$28,640: ShoutMeLoud May 2016 Income Report + Bali Experience

Howdy Shouter,

Welcome to an another episode of ShoutMeLoud’s monthly transparency series!

This is the place where I share everything that has happened in the last month, including my traffic & blogging income report.

The goal here is to summarize all new eaings and leaings, and also share what we have been up to.

Wondering why I do this?

You should read this post first and you can check out all of our previous transparency reports here.

Blogging Lifestyle: Digital Nomadic Experience #3

Last month, I went to Bali as part of my “Digital Nomadic” experience. It’s refreshing to work from a new place and Bali is a perfect place for living the blogging lifestyle.

Traveling & working, when placed together, is rewarding to me in many ways:

• It gives me a new perspective for looking at everything
• It makes me less coected to daily chores
• It helps me get more organized & timely when meeting with my team

Last month, I made it official by telling my team about location independence rather than working from the office.

On occasion, we have decided to work from a co-working space to re-collect our goals and be on the same page. I think this approach is essential for quality teamwork.

But in the month of May, we had most of our communications occur on Slack, and I must admit, so far it’s been the most productive month of the year.

Tips on Bali:

• It’s a great destination for anyone who wants to get away from mundane life and needs to change their environment.
• Inteet speed is usually pretty great & you will find 2-10MBPS WiFi speed most places.
• You can book private villas at a reasonable price using Airbnb. Seriously, it’s more fun to live like a local than a tourist.
  • A quick tip before booking from Airbnb: Always ask the host about the WiFi speed. It will save you a lot of headaches later on.
• If you are into scuba diving or surfing, this is one of the best places to do both.
  • I plaed on doing a scuba diving course but wasn’t able to do it this time. However, I did go scuba diving. Swimming with manta rays was a truly memorable experience. I shot my complete dive on GoPro. It was the first time since ShoutMeet that I put my GoPro to good use.
    • Here is a trailer of the video:

• Bali is also a fantastic place for safari. On my last day, I stayed at the Bali Jungle Safari. I have never had such a close encounter with a tiger before.

Overall, my 14-day stay in Bali was highly productive. With this Bali trip, I completed my 3rd such “Digital Nomadic” experience.

Here are a few images from Bali:

A few more highlights from the month of May 2016:

• We have changed the typography of ShoutMeLoud. You can see how crisp and readable our new font is.
• We are also changing our web push notification system. Right now, I’m testing out a few services & will let you know in a week which one is good and why.
• We are in the process of changing our email marketing service from Aweber to ConvertKit. 80% of the migration is complete, and soon, we will be completely shifted to ConvertKit.
• Also, I found this new plugin called WP Link Status Pro, which is a great alteative for the Broken Link Checker plugin. <Video 1> <Video 2>
• Hired new team member ‘Eric’ to be the part of ShoutDreams. It was a strange coincidence that he emailed me when both of us were in Bali.
• Started testing Media.net along with Google AdSense on my tech blog. I heard many rave reviews about it from a close friend and I’m willing to give it a try again.

As I said, the month of May was highly productive for me & my team. Like always, I will be sharing all my leaings & mistakes in the coming days. For now, let’s look at our monthly report for the last month.

May 2016 Traffic Report:

Last month, we had a downtime of about 5 minutes total due to our server technology migration. ShoutMeLoud is currently hosted on Kinsta. We moved to their new infrastructure which is powered by the Google cloud platform.

Traffic report to website:

Comparing the last report that I have published, the traffic is improving. Since I have started using new web-push notification technologies (LetReach & PushEngage), I’m hoping to see improved traffic in the near future. Also, I’m hoping to see an increase in retuing visitors next month.

Regarding social media traffic, here are our four major social media traffic sources with their total contribution towards social media traffic:

• Facebook (57.25%)
• Twitter (18.48%)
• Google plus (8.10%)
• Pinterest (7.77%)

The above data is important to us as this helps us determine the following things:

• Which social media sharing buttons should we put on the blog?
• Which social media platforms should we target?

I have also started using SumoMe for social media sharing button usage data, and have found it to be very helpful.

Using the data, you can quickly figure out which social media button is the most popular, and you can make appropriate changes accordingly.

ShoutMeLoud Android app performance:

Do you remember the last few times I mentioned our push service not working?

However, this time, I have two pieces of good news for all of our Android app users:

1. We have integrated Google Firebase for push notifications
2. SML’s Android app is now 3x faster in performance

There is a clear increase in traffic with this improved push notification system & soon we will be integrating the same on ShoutMeLoud’s iOS App.

Apart from these changes, we are working on improving the UX of our app. In the coming months, you will be able to login to the app & do a lot more than just reading & Idea.

Download ShoutMeLoud’s Android app

ShoutMeLoud Income Report: May 2016

Alright, now is the time for our most popular section of the transparency report.

We are working day & night to improve our existing properties rather than constantly adding new things. So even if you notice fewer new blog posts, don’t be alarmed by this, as we are constantly updating our old articles to make them timeless.

In terms of revenue, things are looking better. Compared to the last report ($21k), this time, we have reached $28k in revenue.

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Grand Total: $28,640.09 (Approx: 19 Lakh INR)

Expenses report:

Total Expenses: $9,699 (Approx: 6.5 Lakh INR)

As you can see in the above table, I have made a year advance payment to Kinsta. This way I got a discount for one month which is still good considering that my monthly hosting cost has increased by $250. As I have mentioned in a previous guide, investing on a quality Web hosting is completely worth the money.

I have a few surprises for you in the coming months, and I promise it will be mind-blowing for many of you.

For now, I would like to hear your last month’s growth. How was it regarding traffic & revenue? If you have published a transparency report, do share the link with us in the Idea section.

Don’t forget to share our transparency report with your friends on Facebook & Twitter. After all, sharing is caring!