Please critique and analyse my blog

[Ben]

Please critique and analyse my blog

I started my main blog roughstraightmen.com in Summer of 2009 and it could be said it was an instant success. It started to bring in money almost immediately and, with some ups and downs along the way, it proved to be quite a consistent money maker. During the best years I was making about $2000-2500 a month with that blog. It continued to bring relatively decent income throughout the entire past decade… until about 2017, that is. And every subsequent year the sales got worse and worse.

I hit the rock bottom somewhere in August this year and since then my monthly income from this blog has been just about $300-400, which is not sufficient even for paying my bills! If things don’t improve significantly soon, I’ll be thinking about throwing in the towel.

It seems I was severely hit by the late-May/June Google update this year, which was allegedly about Core Web Vitals and page experience, but my traffic wasn’t affected too much. However, the quality of visitors probably changed considerably since that point in time.

By the way, my Core Web Vitals seem to be satisfactory at the moment. Mobile is 100% green, while the desktop version has 4064 good and 5553 “need improvement” pages. I was unable to make those “need improvement” pages become good no matter what I tried. In October I even switched to a different, much faster hosting (thanks for the tip bgmen!) and that metric didn’t change.

On May 27th this year my bounce rate fell from about 55% to 27% and my pages/session metric went from 3,46 to 5,44! All in just one day! Of course, I didn’t change anything on the blog, it was purely due to a different kind of visitors sent by Google. And while these two changes are, of course, viewed as positive by definition, they only brought me severely depleted sales. Each month after May 2021 was worse than the previous one. Now in November it seems my earnings will be only $300, if not less.

And this is all both ironic and contradictory, because this complete desolate desert of sales is happening while my visitors seem to be liking my blog more and more. I have more comments on that blog than I ever had in the past. This past Sunday I had more than 4000 unique visitors (of which 3181 were from google organic traffic), and yet nobody bought anything at all.

I realize that my blog’s design (theme) probably needs to be changed into something more modern and responsive, but at the same time something tells me that that is probably not the main cause of low sales. It could be that in the past few years I concentrated and pushed only a limited number of sponsors/sites, but this is because I found only them to convert. I just couldn’t find more sites that would actually convert. I did continue to push some sites that stopped converting as well, but they are in the minority.

For example, some people have success with Carnalcash sites, and I can’t sell them to save my life. The only one I could sell was Staghomme, but that one is now defunct. Even Malerevenue sites are now extremely hard to sell for me. I usually make only $50-80 per month with them, even though I do push Sketchy and FratX pretty hard, and even RawRoadNation recently.

It looks as if there is some kind of blockage… somewhere, but I don’t know where or what it is. My linking codes do work, I checked them many times.

So, I would definitely be thankful if you could try to analyse and critique this blog of mine and suggest what needs to be done in order to make it bring in more sales again.

I’ll try to upload some screenshots from GA that show the changes in metrics that I mentioned.

All traffic this year

Google organic this year

Bounce rate

Pages / session

[GayDemon]

@Ben

Core Web Vitals

Blog sales are difficult, it’s the lowest income generating section on GayDemon and the only section I’ve not managed to grow traffic over the last few years.

It’s been a rough few years unfortunately and it’s not just blogs that’s affected. For example I’ve managed to grow my traffic by 40% in the last 2 years yet sales are the same during this period. It seems traffic growth just have prevented sales from going down further.

If I go further back and compare with 2017 sales are down by 25-30%. 2015-2017 was my best years by far and unfortunately I don’t see it ever going back to those levels. Too much have changed since then, tubes, onlyfans, economy, visitor habits…

So what can you do? It’s a VERY hard one. Yes, I think you could do a new design, yours is very basic and feels very out dated (using a standard blog design from way back). However it’s clean and tidy which I like. The images you use are small so it probably would look a lot nicer if they were bigger and took up most of the space. But would it change sales? I doubt it would have a big impact.

The other thing to take a look at and which has changed a lot the last few years is mobile traffic. Now majority of my traffic is on mobiles, that changes behavior a lot and I’m guessing means people buy less overall.

I have to say 4000 daily visitors is very good for a blog but the amount you earn per visitor is very low. I don’t know how many clicks you have but my average earning per click to a sponsor is around $0.16 per raw hit. Its hard to compare since I don’t have that number for you. But if compare earnings per visitor mine is $0.025 while you would be around $0.003 ($400 in sales / 4000 visitors x 30 days). Had you converted / sold at the same level as me that would equal $3000 per month.

Now, I think it’s down to being a blog. Blog traffic just doesn’t convert very well any more. Majority of my sales are through reviews, videos and live cams.

Perhaps you could also try to improve your blog posts, adding videos to them? Perhaps that could make a big impact and make it more attractive.

