{"id":2632,"date":"2014-05-05T12:38:29","date_gmt":"2014-05-05T11:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danielebesana.com\/blog\/?p=2632"},"modified":"2014-05-05T12:38:29","modified_gmt":"2014-05-05T11:38:29","slug":"online-income-report-april-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danielebesana.com\/blog\/online-income-report\/online-income-report-april-2014","title":{"rendered":"Online Income Report – April 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’re curious to know why I’m sharing my online income reports, check here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Back in March I added the expenses to the monthly report and I was quite\u00a0surprised about how low they are.
\nApril has been intense: first, I came back from the digital nomad\u00a0<\/strong>experience in\u00a0Thailand and went through the re-adaptation phase in Amsterdam.<\/p>\n

So let me share how April\u00a0went.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What’s going on<\/h2>\n

Welcome HelloBar<\/h3>\n

Patt Flynn\u00a0mentioned in one of his long blog posts<\/a> this free service, HelloBar, that adds a nice call to action bar on top of the web pages and keeps track of the click performances.<\/p>\n

I decided to test this service on ComoHacer.info, promoting the ebook with DIY articles. The message was:<\/p>\n

\"Hello<\/p>\n

It means “More than 270 projects in PDF format, Download Now”.
\nThe conversion rate was\u00a01.1%, meaning that 1.1% of visitors were clicking on the link and going to the sale page of the product.<\/p>\n

Then I tried this one:<\/p>\n

\"Hello<\/a><\/p>\n

It means “More than 270 projects in PDF format, promotion for $9.95! Download Now”.
\nThis message has much lower conversion rate:\u00a00.4%, obviously because it states already the price so only interested people will click.<\/p>\n

I run those two messages for a big part of last month before drawing conclusions.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately with Hello Bar is not possible to track\u00a0which message ended up in more sales, but I feel better with my users to leave only the second message avoid making them think that the download is free and then get disappointed.<\/p>\n

I sold a total of 3 products last month, that is not much but I know they came from the introduction of the Hello Bar!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

SEO experiment: moving posts across blogs<\/h3>\n

In\u00a0May my domain SalsaWalkAbout.com will expire. This domain was dedicated to the travel blog I wrote in 2011 during my trip to Panama and Colombia.<\/p>\n

Nice project, but I felt that keeping the blog running for 100 unique visitors a month wasn’t really appealing.<\/p>\n

So I tested what happens merging two blogs, copying the posts from SalsaWalkAbout into my own\u00a0blog, the one you’re (hopefully) reading now.<\/p>\n

Those are the steps I followed:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Recreate the post on the new blog, copy\/pasting the text\u00a0content and re-uploading the images if necessary. In my case wasn’t necessary because I’m not hosting the images on WordPress itself, but on Picasa (now Google Plus photo albums or something like that). That made the operation super simple.<\/li>\n
  2. Publish the post<\/li>\n
  3. Add a redirection from the old URL of the post to the new one. It’s fundamental<\/strong> that it’s a “301 Permanent Redirection”<\/em>\u00a0, because this is the type of redirection message that tells the search engines\u00a0“hey, we moved the content to this new URL forever, please update the search result!”<\/em>.
    \nI use for this the WordPress plugin     Redirection<\/a>, that also shows the hits to the redirected URL and reports the 404 error messages (page not found).<\/li>\n
  4. Relax<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    What happened was quite cool: in 24h time Google updated the SERP to the new URL\u00a0without affecting the ranking!<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \"Salsa<\/a><\/p>\n

    Few days after the moved posts were actually ranking better<\/strong>, I think because this blog has more authority and posts that the previous one.<\/p>\n

    There are two important conclusions:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Using 301 redirects correctly\u00a0inform the search engines that the post\u00a0is not content copied\/duplicated from another site, but has moved<\/li>\n
    2. Post ranking doesn’t change,\u00a0and can get better if the content is moved to a better website<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      This merging experiment triggers ideas…<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Adsense test on this blog<\/h3>\n

      I run the ads for 1 month on danielebesana.com\u00a0and got this results:<\/p>\n

      Earnings: 1.32\u20ac
      \nRPM: 0.98\u20ac
      \nI was showing the ads on posts older than a week, to avoid bothering with ads the few people that check the articles when they are just published, because I notify them by email or social media.<\/p>\n

      BUT!<\/strong><\/p>\n

      I noticed the lowest avg. session duration in last 12 months\u2026.<\/p>\n

      Compared to previous month:
      \n-30% Avg. Session duration<\/strong>
      \n+6% bounce rate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

      My guess is that having ads on a\u00a0personal blog gives\u00a0a very different feeling to new visitors. I know I’m not the average user, but myself I notice if a blogger is trying to make few bucks with ads and it would affect my trust. Bloody subconscious!<\/p>\n

      So, screw Adsense on this blog.<\/p>\n

      This month I’ll do the reverse test and double-check the results.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      Income Breakdown<\/h2>\n

      Time for the numbers!<\/p>\n