Following on from last month’s report March was quite an interesting month. Changing perspective from using this site as a simple memory dump to one that people, other than myself, would find useful lead to some interesting usage patterns, from both myself and my visitors as well as some changes to the blog!
Due to my change of attitude I actually watched my traffic stats, where I noticed some odd things in my logs, I thought I fixed the problem… It turns out having an URL or page with the phrase ‘apache access logs’ in it is a really bad thing as now that page is plagued with bot hits using Russian domains as a referrer, trying to get a back link for their domain in my web stats. It’s receiving about 1500 unique hits a day at the moment which is skewing my stats quite heavily.
As an experiment I increased the size of the Adsense banners to their larger size, which fit in my new theme. I also attempted to monetize some of the more applicable pages with affiliate links back to O’Reilly products. I think I’m going to have to start to use the number of Adsense views as an indicator of traffic, rather than awstats from now on, due to these pesky Russians. I hope they aren’t mafia!
March 2013 Income Report
Adsense Page Views: 5227
Adsense Clicks: 19
Adsense: £7.50
O’Reilly Page Views: 7022
O’Reilly Clicks: 85
O’Reilly: £0.00
So that’s a really interesting increase, up from £0.33 last month, purely by changing the size of the Adsense banner. Awstats is reporting 8361 unique visitors, up from 6332 in February, but unfortunately I can’t trust that metric any more due to the heavy bot activity skewing the stats. Adsense is reporting 3,889 page views for February so it does look like I am actually getting more traffic.
After speaking to the owner of Lampdocs after a recent post they made about trying to monetize a Linux blog, the main conclusion we came to was more traffic and Adsense. Unfortunately my strength comes from my personal systems administration and development skills, I wonder if I can come up with a killer product worth selling ..
Keep it up..Aim High 🙂