Blog Income and Traffic Report July 2017

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 July 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 July

I’m much more into the swing of the self employed life. Its becoming a little bit less weird rolling out of bed and going down to our office.  For some reason still feel the need to justify what I have done in a day, even though I am working tremendously hard and long hours.  It’s strange when the things you enjoy doing as a hobby are now your job.  Don’t know if anyone else finds this?

It was a CRAZY busy month in the run up to our holiday at the end of July.  We have had a significant amount of freelance work during the month which is why we have managed to net over $11k this month.  Really pleased when the hard work pays off  🙂

We have nailed our plan for Living the blog go live and are targeting mid sept to get Living The Blog up and running.  We are both really excited to share that with you all and hope it will become a really useful resource for aspiring, new and growing bloggers.

Here is a list of our recipes and posts for July on KitchenSanctuary

I made our first major change to Kitchen Sanctuary in a while.  We moved to HTTPS/SSL, you can read more about the move over here and the impact it has had on our traffic.

Also at the end of July we went on holiday to Florida but more on that in the August income report!

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 July, 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):

1. Freelance writing & video: £6934.00 ($9005.00)
2. MediaVine: £1706.26 ($2215.92)
3. Sponsored Work £82 ($106.60)
4. Amazon Affiliate sales £26.10 ($33.93)
5. FoodBloggerPro affiliate sales £0 ($0)
6. Tailwind Affiliate £0 ($0)
7. StudioPress Genesis Theme affiliate sales £0 ($0)
8. How I earned $40k in my first year of blogging affiliate sales £0 ($0)
9. Tasty Food Photography £0 ($0)
10. The Food Photography book affiliate sales £0 ($0)
11. You Tube Ads (check it out here) £0 ($0)
12. Stock Photography Sales: £0 ($0)
13. SiteGround Hosting Affiliate sales: £0 ($0)

Total = £8748.36 ($11361.45)

Expenses

Expenses (currently this includes regular payments for tools, membership fees and advertising but not inconsistent things like courses, trips and props):

1. 1. FoodBloggerPro: £16.37 ($20.83)
   2. SiteGround Hosting and backups: £64.08 ($81.50)
   3. Tailwind: £8.02 ($9.99)
   4. Tailwind for Instagram: £8.02 ($9.99)
   5. MailChimp £60.21 ($75)
   6. Adobe creative cloud £47.76 ($60.79)
   7. Facebook Ads £28 ($36.40)
   8. OptinMonster £12.00 ($15.27)

Total = £244.46 ($309.77)

Net Profit = £8503.90 ($11,051.68)

Traffic

Taking a look into the traffic stats for the month, we have had a grand total of 266,056 page views! That’s a huge 20.9% increase from June, I’m genuinely over the moon with that increase!  The main source of the increase is from organic search where we have had over 40% increase in that channel. I think some of this could be because of the SEO work I did on some of our posts in June and the SSL/HTTPS transition, but I can’t be sure yet until we have a few more weeks of data. Stay tuned for the outcome of the HTTPS/SSL transition.

Here’s a screenshot from Google Analytics for Page Views for July:

 

The dip you can see is where we lost our Google analytics tracking code following our transition to HTTPS/SSL.  We noticed it, so we were able to recover it quickly.  You can read more about the cut over here.

Here’s a breakdown of traffic sources based on the number of sessions.

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 – especially as we can explain it and we’re confidant it’s due to things we have done to grow our audience and not a fluke or unexplained. Fingers, toes and everything crossed that the growth continues  🙂

August Plans

Some of the big things happening in August

• Getting LivingTheBlog ready.  A lot of work to do on that, and if we are to hit our mid Sept deadline then we need to get going on the site design and content creation.
• More video work, including working out how to build our Youtube following and content specific for our Youtube channel.  I know that’s repeated from last month but we didn’t get round to it oops…
• Starting on our Halloween, Holiday and Christmas content plan
• Holiday!  It’s been a pretty crazy year so far.  We will be going on a well deserved family holiday – we’ll be sure to share plenty of pics  🙂

I think that’s all from me. I hope you found all of the 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.