Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on September 3, 2024.
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Welcome to the 115th entry into our monthly income and traffic report!
In this monthly update we share our traffic, earning, and spending figures for our blogs from the previous month so you can get a glimpse inside the business of blogging. In addition to sharing these for your use, by publishing our information we are also able to stay on track with our own goals for our business.
Prior to reading, it is worth noting that we feature two blogs in this report (one global travel and one local travel) and our income is based on the combined total of the two. We break down the traffic for each in this report for additional information.
Note: In July 2023, Google switched from Universal Analytics to GA4 reporting. We use custom templates to ensure we are still reporting on page views as our traffic metric; however, it is possible this figure is different slightly from the past.
August 2024 Travel Blog Traffic Report
Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of August was roughly 8,500 page views. This was a decrease of 14.5% on a per day basis from July and a decrease of 78% from August 2023.
The traffic declines continue with another core algorithm update seemingly pushing general travel sites away from search results in favor of other companies or more niche focused sites.
At this point, we’re just continuing on here for the fun of things, but it really seems like things will just keep getting worse with each passing update / AI rollout. That said, it seems like at the end of the month things started moving back upwards, so we’ll see where September takes us.
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in August was approximately 95,000 page views. This was an decrease of 19.5% on a per day basis from July and a decrease of 54% from August 2023.
Our destination blog was also seemingly hit in similar fashion this month with a slight decrease in traffic from July and a more prominent drop from last year. While search results seem to be better overall in terms of where we are ranking (and what content is showing), overall traffic is down once again- our lowest month since the early COVID shut downs of 2020. That said, at the end of the month see saw a decent bump much like on our travel site, so we’ll see how next month goes.
Still, we are making big strides with this website behind the scenes by growing our newsletter by 1,000+ subscribers per month and having our Facebook group grow at 2,500-5,000 month in membership. So off to pivoting we go!
August 2024 Travel Blog Income Report
Our booked income for August was approximately $3,795- down approximately 20% on a per-day basis from July and an decrease of 65% from August 2023. This income was approximately 95% from our local blog and 5% from our travel blog.
The breakdown includes the approximate following:
*CPM Ads: $2,350
*Affiliates: $1,175
*Facebook Bonus: $270
It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that with both of our sites down 20%, our overall income was down approximately 20% for the month as well.
Still, we’re seeing some momentum building on social media, and we’re finally finding out what works for the social bonus campaigns and are expecting to have that income stream rise more in the coming months.
Likewise, most of my work has been on new projects behind the scenes which are getting close to a tipping point, ideally in September, where we will start seeing the results of our work on that end.
August 2024 Expenses
Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of August were roughly $300 with the following breakdown:
*Programs: $300
This month was one of our lowest spending months in a long while as we put out no new advertising and only really had program renewals and subscription fees to deal with here.
*We do not share our travel/local expenses in this report. This can be anywhere from $100-$3,000+ per month extra, but your mileage may vary as the costs to generate content can vary wildly from blog to blog. We strive to only share true blog operating expenses here.
September 2024 Goals
September is going to be another partial work month for us if only because we’re heading to Japan for a few weeks.
Ignoring that fact-finding trip for future content, I have big plans this month as we’re in the final stages of getting our local guidebook ready to go and starting to launch other revenue streams on our destination blog for Pittsburgh.
I’ve also made progress overhauling our social media postings for the social bonus campaigns and increased our revenue significantly in August, so there will be a stronger push there to build that revenue stream up more in September and beyond. I would really like to increase the earnings to $1,500/month alone there; however, I also recognize that is a stretch.
Still, despite some of these setbacks, we push on as some of our biggest projects are just getting started!
Looking For Past Reports?
Unlike other websites that host an article series on this topic, we only have one article for our travel blog income and traffic reports.
We do this for a number of reasons, but it is mostly because we do not want dozens upon dozens of posts on our site on this one specific topic. Over time, the monthly details become irrelevant and trends are the only thing that matters.
To compensate for this, we update this article every month based on our current data and publish a graphical summary of previous months as well. If you have any questions about data from a specific month we are happy to share more details via email if you contact us.
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