Building Traffic for Your Blog - Part 4

I started working on a couple of Wordpress projects in June. Considering I only wrote a couple of articles, the statistics for June are not bad. Here are some numbers:

Traffic

Since this is the holiday season and because I didn’t have so much time to write, this month didn’t produce a big increase in traffic. The blog had an average of 405 visits, compared to last months average of 380 visits. Traffic coming from search engines doubled this month, reaching 30% of all traffic.

Subscribers

Subscriber count was 160 last month and 213 at the end of June, with an all time high of 236 subscribers a couple of weeks ago. I guess that’s the downside of not being able to write as often as I wanted to. Trust me, July will definitely be better!

I know FeedBurner has some spikes, due to updates or something like that, but I was wondering why the sudden drop from 236 subscribers? I think this might have to do with the fact that I added Google AdSense to the blog. I know some people feel betrayed when they see ads on a blog. I can relate to that, when this impacts the reader’s experience, but I feel the ads on my blog are not intrusive.

Oh… and if you’re thinking I’m getting rich or anything, you’re wrong. I made about $2 last month and that’s quite natural, considering most of my readers are web savvy. So why do I do it?

• It’s the first time I ever used AdSense or any other contextual advertising engine and I was really curious to see it in action, play with the admin, styling, etc. I’m about to launch a couple of other websites or blogs where I will make better use of AdSense, so this will be good practice.
• It’s for testing and will hopefully help me write some cool tutorials or tips about blending ads with a blog’s design.

And hey… I promise when I will reach $1000 from AdSense made from this blog, I will throw a party and invite all my subscribers!

Cheers!