I think the launch of Bread & With It has been a success! I launched the site on the 23rd, one week before the end of April. It has been a crazy week and I have been frantically trying to develop posts for the site, create connections, and learn about monetizing websites. It is surprisingly a lot more work than I realized it would be!
I have spent quite a bit of time submitting articles to various websites. As far as I know I haven’t been accepted yet because I haven’t seen any traffic coming in from those places. Hopefully some of those articles will be accepted this up coming month and I can discuss that in May’s financial report.
So, I am going to discuss with you a few tools to help you get started and what those tools have shared with me about my site this month (week).
Traffic
When I first started my blog, I expected it to go something like this:
But actually from April 23 – April 30 (7 days) I received 77 unique visitors to my website! This may seem insignificant to you but to me it is a huge success! You can see from the screenshot below that on the 29th I received a spike in visits; this was a result of my wonderful sister sharing my Facebook page with all of her friends!
Google Analytics is where I received this information and it is free to website owners. It is a great way to track all activity on your website. They also provide a great deal of educational videos about how to use this service which makes it easy to learn.
Facebook is a great way to connect with people for free. 23 of my 77 new visitors came from Facebook which came up as the second largest way they visited.
I set up my Facebook page and began sharing new blog posts and asked that my friends share with their friends. It worked, because within only a couple days I had reached 51 “likes” and only 14 of them were my own friends. This was way more than I thought I would get in my first week. The support from friends and family has been great.
Facebook also provides you with detailed information about your page activity once you reach 30 likes and I was pleasantly surprised as to how helpful it was to know what posts were getting the most activity and views.
Revenue
So I know you are dying to find out… yes Bread & With It made money during it’s first month/week on the world wide web! $.46 to be exact! OK laugh all you want but honestly this is great! It lets me know there is potential for a successful blog!
When you visit Bread & With It you will notice several ads displayed here and there. These are ad spaces I set up though Google Ad Sense. The code is simple to copy and paste and there is some minor customization. You just set it and leave it. I have one like this on the right sidebar of my page and a few others like it.
To my understanding at this point, is that the space is auctioned off “real time” so that advertisers can bid on my ad space depending on how much traffic and engagement I get. So basically the more traffic I receive the more I will make.
The Google Ad Sense webpage provides you with detailed reports about your ads. What is working and what isn’t. It also allows you to customize your ads and limit certain content as well. So far I am quite pleased!
Sign up below for my email updates to watch me learn how to monetize my blog while I share with you all about making money blogging. This is separate from the Bread & With It Newsletter. This is where I will solely talk about the financial growth, traffic and tools used to grow Bread & With It.
