A Couple Travelers By The Numbers: Oct ’12 Income – $1345

If you are interested in business, internet marketing, and making money online – please check out my blog, SelfMadeBusinessman!

October was our first month of full travel, primarily spent in China. Surprise, surprise, internet here isn’t so hot, which has made it difficult to keep up with all the travels. Moreover, many of the social media sites (facebook, twitter, google plus) are blocked, so it’s difficult to promote our articles in the usual way, and we have idea if we’ve increased in followers.

Still, it’s been going well and we’re adapting to our new lifestyle. We’re able to do a lot of the writing while we’re traveling on 15+ hour long train rides. Bringing two computers (one laptop one netbook) was a fantastic idea! In fact, October was actually a record month for articles published so we don’t appear to be slowing down and are actually publishing nearly everyday. Moreover, unlike with Japan, we’re less concerned about sharing every little detail and are trying to hit the highlights, as well as incorporate more articles like our one month travel update as well as Korean War, DMZ, Reunification, which I think add a nice personal touch to the blog as well as sharing a few more serious, cultural topics.

Summary

Social Media: Considering most of it is blocked, can’t say any large strides were made here (in fact, we have no idea). Though, I did add the google plus icon to our home page and, either as a result of that or some other reason, we picked up a nice handful of new followers. Now if we could only just use it!

Traffic: Came in about 1k more than last month, which is pretty good, since we weren’t able to promote our articles as much. Also, we didn’t get any major benefits from some of the food sharing websites like Foodgawker or Tastespotting that drove significant traffic to our blog in September.

See our guest posts and interviews this month:

• Global Goose

and the interviews we do on our site

• Meg and Tony from LandingStanding
• Bethaney from FlashPackerFamily

Advertising: I made a huge push this month to see what we could potentially earn. This means actively working with all advertisers who contact us, as well as directly emailing a few of the contacts that we were given by other bloggers. As a result, this month is a bit of an anomaly (since we exhausted all our contacts).

The thing about blog advertising is that you generally work with someone once, maybe twice, and then not again. So, when we use a contact, that’s pretty much it for that month, as most advertising is live for at least a year. Therefore, running out of contacts is kind of like draining the well, and every month you have to actively find new ones or hope that they find you. It’s certainly not consistent nor is it very sustainable, in my opinion.

Despite all of that, I thought it was in our best interest to jump on anyone we had quickly – so that’s what we did. See below for the results!

Social Media

Website Statistics

Google Page Rank: 2/10
Note: We increased our page rank from 1 with latest Google update.

Domain Authority: 37/100

Total Advertising Revenue: $2,170

• Direct Advertising ACoupleTravelers: $1,345
• Direct Advertising AvocadoPesto: $825

Total Value Received: $182

• 2 Nights Hotel Stay: $66/night
• Donations: $50

Find previous traffic updates:

Previous Income Updates (Travel Blog)

• August 2012 – $55
• September 2012 – $490
• October 2012 – $1345
• November 2012 – $2031
• December 2012 – $2170
• January 2013 – $2925

Previous Income Updates (Food Blog)

• July 2012 – $47
• August 2012 – $117
• September 2012 – $128
• October 2012 – $825
• November 2012 – $1019
• December – $837