ShoutMeLoud Monthly Transparency Report- August 2015

Hey, Shouter,

It’s the time of the month when we share the progress report of a month & I’m pretty excited to share many interesting things that have happened in August.

At the same time, I’m thrilled to inform you of what we are doing in this month. For now let’s do a quick recap of August, followed by Traffic & income report.

My first experience as travel & work:

Have you heard this term as Digital Nomad? 

According to Wikipedia, here is the definition of Digital Nomad:

Digital nomads are individuals who use telecommunications technologies to perform their work duties and, more generally, conduct their life in a nomadic manner.

It’s something to similar as travelling & working & living life as a minimalist.

There is an enormous community of bloggers & entrepreneurs who love to travel & work. I’m delighted to share that for the first time in my life I tried it & result was exhilarating. We (Me & Shallu) travelled to Thailand for 12 days & instead of living in a hotel, we booked our stay via AirB&B to cook ourselves & live like a native.

Initially, it was a task to find the balance between work & stop the craving of wondering around, but eventually after few failed tries we managed to find the balance. To be honest, work ways I couldn’t work the same way that I do, but limited time taught me first to focus on things which matter the most.

Apart from work, the trip was refreshing as we did few adventure sports like Scuba Diving, Kayaking & explored the beautiful Islands of Thailand.

• Save

We stayed at Krabi Island which is affordable & internet speed is awesome (Average 10 MBPS). Initially, 12 days sounded like too much of a time in another country, but living like a local made everything easier.

If time permits, I will be doing a complete story on my first experience of travel & work like a DigitalNomad. For now, if you are planning to do something like this, you should simply pack your bag & leave.

You will never regret this decision of yours, as such trips give you a great perspective on life. Your work might get affected a bit initially, but later on you will learn to keep the balance.

One of the best thing which I liked about this journey is, I got to interact & learn from people of different ethnics.

• Save

Along with that, travel made it easy to spend time reading, which I missed doing for long. If you are looking for reading recommendations, you should read:

• The AdWeek, Copywriting Handbook
• The UnPublished David Ogilvy

Product refinement & new blogging products:

After adding the Blogger’s store section here, I’m focusing on adding many niche based plugins & products that could help you to growth hack your blog. One of them is Youtube Viral Subscribe plugin, which helped me to reach 5K followers on Youtube in a couple of months.

• Save

For this month, my focus is to refine all the products & assets of ShoutMeLoud & another blog rather than adding anything new. This is why, I have re-written Affiliate marketing & WordPress Guide eBook, & hired a professional to design the eBook.

I was astonished by the outcome, as the new book is easier to read than ever. If you have purchased the eBook before, you must have received the updated copy for free. If not, just drop an email to [email protected] & it will be taken care of.

And, now it’s time to jump to some numbers & look at how our traffic is doing.

August 2015 traffic: Blog/Forum/Android-app

I’m breaking down the traffic for all three platforms as it would give you a wider perspective of how traffic is doing on the various platform. I’m excited & upset at the same time as we got knocked out at 99. Just because of a few numbers we couldn’t hit the one million page views last month.

Blog Traffic:

• Save

Compare to ShoutMeLoud the last report, our Pageviews has increased by 200K & a minor change in bounce rate & pages/session.

Even though this design helped us a lot in branding & user-experience, I’m still looking to revamp the homepage to make it more optimum for first-time users. My hunt for a talented UX designer is still on, and once I find what I’m looking for, the next thing you would be noticing is a new revamped design with the better site navigation option.

Forum traffic: 

• Save

ShoutMeLoud forum is growing exponentially every day & so is the traffic. It’s an ad-free forum where the focus is on engagement & helping the blogging community.

Managing the forum is not easy, and at times it gets hard. Thanks to active members who are sharing the effort & making ask.shoutmeloud.com as one of the most active community forum for bloggers.

These are the most active members for the month of August 2015. These Shouters are not only helping bloggers with their blogging queries but also sharing how they are making money with coupon sites & other legit methods. Big kudos to all of them for nurturing the newbie bloggers.

• Save

App traffic: ShoutMeLoud Android app

• Save

Last month Parse made some changes in their API & that broke our mobile app push notifications. Thanks to Shawn for informing us about this, and we fixed it before it was too late. But it took few days to roll out the update & we lost some traffic due to this.

For newcomers, Push notification enables our Android app users to be the first one to get notified on the newly published blog post at ShoutMeLoud. You can learn more about this technology here & download ShoutMeLoud app from the following links.

Overall we got page-views of 998,380 (Approx. 1 million) in the month of August. On the blog, we have 84% organic traffic & apps & forum have more direct users than the referral traffic of any time.

What’s coming up?

This month September is going to be another slow month for ShoutMeLoud since I’m putting my time & energy on ShoutMeet drive. Moreover, work would be a little slower than the earlier month. I’m planning to get into strategical partnership & collaboration with few companies on upcoming projects.  For the next 2-3 months, I’m more inclined to learn & explore & will be focusing on revenue after that.  It’s disheartening to see the revenue plunge down, but I believe it’s for the greater good.

For now,

How about you? How was your month of August in terms of traffic & revenue?

What new things you did around your blog & how was the result?

Share your experiences in the comment section below & it would be helpful for all of us. 

• Save