Welcome, Jason here again! Thanks for taking time out of your busy day and visiting our blog. We appreciate those that are following our food blog income reports each month. If this happens to be your first time with us, then I would like to start with a real quick background of what goes on here.
I happen to be Jessica’s husband, baby’s daddy, recipe taste tester, but I also hold the prestigious responsibility of compiling the data for these income reports each and every month. The goal is to share our progress with monetizing our blog in the hopes that fellow bloggers might learn something new.
This month marks a mini milestone of momentum (yep I just did that) because we are exactly half way into a full year of income reports, woohoo! I say this because its important to stop and celebrate the small victories. A life of a food blogger is not always easy, there’s a LOT of hard work and sacrifice that goes into it.
As some of you may (or may not) know, Jessica and I have a 4 month year old son James. He is truly the world to us and with the attention he requires it would be very easy to stop blogging and simply give up.
But you know what? This blog is still pumping out great recipes each week because of creative time management and pure grit. I am on Paternity time for the next few weeks, and when James goes down for a nap, the computer awakes out of sleep mode and with the help of a cup (or two) of coffee the creative juices start flowing. So with that said let’s dive into it before James wakes up.
Okay, here are the numbers for November
INCOME:
Food Blogger Pro – $70
Gamut (formerly Cox Digital Solution) – $61.29
Foodie Theme – $46.48
Gourmet Ads – $18.74
How to Monetize Your Food Blog eBook – $17.50
Adsense – $13.12
YouTube – $12.95
Sovrn – $11.48
Swoop – $8.86
Blogher – $8.07
Amazon – $4.83
ZipList – $0.06
Total Income: $273.38
EXPENSES:
Synthesis (Hosting) – $32.33
Food Blogger Pro – $25.00
= NET PROFIT: $216.05
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
This has been our best month for revenue, Woo-Hoo! We are up 250% when compared to last month which was our previous high. The big jump this month came from affiliate revenue, you can see the breakdown here:
Since I was at least ten years old, my Grandpa Joe has continually taught me about the importance of a diversified (investment) portfolio. Obviously he was referring to retirement accounts but the principle still applies within the Food Blog world.
Basically don’t simply rely on ad networks for revenue, look at multiple revenue streams A big chunk of the affiliate revenue this month was generated right here from these income reports. By sharing the tools and resources we use for Jessica’s website we have encouraged several of our readers to purchase products like WordPress themes, eBooks, and Food Blogger Pro.
Now I don’t recommend every Food Blogger start creating Income Reports as they are very time consuming but if you haven’t already, perhaps you could sprinkle some affiliate links in other ways.
For example, what theme are you using for your Food Blog? Does the company you purchased the theme from have an affiliate program? There’s a good chance that it does. So one easy solution is to place an affiliate link in your website footer. Since we use the Foodie Theme by Shay Bocks, we made the link in our footer (bottom of the page) an affiliate link for those that are interested.
Another option would be to take advantage of Amazon’s endless supply of products and create an article that includes affiliate links to each item. Jessica created a timely post intended for Black Friday shoppers that features her favorite kitchen essentials.
Please note we do make a small commission from each affiliate transaction, but we want you to know that we stand behind the products we recommend.
Update on Ad Networks
For those in the know, ZipList the App which allowed viewers to save recipes to their mobile devices has gone out of business and the company has closed its doors. I can’t say that I’m too sad to see them go because their ad network program was Jessica’s lowest earning revenue source by far. We made 6 cents last month, enough said.
In response to losing a revenue source, I decided to add another ad network. From the information we learned in How to Monetize Your Food Blog eBook by Kiersten of Oh My Veggies, we joined the Swoop ad network which features small ads inside of the actual recipe (and sometimes sporadically other places). Judging by the earnings, I think it was a good choice.
I also wanted to quickly note, back in September I talked about adding additional BlogHer banners to the site. Well after the recent dismal drop in revenue from BlogHer I decided to pull those extra banners because I felt like the pages were loading slower. Combine that with no noticeable increase in revenue, I thought it was better to focus on making the user experience more enjoyable.
TRAFFIC
Traffic Overview
Top Traffic Sources
OVERVIEW ON TRAFFIC
We officially broke 30,000 pageviews! After coming up a bit short of that mark in October, it helped to have all those Thanksgiving recipes Jessica worked on in November to seal the deal. Google traffic has reached a new high and we hope that continues to climb. Our other traffic sources were pretty much on par with previous months. There is no magic trick to Google organic search, we’ve been doing this a long time so be patient.
We use the WordPress SEO Plugin which provides a checklist of things you can do to improve each article. One of those checklist items is making sure you are linking to an outside website. While adding affiliate links will satisfy this, I don’t believe Google really boosts your page value with them, so “spread the love” and try linking to a trusted reference like Wikipedia or a news outlet in each post.
How’s your email Newsletter doing? Do you have one? In August we made the transition from FeedBurner to MailChimp. Since making the switch we have seen the number of subscribers increase month of over month. (See chart below)
We are very pleased with the service and thanks to our friends at FoodBloggerPro for their technical assistance. We had a few questions about image sizes and formatting, now our newsletter looks great on all devices and email clients. Below is a quick snapshot of our recent growth. The MailChimp service is free if you have under 2,000 subscribers. We are under 200, so we have a little bit of time before we have to add MailChimp to our list of expenses.
FINAL THOUGHTS…
There were 10 blog posts for the month of November which was equal to October. After reading income reports from Pinch of Yum and following their trends, it makes sense that the final months of the year is when food blogs have the greatest potential to increase their earnings. Companies are willing to pay Ad Networks a premium for banner ad impressions and general viewers are more susceptible to making frequent holiday purchases.
We strive hard to make great content for this blog as I’m sure you do with your blog, but since overnight success stories are far and few between, its important to be patient and embrace the little victories. Last month SunKist (the fruit company) pinned Jessica’s homemade Citrus Cranberry Sauce to their official Pinterest account. There wasn’t a noticeable jump in traffic but it was nice seeing a large company giving a shout out to Jessica. It’s the little gems like that and positive comments from you guys that keep us moving forward. So thank you.
Okay, I like to leave these income reports with a little personal touch because I try and ground myself by remembering its not all about the money. This is our second year in our house, last year we got an amazing Douglas Fir tree from the local Boy Scouts Christmas Tree lot, unfortunately towards the end of the season the tree made a complete mess. So this year we decided to go with a fake tree, it doesn’t smell like the real thing but it looks pretty realistic.
From blog to baby, we are very thankful this holiday season for all the wonderful things that have happened this year, thanks for stopping by and we hope you come back next month.
Seasons Greetings from Jason, Jessica and James
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