[GayDemon]

One thing more… I noticed you promote CashKaboom regularly. I would drop them immediately. You’re not getting credit for sales. Their links ONLY work if you send traffic to the join page using a special link. They announced this change some time ago, basically saying that they won’t credit sales. This is what they said:

The site owners have decided to run regular sales on all sites. Affiliates will only receive earnings from full price membership. Therefore, if the outside of our sites show they are on sale please remove promotional material you are using to prevent sending traffic and sales which you won’t be credited for. Or, as an alternative, we can supply direct links to the sites’ billing pages so you can still receive a percentage of the full join price for traffic you send. We apologize for any inconvenience

What that means is they will regularly remove affiliate links from tours and not give credit for sales. Linking to join pages helps but sales ratios are horrible.

[Ben]

@GayDemon

So what can you do? It’s a VERY hard one. Yes, I think you could do a new design, yours is very basic and feels very out dated (using a standard blog design from way back). However it’s clean and tidy which I like. The images you use are small so it probably would look a lot nicer if they were bigger and took up most of the space. But would it change sales? I doubt it would have a big impact.

Thanks for the suggestions and analysis, Bjorn.

Yes, I will definitely change the design, that has been on my to-do list for quite some time, but I was unable to find a suitable replacement for the current theme. If anyone knows of a good dark magazine or blogging theme that can be bought, which would be somewhat similar to what I already have on that blog, please let me know.

On the other hand, I see that most of the bigger and popular porn blogs still employ this same old-style blogging theme. Is there any advantage in using e.g. magazine theme instead of blogging one?

As for the images and their size, I would agree with you. When I change the theme I will start using wider pics. But would it be possible to display wider pictures even on old posts although they are hardcoded in WP to have the width of 550 pixels? Maybe there is some plugin that can do that?

@GayDemon

The other thing to take a look at and which has changed a lot the last few years is mobile traffic. Now majority of my traffic is on mobiles, that changes behavior a lot and I’m guessing means people buy less overall.

I also thought the same thing, but unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about it. Mobile phones have not been good for porn sales, in my opinion.

Speaking of mobile, I do have a mobile version of the blog (which is generated by WPTouch plugin). Not sure how good and optimized it is for SEO though. They have been pretty sloppy in updating their plugin to the latest technologies and SEO requirements in the past few years.

@GayDemon

I have to say 4000 daily visitors is very good for a blog but the amount you earn per visitor is very low. I don’t know how many clicks you have but my average earning per click to a sponsor is around $0.16 per raw hit. Its hard to compare since I don’t have that number for you. But if compare earnings per visitor mine is $0.025 while you would be around $0.003 ($400 in sales / 4000 visitors x 30 days). Had you converted / sold at the same level as me that would equal $3000 per month.

I’m not sure where to get that piece of data (amount I earn per visitor). I suppose I should find the average of all clicks I get for all sponsors and then divide that by the number of sales or amount of money I earned? Yes, my amount I earn per visitor is very low at the moment, and I don’t know what caused it or how and if I can make it return to some better value.

But it wasn’t always like that. Way back in 2014 I would easily earn $2500-3000 per month, and the memberships were being sold like hot cakes. The traffic I now have is comparable to that period, and I basically do the same thing as I did then, but the sales are just not happening anymore.

Perhaps it’s all due to the fact that blogs are out of fashion or have been replaced by tubes and onlyfans type of sites. If that’s the case, I can’t do anything about it.

@GayDemon

Now, I think it’s down to being a blog. Blog traffic just doesn’t convert very well any more. Majority of my sales are through reviews, videos and live cams.

Perhaps you could also try to improve your blog posts, adding videos to them? Perhaps that could make a big impact and make it more attractive.

I already have videos on the majority of my blog posts, but they are just regular short trailers. Perhaps you thought I should put more longer videos (e.g. videos made for tubes)?

Speaking of videos, that might be a partial cause of my problem. Namely, we all know that Flash video was discontinued and virtually banned in most modern browsers as of January this year. And on my blog almost all the posts between 2009 and mid-2013 used one plugin that inserted Flash videos (FLV). When the change happened with Flash at the beginning of this year, virtually all my videos from that period stopped working for most of my visitors. Perhaps it took a few more months for some of the visitors to update their browsers… but that has certainly caused a gradual decrease in the Average Session Duration on my blog, because people who would otherwise watch those videos, now were not able to do so anymore.

Please take a look at the screenshot of Average Session Duration.

It slowly started to drop from about 3:00 min to about 2:10 in April. Now I am in the process of changing all those old FLV videos into MP4 and embedding them with a standard HTML5 plugin, so they will all work again. But it’s a long process as there are so many old posts. I already see a bit of increase in Average session duration, but I guess it will take time for Google to notice that.

It seems that Google filters their surfers and selects what kind of visitors it will send to your site. If your Average session duration is high, it’s likely you will get visitors that like to spend money and are likely to buy stuff. If your Average session duration is low, you will probably get freeloaders that almost never buy anything. Of course this is not their official policy, just my hypothesis. Some alleged Google insiders and whistleblowers have said the same thing.