Income Report & Review #002 (January 2017)

Every month I’ll be bringing you details on the inner workings of the blog, warts and all. Here’s January’s recap…

January saw a total of 8 new blog posts, most of which came from the contributors that I found following my outreach Tweet in December. You can check out who they are on the brand contributors page. In addition to those posts there were several interviews with the developers behind the games Santria, Bit.Saw & Vacuous.

Here’s a list of the January posts just in case you missed them.

TIP: if you sign-up to the newsletter then you’ll hear about new content more frequently than these posts.

Eight articles is the highest to date but it’s a lot of content and people are very busy. I want to release as much to you to read as possible but I also want there to be a steady stream of posts rather than a bumper month of content followed by just one per week in the following month. I’m working how best to manage that so I can keep an optimum number of posts being published each month.

Also in January I started working on a new game with one of the new contributors. It’s an infinite runner and will be available for free here on the blog, Windows, Android and iOS. It’s still early days but when there’s a polished enough demo you can take a sneak peak!

GameMaker Blog Readers

This month saw a small resurgence in readership of the blog with a total of 9,054 visitors this month – this is up +1,042 from December. Of those visitors, 7,085 were brand new to the blog in January.

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Fans of GameMaker Blog

I increased my level of activity on Twitter again this month but this isn’t resulting in an additional returns in terms of new followers, which I find odd. Facebook remains an avenue for promoting new content only and the newsletter subscribers continued to grow at a steady rate.

Twitter

In January I tweeted 33 times and gained 144 new followers. This brings the total followers to 17,684 and a total increase of 670 since the start of November.

I never got around to implementing the auto-tweeting script that I have from previous projects, however, that is in place as I write this in Feb and so traffic and Twitter activity will no doubt increase next month!

Facebook

During January I made 8 posts on Facebook – as I’ve said before, this is just a vehicle to ensure notifications of new blog posts are visible to all.

There were 32 new likes in January, bringing the total page likes for GMB to 6,057. Another growth month but a long way off the Twitter numbers.

This month there were a further 91 newsletter subs which is still encouraging even though it’s slowing considerably. I’ve made some changes to the sign-up form in February so I’ll be able to share the results of some A/B testing that I’m carrying out.

Having sent out the second newsletter I’m still seeing some bad data coming back from the signups and so a total of 7 emails were removed from the list as a result of undelivered messages and I had 1 person unsubscribe.

Those additional 83 brings the newsletter mailing list to 363 in total which I’m really happy to see.

Subscriber Summary

By the end of January the total “fan” count sat at 24,104 across all media, which was up 259 from December.

I’m confident that numbers will continue to grow naturally but, as per last month’s update, my main focus will be to get the Twitter follower count to 20,000 and the newsletter mailing list up to 1,000.

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January Income & Expenditure Report

This month saw continued income growth whilst keeping costs low. I added a few Amazon links to GameMaker books towards the end of the month in an attempt to generate a new income stream, this has seen some activity but no sales and therefore no commission as of yet.

For ways to support GMB see the end of the post.

Note: I’ll be displaying the values here in USD due to the overwhelming majority of users that are living in the United States, however, as I’m based in the UK myself I’ll be converting using the latest available conversion rates when the post is made. Given the volatility of my home currency (GBP) this could result in some interesting numbers and so I’ll include both GBP & USD in each report for consistency.

Income

(Exchange rate GBP 1 = USD 1.25)

In January Google Adsense continued to be the main source of income with AdFly being the only other source of revenue.

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It’s nice to see a little more income coming in, however, to get the blog to where I want it to be I’ll be hoping to get this up into the hundreds at least. Check out other ways to support the blog at the end of this post and check out the brand new Patreon which explains exactly what I plan to do longer term.

Expenditure

(Exchange rate GBP 1 = USD 1.25)

What with no giveaways or site purchase to account for, January’s expenditure was nice a low with just hosting fees to pay for.

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With such low expenses this month it’s really no surprise that the blog managed to turn a profit, albeit a little one. In January GameMaker Blog made a profit of… $10.74 or £8.59 depending on your currency of preference.

How To Support GameMaker Blog

If you’d like to support the work being done on the blog then there are various ways to get involved.

You can create content to be published here, just get in touch to talk through the details;
Use any of the Amazon links before making any purchases you were intending to make there already (a small commission is paid at no extra cost to you)
Support the GameMaker Blog over on the brand new Patreon.

That’s it until next month. If you’re not on the mailing list for the newsletter then click here and leave your email. Oh, and don’t forget to follow GMB on social media – see the icons on the right-hand side of the blog.

Income Report & Review #002 (January 2017)