Interested in knowing some of the behind the scenes stuff for Kitchen Sanctuary? Here’s the latest in our blog income and traffic report for Aug 2017. Check out our previous reports here.
We have moved our income reports over from KitchenSanctuary to Livingtheblog! Living the blog is our site to share what we have learnt about blogging. If you’re interested, I recommend that you check out our How to Start a Food Blog post (currently this is on Kitchen Sanctuary, but we’ll move it over here at some point) if you are thinking about giving this blogging thing a go too!
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What’s been going on in August
Sorry the income report for August is a bit late folks, I have been head-down getting Living the Blog ready, so much so that I have fallen behind with the income reports. I will get back into the swing of them and hopefully get Septembers out soon too.
It’s been a CRAZY busy month, I seem to be saying that a lot recently don’t I…. Anyway, lets start with holiday: We spent 2 weeks in Florida and had an amazing time with the kids. Not necessarily relaxing and chilling but it was great! Disney world, swimming with dolphins and universal.
When we came back we were straight back into the deep end, freelance work, our own blog schedule, getting Living the Blog ready and then there was the BigFeastival. We had a great weekend there. Nicky was judging the cookaholics competition on stage and Gracey was judging the junior cookaholics.
Here is a list of our recipes and posts for August on KitchenSanctuary
And I must not forget, getting Gracey ready for high school. My little daughter is growing up and starts high school first week of Sept….
Ok now lets get back to the income and traffic report for August….
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 we get a small commission (at no extra cost to you of course). If you do click through then thank you so much, it helps us keep LivingTheBlog and KitchenSanctuary going.
Income
(fyi – this info is based on earning reports and invoices for work done in the month of Aug, it’s not based on money that has actually come in yet, so there may be some variations based on things like paypal fees or exchange rate fluctuations):
- Freelance writing & video: £3500.00 ($4515.00)
- MediaVine: £1984.92 ($2577.82)
- Sponsored Work £508.00 ($655.32)
- Amazon Affiliate sales £18.76 ($24.20)
- FoodBloggerPro affiliate sales £0 ($0)
- Tailwind Affiliate £12.37 ($15.96)
- StudioPress Genesis Theme affiliate sales £0 ($0)
- How I earned $40k in my first year of blogging affiliate sales £0 ($0)
- Tasty Food Photography £0 ($0)
- The Food Photography book affiliate sales £0 ($0)
- You Tube Ads (check it out here) £0 ($0)
- Stock Photography Sales: £0 ($0)
- SiteGround Hosting Affiliate sales: £0 ($0)
Total = £6024.05 ($7788.30)
Overall our income was down slightly from the previous month. This is mainly because July was a great month and we have been on holiday in August so reducing our overall workload. Our plan for Sept is to reduce even further to allow more time to get Living the Blog live. I am expecting Sept to be worse for income.
Expenses
Expenses (currently this includes regular payments for tools, membership fees and advertising but not inconsistent things like courses, trips and props):
-
- FoodBloggerPro: £16.37 ($20.83)
- SiteGround Hosting and backups: £64.08 ($81.50)
- Tailwind: £8.02 ($9.99)
- Tailwind for Instagram: £8.02 ($9.99)
- MailChimp £60.21 ($75)
- Adobe creative cloud £47.76 ($60.79)
- Facebook Ads £28 ($36.40)
- OptinMonster £12.00 ($15.27)
Total = £244.46 ($309.77)
Net Profit = £5779.59 ($7478.53)
Traffic
Taking a look into the traffic stats for the month, we have continued to grow in August and are definitely seeing the positive impact of the HTTPS/SSL switch. You can read more about this and the impact it had to the traffic here. August was our busiest month EVER for users visiting Kitchen Sanctuary with nearly 195k users visiting the site. We had a grand total of 298,775 page views! That’s a 12.3% increase from July!
Here’s a screenshot from Google Analytics for Page Views for August:
Here’s a breakdown of traffic sources based on the number of sessions. We have had a small increase in number of sessions from ‘Organic Search’ again this month 🙂
Here’s the info on the location of our readers. The top 5 are pretty static in terms of the % of the audience.
My overall summary is that I am super pleased with the organic growth. You can definitely make a difference to your organic traffic if you put the time and effort into SEO optimisation (I’ll write a post on what I’ve done for SEO soon).
September Plans
Some of the big things happening in September:
- Living the Blog will be released! We have put a lot of work into it over August and are determined to have LivingTheBlog ready mid Sept (hint we did it) 🙂
- Starting on our Halloween, Holiday and Christmas content production for ourselves and brands.
- Not much else really. We are focused on LivingTheBlog so want to ensure we give it enough attention.
I think that’s all from me. I hope you found the blog income and traffic report for Aug 2017 helpful. You can check out our other income reports here. 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.
