Welcome, welcome! Thanks for stopping by. I’m Jessica’s husband Jason, and once a month I have the privilege of stepping into the spotlight (tap, tap, is this microphone on?) and delivering our monthly income and traffic report for jessicagavin.com.
If you’re new to these reports, here’s the gist… Each month we like to keep our readers updated on our progress of monetizing this blog. We understand that not everyone is interested in this information and that’s okay. This once-a-month report is for those that either run their own blog or are considering starting a food blog. Our collection of income reports is where you’ll find out what goes on behind the scenes of running jessicagavin.com.
Please note, these reports are surprisingly time consuming to create, I don’t want to sugar coat it. In fact just simply maintaining a blog is extremely time consuming and VERY hard work. Determination and perseverance is a must. Although in a strange analytical way, I do enjoy creating these reports in order to keep ourselves accountable (Jessica’s giving me the crazy eyes). I find it interesting to look at our historical chronology for JG and see how far we’ve come.
Ready to take a look at the numbers? Let’s get started.!
Please note we do make a small commission from each affiliate link listed here, but we want you to know that we stand behind the products we recommend.
INCOME:
Gamut – $39.28
Sovrn – $23.02
Adsense – $22.02
Gourmet Ads – $20.74
Swoop – $10.45
Amazon – $9.39
BlogHer – $7.81
How to Monetize Your Food Blog eBook – $7.50
YouTube – $1.97
Total Income: $142.18
EXPENSES:
Synthesis (Hosting) – $32.33
Food Blogger Pro – $25.00
“Pin it” Button Pro – $14.50
Total Expenses: $71.83
= NET PROFIT: $70.35
TRAFFIC
Traffic Overview:
Top Traffic Sources:
RPM
We show this stat every month. RPM is revenue per thousand impressions. This is a helpful metric to determine what the revenue is per 1,000 pageviews. It is calculated like this: RPM = (Revenue / Pageviews) x 1,000. When we make any updates to Jessica’s blog we can tell how effective the changes were by looking at this number.
OVERVIEW ON INCOME & TRAFFIC
So how did we do for February? Well depends on how you look at it. Considering its the shortest month of the year, then not too bad I suppose. Our traffic was on par with last month, which was our highest thus far (yay!). But the main issue was that revenue has decreased four months in a row (not yay!).
Obviously we don’t have all the answers, otherwise traffic and revenue would be breaking records each month. There’s so many facets running a blog.. from hosting, to themes, to social media, and oh yeah… actually creating content that people want to read.
We do a fair amount of guessing, googling this and googling that, and relying on our gut experience so far. We are forever in a state of work-in-progress, we’re both just trying to get better at blogging one day at a time.
Okay, now back to that little issue of ours… Revenue. To increase revenue we decided to focus on two things this month:
Resources Page – Want to know all the tools and equipment needed to run a food blog? We created a page for that. Our helpful resources for food bloggers page provides a list of items that we use daily. This page was designed to increase our affiliate commission revenue. If someone clicks on a link or image and purchases a product or service, then we will receive a small percentage of that transaction. By creating this page we created a new potential revenue source for when traffic starts flowing in. We also added a link to this new page on our navigation under the Resources pull down.
Improve Quality – Recipes featuring our new homemade photography table-top began to appear online in February. It’s funny that it took a 30″ by 30″ table-top to become inspired to create better content. I’m not kidding, right away we noticed a more unique and professional quality to our photos so we started adding more photos to each recipe page. To build upon that momentum, Jessica felt inspired to elevate her writing quality by really making an effort to go beyond her comfort zone and open up by sharing more personal moments and details of her life within the content of each recipe post.
With the focus to improve quality it is our hope that this could lead to returning visitors coming back for more great recipes, photos and stories. Basically, returning visitors = more pageviews, which then = more potential revenue. Got it? There will be a test at the bottom of the page, jk. This was our more indirect approach to building revenue.
Here’s the current breakdown of our visitors:
I would be interested to know what your visitor percentages are, feel free to leave a comment with your percentages info below.
There would have been a third item called The Pinterest Experiment but we ran out of time, darn short month. However, on the last day of the month we finally pulled the trigger on a Pinterest schedule service. After reading user reviews on the community forum at Food Blogger Pro we decided to go with TailWindApp. Primarily because of price but also because of the abundance of analytics it provides. I will have more to report on how this is working out next month, but I thought I would at least give you all a heads up.
FINAL THOUGHTS…
There were 9 blog posts for the month of February which was one less than January. In fact, this short month broke our streak of 10 or more blog posts each month since we started keeping track of these reports 9 months ago. There’s that accountability thing I was referring to earlier.
Tax time! I don’t know about you but I like to get our taxes done as soon as possible. I usually slave over Quicken for several hours (sometimes days) to organize our finances. If we’re getting a refund, I would much rather have that money in my hand sooner rather than later.
If you are a fellow food blogger, I don’t want to give any tax advice other than to recommend talking to your tax professional or accountant. Ask them what items you are allowed to write off. For example as part of our little food blog business, some of our photography equipment, groceries, and hosting expenses are tax deductible. This helps to offset taxes that we would ordinarily need to pay on the income we have generated.
As I’ve stated in previous reports, this blog is more than just a food blog. Its a family journal. This small but important mindset helps to take the chore out of writing content just for monetary reasons and more for thinking big picture. Will our son James log onto jessicagavin.com in 15 years to see how mom and dad made $100 in a single month? Hmm probably not, but will he log on and want to see pictures from his childhood or read personal family recipes and moments that his mom has shared? Perhaps. That’s what keeps us going.
Keeping a positive spin on things is easier when you think of the main goal instead of getting pulled down the dark negative hole that is day-to-day revenue numbers. You probably think its funny that I say that considering this is an Income Report where I’m breaking down all the numbers. But this is a monthly income report and not a daily or weekly report. Although the thought of a yearly income report sounds more convenient, haha.
Did you get sick this cold season? I sure did. I think just about everyone at my office was sick at one point or another. Unfortunately the same was happening at James’ day care with all the little kids spreading their little kid germs everywhere. So father and son were both sidelined for a few days. Being sick in bed all day is never fun but at least I had some company.
As always, thanks for stopping by and taking the time to read our report. I look forward to updating you again next month.
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