tools for it. So thanks so much for this article!!
Quite impressive, Marko. 1000$ in a single month, from a single blog, with such a short life span is DEFINITELY impressive. Keep up the awesome work, man!
Found you fromTwitter. Very impressive ramp up in numbers. Don't forget to pat yourself on the back for good content and information. All the other stuff is great, but without good content it means nothing. Nice work! I am still working on the stumbleupon and trying to figure how best to implement.
what a traffif from 1st month to the 2nd, btw i found your blog from kikolani.com
It was a great idea to show the readers what success really is. Just by showing that information, you are letting every new blogger and website owner know what patience and hard work really amounts to in the end.
Very good post. I really impressed on it. Thanks for sharing your great tips with us. And congrats for that.
It was a great post and congrats on your income $1k per month. I hope that my blog can be like yours pretty soon. Thanks for sharing the useful tips.
Very nice and useful post, I see that you are doing great with WordPress Thesis Theme, I wish you good luck and more great work on your blog!
very inspiring …Thank for sharing the tip
Congratulation……..!!!
i m really inspired by you and thank you so much for the great article.
keep it up…
Impressive. You’ve done well. How long after your blog started did you launch your ebook? Also, since it’s been around a while now…have any affiliates been successful with selling it?
Thanks. Not really, more than 100 affiliates signed up last time I checked but none sold more than 1 copy. I would have to go after big sites to be my affiliates I guess.