In May 2024, my travel blog made $35,830.
That’s the lowest it’s made since 2022!
Monthly pageviews are now at 704,355 – less than half what they were in January.
There’s a lot of talk about ‘Google killing small publishers’.
But I don’t think that’s true.
Google can never kill my business.
Because even with zero Google traffic, I’ll make plenty of money.
And you can too.
Here’s where my income came from:
- Raptive display ads: $25,051
- Affiliates: $6,310
- Sponsorships: $3,574
- YouTube ads: $466
Let’s not forget expenses, by the way, those were $6,286.
That leaves a tidy profit of $29,544.
My profit is about to go way down next month (temporarily!)
I’m hiring a commercial director.
While I’m working on the traffic, he’ll be working on increasing the income from every visitor.
Because it’s MUCH EASIER to double your revenue per visitor than it is to double your visitors, right?
I’ll be leaving it to him to figure out exactly how to do that, but I expect that much of it will involve communicating with brand reps to negotiate our affiliate and sponsorship deals.
As well as working on the travel site,
I’ll also continue to work on my public case study, veganwins.co.uk, which will be live soon.
This is a no-SEO project.
So if you’re interested in getting traffic from Facebook, Pinterest and email, be sure to follow along with that in this weekly newsletter.
Last week, I talked about my plans for Pinterest by posting vegan recipe roundups.
I had a lot of questions about where I’ll be sourcing the images.
Of course, you can’t just take photos from other people’s blogs and use them without permission.
So in next Tuesday’s email, I’ll be sharing my exact strategy to get food photos without stepping foot in the kitchen.
Look out for that one.
– NSL