This is the blog income and traffic report April 2016! If you are interested and want to see all our other income reports click here!
It’s that time again!
My seventh income and traffic report (check out the rest here).
April has been a really good month. I feel like I’m starting to sort out this whole work-life balance thing. I’m not there 100%, but I’m definitely getting better!
Apart from my regular posts and freelance work, I finally managed to get a few things crossed off my list that have been staring at me for ages!
- Change of Ad companies – I signed up with Mediavine during April, and they now manage all of my ads. I’m loving the service so far. I’ll talk a little more about it later in this post.
- I finally updated my free-ebook. This is the book I give away when readers sign up to my mailing list. It contains my 20 most popular recipes, and I’ve been meaning to update it since January! I finally got it looking right thanks to a template from Nagi at FoodBloggersCentral.
- I started using OptinMonster as a way to get more people to sign up to my mailing list. I’ve only been using it a few days, but I am starting to see an increase in signups. I’ll see how it goes over May and report back in my next income report.
Also (little happy dance here) –
I had eight more of my recipes published in the Summer edition of Superfood magazine! Currently it’s only available in the UK, but if you are based over here then you can find it in M&S (and Sainsbury’s too I think). It’s got loads of healthy recipes to get you feeling great for Summer.
I’m down 10lbs since my March report. I’ve still got 4lbs to go – to get to my happy weight. I’ve plateaued a little, so I’m intending to ramp up the exercise this month. I’m keeping everything crossed that I’ll be at my target weight by my next income report.
Ok, I’ve talked enough and we haven’t even started on the numbers. I really hope the info in this post gives you some insight and ideas if you’re new to blogging and monetization. Also check out my How to Start a Food Blog post if you are thinking about giving this blogging thing a go too!
Income Breakdown
Note – there are some links in this post that are affiliate links – which means that if you click on them and then sign up to the service/product I’ll get a small commission (at no extra cost to you of course). If you do click through then thanks!
Income:
- Freelance writing: £960.39 ($1386.07)
- Sponsored Brand work £215 ($310.30)
- Gourmet Ads: £40.92 ($59.06)
- MediaVine: £274.85 ($396.67)
- Google Adsense: £17.32 ($25)
- Amazon Affiliate sales £22.68 ($32.73)
- FoodBloggerPro affiliate sales £0 ($0)
- How I earned $40k in my first year of blogging affiliate sales £0 ($0)
- Tasty Food Photography £0 ($0)
Total = £1531.16 ($2209.83)
Expenses:
-
- FoodBloggerPro: £14.49 ($20.83)
- Hosting and backups: £11.70 ($16.82)
- Tailwind: £6.02 ($8.66)
- MailChimp £17.82 ($25.72)
- Facebook Ads £6.00 ($8.66)
- OptinMonster £11.49 ($16.58)
Total = £67.52 ($97.27)
Net Profit = £1463.64 ($2112.56)
Traffic
My stats held pretty steady in April with about 30 more views overall than last month, so not too bad. My stats had gone down a little over the last couple of months, so at least it’s heading in the right direction again – if slowly!!
I talked a little last month about a few things that I though might be hurting my traffic, so I’m hoping that now I’ve got those areas under control, I’ll start seeing a decent rise again soon.
Here’s a screenshot from Google Analytics for April:
Here’s a breakdown of the traffic sources based on the number of sessions. Last month I talked about a drop in Pinterest traffic that affected a lot of bloggers-(which occurred mid-March). It ended up lasting about a month before going back up again, so I was glad to see that my overall Pinterest traffic for April was a few hundred higher than March.
Here’s the info on the location of my readers:
Takeaways
For any of you new (or potential) bloggers out there, I really wanted to share a new course that I recently reviewed from Kristen at OhMyBlog. Kristen also runs The Endless Meal blog, which is one of my favourite foodie blogs. She’s such a great cook and photographer, and she makes everything look sooo delicious! She’s recently been on a mission to help people start their own blogs via a series of detailed video tutorials.
I’ve been through them, and they’re really great. I just wish I’d had something like this available when I started my blog.
It’s a case of following along with her as she runs through every step in setting up your blog, making it look great and getting your first post out there. It’s especially great for those who aren’t techie minded (yep, that’s me!).
The course talks you through: Hosting, setting up WordPress, plugins, themes, logo creation, driving traffic to your blog and lots of other areas too.
The price for this course (which includes lifetime access to the material, Pinterest group board invite, worksheets and access to the private Facebook group) is $149. Total bargain!! If you’re new to the blogging world, or you’re looking to set up your first blog, I thoroughly recommend it.
Check out the course here.
MediaVine
I joined MediaVine and they took over the Ads on my site from the 10th April.
I’ve never been great with keeping on top of the ad situation. I had myself set up with a few ad networks, but hadn’t set up waterfalls/backfills/passbacks (or another one of those words that makes my eyes glaze over).
Mediavine do ALL of that for you. If you don’t like the type or location of certain ads, it’s really easy to remove them – via the dashboard, or by contacting them directly.
So far I’ve found the customer service to be fab. They have weekly calls you can join (optional) where they work with bloggers to make sure everyone’s happy, and to help bloggers to optimise their revenue.
The dashboard is also great to keep an eye on daily earnings (split by ad location, so you can see what’s performing the best).
So how have they performed earnings wise for Kitchen Sanctuary so far?
Well let’s take a look at my Jan, Feb and March Ad earnings and compare that to April. Bear in mind that I only joined MediaVine on the 10th of April, so I was still earning from my other ad networks up until then.
Pretty good hey?
I did take a couple of the more annoying ads down, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the performance and maybe adding or removing ads in May to see what happens.
Fingers crossed these ads will continue to perform pretty well so that eventually I can start to earn more from my work on Kitchen Sanctuary than the freelance work I do.
My overall aim is to continue to build Kitchen Sanctuary as my main source of income, but I know that will take time.
That’s all for this month folks. I hope you’ve found this info helpful. Please let me know if there’s anything you want me to talk about in a future report. Just drop me a note in the comments.
Have a great weekend x