Food Blogging Traffic & Income Report for August 2018. Watch over my shoulder as I show you how to increase traffic and improve your income on your food blog.
One thing that annoys me when it comes to food blogging is that we are not all given the same set of opportunities. This is often down to the location where we live and what brands we have locally to us.
I am a prime example of this. Living in Portugal with a readership that is based in the US, the UK and Canada means that I am very stuck in what I can do.
I will contact a US brand and I will get an email back from the Portuguese branch. That will then tell me where to go because I have ZERO Portuguese readership.
I got an email this morning. It offered me the opportunity to cook the latest version of Richmond sausages at a trade show in London. I love Richmond sausages and it would have been amazing to jump on board. I even pay a premium for Richmond sausages at my local English supermarket because they are not popular in Portugal.
I doubt it would have included air fare to the UK, hotel in London for us all. Therefore, I didn’t even bother replying to the email.
But it got me thinking about what you do with so many brands being based in the US and getting samples to us with how difficult the Portuguese customs can be, and the expense involved can be crazy.
Or with conferences. I would love to meet some of my fellow food bloggers in person. But all the conferences are in the UK or in the US and again it’s a travel problem. I am a mum of 3 and there is no way I could leave them overnight; my daughter hasn’t forgiven me yet for when I was in hospital having her baby brother!
How To Start A Food Blog
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Low – Medium – High Ticket Items
Going back to what I said about opportunities and the lack of them as a food blogger that doesn’t live in the US got me thinking…..
Sponsored content is all about providing us with our high-ticket income. Those 1000€ sponsored content sales add up and make you feel rich! But in reality, if you have to run a team of people and send out a HUGE amount of emails to get them, you have to ask yourself whether or not they are worth the investment or not.
Instead you need to focus on making sure you have lots of low, medium and high-ticket items to bring the income of your food blog to its full potential.
Low Ticket Items = This can be your advertising networks such as Adsense and Gourmet Ads. They don’t pay as much as what you would like but go towards the cost of running your site. We still run Adsense on RecipeThis.com but only one ad that we just happen to like.
Medium Ticket Items = This can be your better advertising networks or managed programmes such as Monumetric or Adthrive. You can also be selling cheap ebooks for $5 a time on Amazon. Or you could be offering your readers a low price to read all your recipes advert free. I would also put affiliate marketing under medium ticket items.
High Ticket Items = This could be a course that your readers can sign up for. There could be a $15 recurring option or an annual $100 option. Those $100 can add up and sell 10 a week and you have made the amount as you would from 1 sponsored content recipe.
In the long term you want to focus your attention on more medium ticket and high-ticket items and see how much you can make it grow. You also want to appreciate that you could keep the traffic the same but increase your income just by creating new income streams.
Our Food Blogging Income During August 2018:
- Adsense = $1106.07
- Amazon Associates = $479.63
- Kindle = $114.65
- Clickbank Ebook Sales = $112.94
- Amazon CPM Ads = $90.65
- Draft2Digital = $56.77
- Google Play = $22.96
Total Revenue = $1983.67
Our Food Blog Expenses During August 2018:
- Hosting = $30.00
- Aweber = $49.00
- Rafflecopter = $13.00
- Canva = $12.95
- Bluburry = $12.00
- Buffer = $10.00
- Microsoft Office = $10.59
- Imagify = $4.99
Total Food Blogging Expenses = $142.53
This leads to a total food blogging income from Recipe This For August 2018 of $1841.14.
It’s Just Us
Now the business team is just the three of us. Dominic, Kyle and I. We will be building up a new Filipino team in September but as we were away and who we had was not working out, it’s a quiet team for now. This has always been our biggest expense so it’s weird not having a virtual assistant expense or screenshot software to pay for.
This Income Report is 100% Passive Income
This summer we went on a road trip and visited 8 countries. This meant that we spent very little time near a laptop or the internet and 95% of blog posts were scheduled in advance.
We didn’t have to spend hours talking to brands about sponsored content or worry about the admin of a food blog.
What you see is what happens when you literally do nothing and how a food blog can run on autopilot. I don’t think I even worked for 4 hours a week!
The Monumetric Story
A lot of you have asked and we have stayed tight lipped about what happened at Monumetric and why we left so suddenly. Well we hadn’t talked about it through fear that we might not get paid what we were owed, so we waited until the last of the money was paid (which was early August) and now we can finally share our side of the story.
Back in May we decided to leave Monumetric. They were not paying as much as we expected when we signed up for them and that was not the worst of it, the worse thing was that they were putting full page pop up ads on our site without our permission.
Here is an example:
But because they didn’t show ads in our country, it was only after someone complained that we used an American IP address to look for ourselves and we were shocked. We wanted everything to do with it off our site as soon as possible.
You can even see the agreed ads here:
I hate pop ups and don’t have any running on my site and was absolutely heartbroken that they had done this.
We put in our notice to leave them.
They owed us a lot of money as they were not Net30 but more like Net120 with some Net60 and some Net90 thrown in.
That was the end of April and we didn’t receive any payments at all in May, payments were super late in June and then payments were all over the place until we got what we were owed in August.
I must admit it made us very nervous as we were heading out on a summer break in June and it was our spending money and day to day living costs. At first, I thought it was just us, with us giving them notice then I saw a few tweets from people asking when they were going to be paid.
Even if I had been happy with the ads, making me wait months for my income would have meant that I would have left them anyway. I just wonder who stayed after all this. This makes us very nervous about trying out any ad networks again as we are sick and tired of them saying one thing and then changing things without our permission, after all it is our livelihood and will do everything we can to protect it!
For now, we are back with Adsense as a temporary solution, until we have had a chance to work on some more of our income streams.
Recipe This Blog Traffic August 2018
We got over 300,000 page views again this month and are really pleased with it. Considering we are in the dead summer time frame this is not bad.
I call it the dead summer, because as a kitchen gadget blogger the search volume and the interest is not there in the summer. A bit like having a cake blog in January when everyone is on a diet.
Read How @recipe_this made money from their food blog last month From Food BloggingHere is our traffic for August 2018:
Here are our top 10 traffic sources for RecipeThis.com during August 2018:
As usual there is not much of a change with our top 10 traffic sources. Pinterest is the top source right now and it has been now for a few months. I have always got Pinterest and understood how you can get medium results from very little input.
I would estimate that my time spent on Tailwind is approximately 10 minutes a day.
Here is our SEO traffic from Google Webmaster Tools account:
I LOVE SEO and I always do an analysis on it once a month when I do the income report. Because we focus on kitchen gadgets its nice to see which one does the best, which one we get nothing from and the best ways to rinse and repeat.
Its always the battle between the Air Fryer, the Instant Pot, the Soup Maker and the Slow Cooker. Other kitchen gadgets are used but these are the big boys. We can reveal that for August it was the lure of the Air Fryer that won.
What’s Next?
Our road trip is at the end and we are back to focusing on RecipeThis.com. We are getting ready for the winter to arrive after having a spectacular summer.
We are also working hard on some changes to our income streams and like we mentioned above, focusing more on our medium and high ticket items.
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