November 2023 Traffic & Income Report From French Health Blogger

Why I post Blog Income Report?

After working for 11 years as a traditional physical therapist with patients in my local area, I stopped my local activity in August 2023. I decided to dedicate myself 100% to my website on physical therapy and communication, which you are currently on.

I feel more useful today by writing than by providing one-on-one care, and I also enjoy the organizational freedom it gives me.

Here are the three main reasons that inspire me to publish my income and traffic report every month:

1. Transparency. It’s one of the values I hold most dear.

I write about a subject with significant stakes—health. It seems crucial to me to be transparent about how I might be influenced in what I share with you.

Making my income sources public is important. I have always declined partnerships with brands or health products to some extent to minimize biases in my statements.

Of course, it’s a matter of finding the right balance, as engaging in affiliations can also influence what I say.

2. Meeting a need. I have been reading this type of blog posts for years, and I still do today.

It helped me stay motivated, take a step back, and reflect on the monetization strategies I found most ethical. By documenting my own journey in professional blogging, I hope to be helpful to others.

For now, my blog income reports are not widely read. So, I can’t say I create them for the traffic they bring me, but perhaps that will change in the future.

3. Taking a step back. Taking the time to write an article like this allows me to see things from a different perspective.

It helps identify things on which I may spend more or less time.

Blog Earnings in November 2023

I’ll first break down exactly where my income came from, what each source is and then all my blogging fees for the month.

Income:

• Mediavine: €1,940
• Ebooks: €815
• Affiliate: €430
• Youtube: €140

Total: €3,325

Note: €1 ≈ $1 USD

Mediavine – This was my ad management company. They placed and managed all the ads that you saw on my blog. Advertising revenues vary greatly depending on the months of the year, and for most website publishers, November is the best month – that’s the case for me.

Ebooks – I sell my ebooks on my website for patients and physical therapists in English, French and German. Yes, I love languages!

YouTube – This money comes from the ads placed on all my YouTube videos in French.

Affiliate – I lump all the money I make from different affiliates in this sum because it can come from different places like Amazon Affiliates and other affiliates (Indy and Sensilia, french brands) linked on my blog.

I’m also a freelance Wikipedia writer and consultant. However, I don’t mention these earnings because they don’t come directly from the blog (even though some of my clients find me through my blog).

Expenses:

Here are this months expenses:

• WordPress.com: €25
• System.io: €16
• Polylang: €12
• Payhip (+ Stripe/Paypal): €67

Total: €120

When you subtract the fees from the total income…

Profit for November 2023 = €3,205

*Note that this is before taxes. For me, they are about 30% in contributions, and then I also pay income tax (which depends on my husband’s income and the fact that we have 2 children).

WordPress.com – This is my hosting and domain name. I pay annually, but I divided the amount by 12 to get an idea of what I pay per month as an expense.

System.io – Tool that allows me to manage my newsletters and forms.

Polylang – Plugin that handles multilingualism on my site. It’s a yearly cost, which I divided by 12. In other years, I won’t be obliged to pay, unless I wish to continue benefiting from their support.

Payhip (+ Stripe/Paypal) – This is the platform that enables me to sell ebooks. Payhip charges 5% per ebook sold, and Payhip and Stripe together take an even lower percentage. It’s much less than what Amazon, for example, would charge, which is why I haven’t put my ebooks on Amazon. See my Payhip’Review.

Traffic Report in November 2023

Now, let’s break down my traffic so you can see exactly how many people it took to come through my website to get these numbers.

Here’s what my traffic in November 2023 looked like:

In total I had 134,150 views for my entire blog in November 2023. 

Month	Page View	Traffic Variation
November 2023	134,150	↘️11%
October 2023	149,131	↘️41%
September 2023	252,709	↘️1,2%
🥇August 2023	255,729

Yes, you saw it right: I’ve lost almost half of my traffic compared to this summer. It’s not due to seasonality. It’s because of two successive Google updates (including the Google September Helpful Content Update) that have caused a significant drop in my traffic!

It’s not pleasant, but it’s something you should expect if, like me, you run a blog that relies heavily on Google for traffic.

Let’s take a closer look. Here are the traffic sources for my trilingual blog in October 2023:

You can see below where my traffic mostly came from. The top 1 traffic referrers were search engines (which is mostly Google search).

For several months, I’ve been trying to get traffic from sources other than Google. My Pinterest strategy is slowly starting to bear fruit, although it’s still far from the traffic generated by Google.

Finally, here is the origin of my visitors:

I translated my website into English and German for three reasons:

1. Because I wanted to share my physiotherapy knowledge beyond the borders of France.
2. Because these are the two foreign languages I know best (even if I’m not very good at them, thankfully ChatGPT exists).
3. Because they are spoken in countries where RPMs are higher. This means that advertising revenues are higher when people from countries like Germany or the United States visit my blog than when people from France visit.

I only translate the articles that are most popular with readers and perform the best. Currently, I translate at a rate of 2 articles per week in German and 3 in English.

Social stats

Youtube: 4,7k subscribers

Pinterest: 32 followers 

Newsletter (french pro): 1,5k subscribers. I send a weekly newsletter to curious French physical therapists, doctors, and entrepreneurs about my dual role as a physical therapist and professional blogger. It’s on Substack.

Newsletter (french patients): 1,5k subscribers.

A Few FYI’s about November 2023

This is the third month in a row where I am still losing a lot of visitors (even though I continue to publish 3 new articles per week, plus translate some). I hope this is the last one!

Fortunately, this huge traffic drop has not affected my income. This is for two reasons:

• Seasonality: in the fall, advertising revenues are high. It will be less nice in December and especially in January, the worst month of the year.
• I have been with Mediavine since late September. Before, I was with an ads’agency that allowed for higher earnings than AdSense but less than Mediavine.

So, my loss of traffic does not affect my financial security. However, I am disappointed that my articles, which were useful to many internet users (judging by the numerous comments), are now much less visible.

I don’t have much hope of recovering this lost traffic. However, I hope to continue making a living from my freelance writing business because I love it.

In January, I will launch my first low-priced mini-course for physiotherapists and a membership. Maybe this will help compensate for the loss of income at the beginning of the year… stay tuned!

I would be delighted to see you again for the next income report. You can subscribe to the site to be informed of new articles (in English and French) or follow me on Pinterest.

See you soon 🙂!