Income and Traffic Report Oct 2017

WHAT A MONTH!  Without exception our best month EVER!  Here’s the latest in our blog income and traffic report Oct 2017.  Check out our previous reports here.  

Sorry its been a while since our last post, It has been crazy busy over on Kitchen Sanctuary during October/November and doesn’t look like its going to slow up through December.

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 October

Living the blog has had to take a little bit of a back seat during October, which was not exactly what we intended but we have had sooo much work on for Kitchen Sanctuary. Over on Kitchen Sanctuary, we hit over 400k views in a month, first time EVER!. We have had much more freelance and sponsored work on the books and have been starting our Christmas content plan and schedule.

Here is a list of our recipes and posts for October on Kitchen Sanctuary.

Here are a few of the things that have been going on during October:

We were invited to and attended a couple of events, one for the Happy Egg company and one for Grana Padano & Proscuitto di San Daniele.  These have been the first events we have been invited to as a professional blogger couple.  Don’t get me wrong, I have been to a few events as Nicky’s +1 but being invited to events as a team was quite cool  🙂

Got to mention Halloween! W had so much fun with Halloween this year. We did quite a large number of Halloween shoots both for brands and for ourselves.  We also had a bit of fun doing something a bit different with our Halloween videos.  Check out these 3 videos: Halloween Doughnuts, Halloween Eyeball Sub and Halloween Scream Cheese.

We had a Halloween Party, our first big kid’s party in our new kitchen and extension.  It has taken us a few months to get to around to having a party for the kids in the new kitchen so we thought Halloween was as good of an excuse as any.

Yes thats me in the Darth Vader (or Darth Dad) suit  🙂  Ok now lets get back to the income and traffic report for Oct….

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 Oct, 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: £4200.00 ($5670.00)
2. MediaVine: £3116.04 ($4210.87)
3. Sponsored Work £1147.81 ($1549.54)
4. Amazon Affiliate sales £49.45 ($66.77)
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 = £8513.30 ($11,497.19)

Back up to a really good level of income for October.  Best ad revenue we have had from Mediavine.  Really pleased that our ad revenue and CPM has gone up inline with our increase in page views and sessions. We have also increased our freelance and sponsored work in Oct.

Unfortunately we got quite a few zeros for affiliate sales on ebooks etc – I think that’s partly because we’ve moved these income reports from Kitchen Sanctuary to Living the Blog, and LTB currently gets way fewer readers than Kitchen Sanctuary. Fewer readers = fewer sales.

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: £72.00 ($97.20)
   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 £10 ($13.50)
   8. OptinMonster £12.00 ($15.27)

Total = £174.17 ($235.13)

Net Profit = £8,339.13 ($11,262.06)

Traffic

Taking a look into the traffic stats for the month, October was HUGE for Kitchen Sanctuary, It was the first month that we achieved over 400k page views EVER! We had a grand total of 434,686 page views! That’s a HUGE 21.3% increase from Sept!  Month-on-month it has been getting better for traffic which is really great to see.

If you take a look at the chart below you will see we had one exceptional day.  On the 15th October we had over 34k page views.  Having looked into this, it appears the spike in the traffic was for our Slow Cooked Steak Diane Casserole. – which was only published the day before on the 14th October. Usually it takes a long time for these things to build momentum, so we initially thought maybe a Pinterest pin or Facebook post for it had started to go viral. Then we found it was all coming from Google/Organic search. We didn’t quite believe that somehow everyone was searching for steak diane casserole so we did a bit more digging, it looks like it was featured on a ‘card’ on android devices.  We couldn’t actually get to see the card or figure out how it was featured, but we were really pleased it was!

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. Nothing unusual to report here.  Fairly common for us to get about 30% traffic from social and 40-50% from organic search.

Here’s the info on the location of our readers.  The top 5 are pretty static in terms of the % of the audience.

I wrote in Septembers income report that it had thrown down the gauntlet to October and I wasn’t sure if it could be beaten as we had had a Buzzfeed feature and so on. Well October smashed it!  Super pleased with the traffic and income for October, more months like this please!

November/December Plans

Some of the big things happening in November:

• It’s the start of the busy period for food blogs so energy and focus back onto Kitchen Sanctuary and with the holidays fast approaching, the demand for food content is high.
• Shooting and socialising our Christmas content schedule.
• Oh and its our 10th wedding anniversary so hoping to get a few days away.  Fingers crossed.

In summary, we have had a great month for traffic and our Ad revenue has been boosted by this increased traffic. Christmas is now round the corner.

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