So my blog is exactly one month old. I thought I’d do an analysis of my site and break down some vital statistics. I’m interested in data such as number of visitors, where they are coming from, how much time they are spending, and finally income.

Keep in mind this is the very first month. Nobody knows who I am, and I don’t have a whole lot of content. I haven’t done much in terms of promotion. I was very surprised to see that Google indexed my blog 3 days after it started.

So let’s analyze this a bit. At 27 posts, that’s almost 1 post every day. My goal was to try to post about 5 times a week corresponding to 1 per work day. I was pretty successful with that, but we’ll see how long I actually keep it up. At 26 comments, that’s an average of 1 comment per post which I think is pretty good.

As for visits and page views, I don’t have much to say about that other than I use it to calculate the cost per click. Average time on site was interesting. I think it was probably skewed by the fact that I was still doing design coding on it and had the site open for long sessions at a time.

Google bringing in the most traffic was no surprise there. Overall, I’m quite pleased with StumbleUpon as a social bookmarking platform. I did not try delicious although that’s something I will want to explore next. Digg did not bring a significant amount of traffic and I didn’t expect that it would after reading many a blog articles about how skewed it is.

Here is where it gets interesting. My most popular page was the Ruby on Rails Tutorial. It was a really simple tutorial, but apparently RoR is teh hotness because many people are searching for it. I’m not Rails experts by any stretch of the word. It was so hard for me to figure out how to even get a Hello World app that I had to write it all down. Top Mac software also made the list. What’s interesting is the 3rd most popular link was my Martial Arts category tab. I would have expected another article.

For some of you, this will be the most important part of the report. How much money did I make? A grand total of $3.69. Sources of revenue including advertising and affiliate residual income. That comes to a CPC (Cost Per Click) of almost $0.06. Considering that I put in about 30 hours into this, my hourly rate is about $0.12. Woohoo! I think manual laborers in India and China earn more than this.

The primary goal of this website wasn’t about trying to make a professional living out of blogging. I figured, if I was gonna blog, I might as well throw some ads up, and if it makes money - great. I think the only people who are making any serious money blogging are the ones who blog about how to make money blogging. So if I was serious about making money blogging, I would start a blog about making money online. To me, that’s a hard road where the chances of success are slim. Plus I don’t know much about the subject, and I probably wouldn’t be very passionate about it. And about the products and affiliates I endorse, I either actually have or use the product or it’s in my wishlist. I’m not going to push anything just to make money if I didn’t actually believe in the product or would use it myself.

Actually, my financial goals for the blog are quite modest. I’d be happy if the revenue generated pays for the hosting. At least that way, the blog doesn’t cost me any money - just my time, which I am willing to give in order to share my knowledge and passion about certain subjects. That said, I believe my goal is quite attainable. My hosting costs $20/month. At the rate I’m earning, I would need about a 5 fold increase in traffic per month which comes to about 7,200 page views a month. That’s really not all that much traffic. Keep in mind that on top of the new content I will be writing, my old posts would still be generating traffic.

I also found this fun little widget. It calculates your blog’s valuation based on the amount and source of links to your website. At the time of this report, my blog is worth $1,129.08. Of course this is paper value, and even if it was worth a lot of money, it’s not like I can sell it.

To conclude, I had no expectations about the performance of this blog, this being the first month and all. I was just happy about the one thing I could control which was that I was able to push myself to write almost daily on top of all the other crap I’m involved in.