Blogging life and Income report – October 2015
October was an exciting month full of challenges, work, traveling, pad thai, curry and shrimp!
We had the opportunity to go to Thailand and participate in TBEX Asia. During this event we met amazing people from around the world that gave us lots of energy and motivation to keep doing what we do and travel more!
TBEX Asia Thailand 2015
I took some videos about our trip so if you guys want to see everything we did, you can watch the following series of videos:
Part 1 – Traveling from Costa Rica to Thailand
Part 2 – Jet lag and speakers reception
Part 3 – Conference and speaking time
Part 4 – The End and Fam trip to Krabi
We spoke about our affiliate system in our travel niche which is “Costa Rica.” We used a couple of real examples and went step by step in the process and which tools we use to make the work easier.
*If you couldn’t go the the conference and you want to know more about it, no worries I wrote an article about how to create your affiliate system in your travel niche.
Speaking at TBEX Asia
We will be publishing some articles about our Thailand adventure soon on Mytanfeet 😉
Blogging business
We are very excited to announce that we are officially a business in Costa Rica, we just need to go to the city to pick up the books and the license. This will be a new era for me and Samantha that will bring bigger challenges and adventures.
Talking about business, I decided to do not take more side jobs for the moment. For the last 6 months I have been spending more than 70% of my time working for clients doing different jobs like web design, sales strategies, Internet marketing and other administration processes that takes too much time.
I am very happy for all the results with my clients, one case in particular where we were able to keep a business open that was ready to close and fire all the staff. After a few months of hard work, they are now able to make a nice monthly profit. Also we made two big deals with other companies that will bring enough business to keep every one busy next year.
I love to help people when I can, but I think that I have been getting involved in too many things so hopefully next week I will deliver the one job pending I have with a local company and by the end of January, I will be 100% on this blog and on Mytanfeet.com.
That been said, I will be publishing more frequent on on yeisonkim.com. I want to share all the business strategies I have used with real companies using the internet as my primary tool. So if you haven’t subscribed, I invite you to do it in the box below.
[rad_rapidology_inline optin_id=optin_4]New theme coming soon
I just started to build from scratch a new theme and layout for Mytanfeet.com, I will keep using Genesis Framework but this time I want to put emphasis on user experience, SEO, sales but most important a better mobile version. I am still in the early stages but the main idea is to make the site more easy to navigate and offer more options to our readers.
I have been studying and taking notes from most of the sites that I would buy things from. A website that looks good doesn’t guanratee that you will make sales, so I will be testing different layouts within the next weeks.
Published Content
Early last month Samantha wrote our top Taiwan travel tips in case you are thinking about visiting this beautiful island. If you thinking about visiting another popular area in Costa Rica and where we currently live, you can check our 5 reasons to visit Playa Jaco article and if you made up your mind to visit, we can tell you how to take the bus from San Jose to Playa Jaco.
The north Pacific area of Costa Rica is one of the most visited places and if you are are wondering what the best hotels near by the Liberia Airport you should read our article.
In total we published 4 articles on Mytanfeet.com for the month of October which is much lower than our normal. We were very busy traveling and focusing in our presentation and side projects that we couldn’t stick to our 2 post per week average, now that we are back we will be creating more content and get back to our posting schedule.
On yeisonkim.com I published a total of 5 blog posts in October, all of them about our Thailand trip (see link above). My goal is to write one article a week for this blog. I know I have said this before but until now, I think that I have the time to do it.
Traffic sources
This month traffic sources percentages were:
- Organic search 62.92%.
- Social 19.69% – Pinterest leads our social media traffic source with a 78.51%, second this month was stumble upon with 11.05% and third Facebook with 6.62%.
- Direct traffic 15.01%.
- Referral traffic 2.38% – Having as our first referral our lading pages (LeadPages) with a 19.67%, second theexpeditioner.com with a 8.34% and flipboard as our third with 4.65%.
We were included in the Expeditioner’s top 50 travel blogs list for the 3rd quarter of 2015 according to traffic. Going to work hard to stay on here and move up!
October 2015 Stats & Income Report
Traffic
Visits: 67 042 (+5949)
Unique Visitors: 55 848 (+4509)
Page views: 99 642 (+10 688)
YouTube channel stats:
Views: 14 698 (+1005)
Minutes watched: 36 188 (+2443)
Subscribers: 344 (+15)
Income Report
Affiliate links:
Amazon: $180.45
Aweber: $5.70 (This service is a must have, read how we use it in this article)
Leadpages: $11.1 (Learn how we used LeadPages with this blog)
Bluehost: $240 (From The complete step by step guide to start your blog)
WP Engine: $100
Mytanfeet Costa Rica Affiliate System: $4816.2 (Learn how we make sales with our affiliate system)
Mytanfeet International Affiliate Network: $862.75 (Combination of affiliate programs such as Hotels combined, Agoda, CJ, etc)
Total affiliate income: $ 6216.2
Advertisement:
Google Adsense: $442.58
Youtube:$21.33
Total Advertisement: $463.91
Coffess, Pizzas and Beers from Readers: $100
Grand Total : $6780.11
Expenses October 2015:
Traffic Hosting Planet: $24.99 (The hosting we use)
MaxCDN: $14.99 (Content Delivery Network that make our blog to load faster and save bandwidth)
Lead Pages: $40 (Best landing pages period)
Aweber: $30 (Email Marketing Manager)
Securi: $18 (I don’t have to worry any more about spam or attacks)
Total Expenses: 127.98
Total Income for October 2015 : $6652.13 (+1052.02)
Social Media and email subscribers
Twitter followers: 18 363 (+609)
Facebook likes: 2239 (+70)
Instagram: 5607 (+195)
Emails subscribers: 2274 Learn how I used Lead pages and Aweber to gain subscribers and automate income
Celebrity Status
Google Page Rank: 3
Alexa Rank: 221 015 (-15)
Domain Authority: 40 (+4)
Thoughts and Plans
October was a fantastic month! We were able to keep our income coming while we were traveling and having fun with travel bloggers around the world. The food was fantastic … well too much shrimp for me but I am sure Samantha loved it, due to my shrimp allergies I can’t eat shrimp so I know she enjoyed it for me.
Along with re-doing our website, we’re planning on re-doing our newsletter sequence and Samantha is going to keep working on her e-book. I’m planning a trip to Panama for a few days with friends and then Samantha and I will be visiting one area we have yet to visit – the Osa Peninsula.
We had a great time in Thailand and learned so much at TBEX. It really gave us the motivation and determination to work harder so you’ll be seeing a lot more of yeisonkim.com in the near future!
