Art of Money Benchmarks

Regular Art of Money readers will know that every six months or so I get the urge to cut off my own head and see what grows in to replace it

It has happened again.

I’m going to make you wait a few hours to find out what the new direction is going to be, but as part of the new project, I need to publicly post a benchmark of all the relevant stats of this site (if you are guessing that I’ll be trying to pump it up at Art of Money, you’d be on target.)

For the most part the numbers below are an average for the last 3 months, just for the purpose of removing anomalies and to get a more accurate benchmark.

Traffic

Monthly unique visitors: 6000

Daily uniques visitors: 200

Daily page views: 308

Feed subscribers: 400

In general the traffic quality for this site is also low. While Google obviously trusts this site enough to send traffic, due to my inability to stick to a topic, Google doesn’t really have me down as the authority in any potentially profitable niches or high value keywords. Here’s a parcial keyword list from Google webmaster tools: keyword elite, robo form, microlending, micro lending, bbbbb, roboform review,jon symons, cashflow online, pipeline profits, running logo, reebok 9k0. Throw in a few “art” related queries and you have quite a muddle.

If I want to increase the traffic from search engines I’ll need to define a tight theme and stick to it, so I no longer bleed out into many topic areas and dilute my site’s potential target.

Earnings

Monthly gross earnings: $485

Monthly expenses: $30

Monthly profit: $455

Daily profit: $15

Up until now, I haven’t tried to monetize this site. The earnings above are from only 2 sources: affiliate links to products that I use and recommend, or text links that I’ve sold either privately or through Text Link Ads.

Key Metrics

In business, and if you are blogging for profit it counts as a business, you want to boil your entire business down to a couple key metrics that can be focused on.

One of the most commonly accepted ones for a website is “visitor value.” This metric is how much profit your site makes off of every unique visitor that comes to it.

Visitor value isn’t a perfect metric on its own, since you could be making $10 a visitor, but if you only get 3 visitors a month, your site still sucks as a business.

Therefore in order to get a complete picture you can boil your site down to 2 factors.

1. Number of visitors
2. Profit per visitor

In order to make money online all you have to do is work on those 2 factors. Everything you do on your site, should have a purpose that can be categorized into either 1 or 2.

So for Art of Money, the last 3 month daily averages are:

1. Number of visitors = 6000
2. Profit per visitor = $.076

Every visitor that request a page from Art of Money earns me 7.6 cents. Considering my traffic levels are low, if I am able to hold that number and increase the number of page views by any significant factor, I’ll have a blog earning a decent amount of money, but the ideal is to increase both numbers.

Stay Tuned

In the next 24 hours I’ll announce a new project that will be focusing on increasing all the numbers and showing you how to do the same.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.