Hey, Shouter.
This is the time of the month when I put myself into introspection mode to have a close look at what is working well and what is not working where ShoutMeLoud’s operations are concerned.
Every month I share my detailed traffic and income report as a part of ShoutMeLoud’s transparency policy, so that you and other bloggers can discover new ways to drive traffic and new ways to earn income from a blog.
Feel free to use any of the ideas mentioned below for your blog in an effort to grow your traffic and income.
January was an eventful month for me, as I resumed working after a month-long break. I also organized first professional blogging workshop in India on January 25th, 2015! You can see the highlights ( Video + Images) here.
The first workshop proved to be very meaningful for the attendees, and so I have decided to do workshops on a regular basis. I currently have two workshops planned in the coming months. The professional blogging workshop is priced at INR 19000 ($308). You will find the date, location, and link to apply for the workshop below:
- 22nd February: Delhi
- 15th March: Bangalore
When I announced the Bangalore workshop date I was pleasantly surprised to find that within a few hours, 70% of the seats were booked. I’m considering the possibility of extending my Bangalore trip by one day so that I can manage two workshops in two days. I don’t like to extend my workshop groups by 10 attendees in an effort to keep the groups smaller and more conducive to good, ongoing discussions, as this provides a more productive workshop atmosphere for attendees.
Before I share January’s traffic and income report, here are some of our top articles from last month. If you have missed any of them, I encourage you to open them in a new tab and read them at your leisure:
- Why and how you should be using images with your blog post
- How to buy webhosting with domain names for your WordPress Blog
- 5 reasons you should start using CloudFlare for your blog right away
Now, let’s have a look at the traffic performance for ShoutMeLoud in the month of January 2015:
ShoutMeLoud January 2015 Traffic report
The last week of January was a little slow for ShoutMeLoud in terms of publishing new posts, but overall our traffic increased in comparison to earlier months. One area where I’m seeing ShoutMeLoud as needing some fine-tuning is where the bounce rate is concerned. I’m surprised to see the bounce rate at 80%, which doesn’t seem to be good at all. I’m confident that this will improve in the month of March, as by then the new ShoutMeLoud theme will be live.
Here is the traffic chart for the past month:
The majority of ShoutMeLoud traffic was from search engines (82%), and Facebook sent us the majority of our social media traffic. Flipboard and Feedly are sending decent traffic as well, whereas traffic from Pocket declined considerably.
After many years we have crossed the milestone of 600,000 page views in a month, and I’m confident that we will see even more traffic in the coming months.
Android app traffic report:
If you are new to ShoutMeLoud, you should know that we also have an Android app which you can download here. I launched it in the last quarter of 2014, and in retrospect, this was a great decision.
Users are increasing with time, and as you can see from the screenshot above, stats are looking very promising. An iPhone app is next on my “to-do” list, and if you don’t yet have an Android or iOS app (or both!) for your blog, you should work toward getting one soon.
Blogging earned me a flat!
I’m so excited to share this special news with you! Buying a flat has been a dream for me for the past couple of years. In the month of December, I purchased a flat for myself with all my savings. If you have read my blogging journey, you are aware that all of my income for the past 6 years is exclusively from blogging.
Buying a flat was a big decision for me, especially because I am a person who does not like to have any debt. For years I have lived in a rented apartment and spent a significant amount of my income on rent. After reading the book “Rich Dad & Poor Dad“, I realized that I was making a big mistake by making a large monthly rental payment, when I can spend the same amount every month to pay my mortgage/loan EMI.
It was also a great investment decision because once I have finished repaying the loan, the majority of my expenses and investment will go toward my business expansion.
Just to let you know, 5 years ago I purchased a car from my blogging income, and yes – even this flat is paid for with my blogging income!
New tool discovered:
This month I started using Desk App on Mac OS, which is a desktop writing app and is of top-notch quality. If you are using the Mac OS, you should grab this app right now. This integrates with your WordPress blog and offers a great distraction-free writing mode.
On another note, here are some articles and notes which I discovered last month from around the web which are worth reading:
- Are you afraid of your own success?
- Best titles & headlines to create viral post titles
- 7 steps to master the law of attraction
- Powerful blog promotion techniques from marketing experts
- Things to stop doing in 2015
- 36 tools and tips for social media marketers
And that concludes our January roundup!
How was your blog’s traffic last month? Feel free to let me know via the comments section below, and do share this report with others to create awareness about blogging.
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Harsh You are making the Indian Community so proud by your work.Indians are always best at their work when their make their mind.I Congratulate you for having a wonderful blog.Your blog contains A to Z info about starting and promoting wordpress blog.
Such high numbers always motivate me to do more hard work. One of my site also has 3,00,000 pageviews per month but income is too low just 200$ what can i do to improve it.
Congrats Harsh… You knowledge is so vast….
I have never seen a blogger who shares his/her income and expenditures at public level.It needs a great courage to do that….
Hats off to you bro….
Make hard work for this .. Thanks for show the report.
Hello there Harsh
Congratulations for your new level and i am so cheerful at whatever point i read your posts. Its truly magnificent and you are doing fantastic occupation to new comers… ..Keep shaki
Buying a Flat is totally a dream for any of us any you done with your blogging earning. By the way congro for your new flat. Keep it up.
Harsh, I noticed that your blog is now getting batter alexa ranking than the previous year. Maybe the new and improved design is helping it a bit. Anyways, thanks a lot for helping us all. Kudos 🙂
Congratulation Harsh for the new Flat. Keep rocking like this.:)