Income and Traffic Report Sept 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 Sept 2017. Learn why we had a drop in revenue for September and why its ok that we did. Check out our previous reports here.  

Living the blog is our site to share what we have learned about blogging.  We 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!

What’s been going on in September

Living the blog was launched!  WOO HOO!  Its been over a year since we first started discussing the idea and I am really pleased to be writing for you on our new site and sharing what we have learned and how we do this blogging thing as our full time jobs.

Nik and I were almost single minded in September getting the site and initial content ready, which meant that we had to reduce the time we spent on Kitchen Sanctuary.  That was hard for us as we have been really focused on the food side of things, especially now we are doing a lot more video content.  Still managed to get our planned 3 posts per week out during Sept though, Here is a list of our recipes and posts for September on Kitchen Sanctuary.

But we really backed off the sponsored and freelance work.  This is why you will see quite a dip in our September income compared to August and July’s.  It was a conscious decision that we took to ensure we had enough time and energy to put into getting this site live.  I am really glad that we did that, if we hadn’t then I’m sure we would not have got Living The Blog live until next year.

I know its kinda boring talking about just one thing that was our main focus in September but its been a busy month. A total change for us in that we’ve not just focused on our usual food content production – which has been both fun and stressful!

Ok now lets get back to the income and traffic report for September….

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 Sept, 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: £700.00 ($931.00)
2. MediaVine: £2655.87 ($3541.16)
3. Sponsored Work £105.00 ($139.65)
4. Amazon Affiliate sales £4.73 ($6.29)
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: £30 ($39.90)

Total = £3505.03 ($4670.57)

Overall our income was down from the previous month.  Our plan for Sept was to reduce our workload on Kitchen Sanctuary to be able to focus on Living The Blog.

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 = £3260.57 ($4360.80)

Traffic

Taking a look into the traffic stats for the month, we have continued to grow in September!  Whoop Whoop!  September was our best month EVER for users visiting Kitchen Sanctuary (yes I know i said that about August last month) with over 230k users visiting the site. We had a grand total of 358,206 page views! That’s a HUGE 19.9% increase from August!

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

Here’s a breakdown of traffic sources based on the number of sessions. We had an increase in social traffic this month.  This is mainly from Buzz Feed.  One of our recipes (Hungarian Beef Goulash) was featured in a roundup on BuzzFeed.  This resulted in the beef goulash getting 18,834 page views in Sept compared to the 4273 it received in August, and is a massive 340% increase in traffic for that one recipe.  I would love that to happen every month  🙂

Here’s the info on the location of our readers.  The top 5 are pretty static in terms of the % of the audience. Although we have seen an increase in traffic from the US, this is because of the BuzzFeed feature mentioned above.

We only had one day in September that was less than 10k page views, this is brilliant and together with the BuzzFeed feature meant that we had an amazing month for traffic.  I cant hide it, I am REALLY happy with the traffic this month.  Come on October, the gauntlet has been thrown down by Sept.

October Plans

Some of the big things happening in October:

• It’s the start of the busy quarter for food blogs so energy and focus back onto Kitchen Sanctuary.  With the holidays fast approaching, the demand for food content is high.
• Planning our our Christmas content schedule, including looking at what was popular last year and our new content for 2017.
• Our social and blog content calendar for Living The Blog.  Now it’s live we really need to get our ongoing schedule set out.  We will be trialing Coschedule to do this.  If you are interested in what we are working on then why not check out our coming soon page.
• Halloween.  We have created all of our Halloween content so you will see that being posted on Kitchen Sanctuary mid to the end of Oct.

In summary, we have had a great month for traffic and our Ad revenue has been boosted by this increased traffic. However our income has dropped because we took the time to get Living The Blog live.  It’s something we knew would happen, but hopefully it will be time well spent if you guys find our new site to be a useful resource.

I think that’s all from me. I hope you found the blog income and traffic report for Sept 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.