Blog Income Report – February 2018

Hiya! This is Kristen here for February's income report. Today is the one day a month that I share what goes on behind the scenes here at TEM. I share where the income comes from, what expenses there are, and some tips for fellow and dreaming to become food bloggers.

This past month, we've made some changes to how we approach Facebook. While the jury is still out on the success (or not) of our new strategy, I do have some tips to share. These are some back pocket tricks I've learned to help grow our FB page.

Before we get to the tips and tricks, let's go over the numbers and traffic first ….

INCOME

• Adthrive – $5,040
• Viglink – $63.19
• Sponsored posts: $3250.00
• Affiliate sales – $14.50

Total Income: $8,367.69

EXPENSES

• SiteGround – $90 – My much loved hosting company
• MadMimi– $89 – What I use to send my email newsletters
• Tailwind – $10 – Pinterest scheduler – LOVE them!
• Vaultpress – $5 – Backs up all TEMs files.
• Teachable – $29 – Hosts my course Oh My Blog
• Adobe Premiere Pro – $19.99 – What I use for video editing.
• Music for videos – $54.88
• CrashPlan – $5.99
• CloudFlare – $20
• OptinMonster – $16.58 – what I use for my newsletter signup forms
• Link in Profile – $8.25
• Support staff – $282.75

Total Expenses: $631.63

TOTAL PROFIT: $7,736.06

Note: The income reported here is in USD. Although I am Canadian the majority of the income I earn through TEM, and my expenses, are in American dollars.

RPM is a handy formula to calculate how much money your blog is earning. The acronym stands for Revenue Per Mille, or revenue per thousand pageviews.

Total Profit ÷ Total Pageviews x 1000 = RPM

Using this formula we can calculate The Endless Meal’s RPMs:

$7,736.06 ÷ 459,006  x 1000 = $16.85

 

Facebook Tips and Tricks

Invite people to like your page.

And I'm not talking about friends and family. Facebook has a handy little tool that lets you invite people to like your page if they've liked one of your posts.

To do this, click on who has liked your post. A box will pop up with the names of everyone who has clicked the like button. Next to their names will either be a greyed out box that says ‘Liked' or a blue box that says ‘Invite'. If you click the Invite button that person will get a notification asking them to like your page.

Featured Content

Facebook lets you choose which content you would like highlighted on your page. It's called Featured Content. On TEMs Facebook page, we have videos first, photos second, and then we show the rest of the posts.

What's great about choosing featured content is that you can pick the very best photos you've posted. And because you are choosing from photos you have uploaded to Facebook, they don't need to be your photos. That amazing looking minestrone soup at the top right is a picture from The First Mess. Of course, when someone clicks on the photo, there are two links in the caption. One links to her Facebook page and the other directly to the recipe on her blog.

 Finding and resharing old posts

Have you heard of Facebook Juice? I've even heard it called Fairy Dust. It's the idea that Facebook favors popular posts. One way to harness a little of this special fairy dust is to share your posts that other people have shared.

But how do you know when someone shares your post? If it's a new share, you'll get a notification about it. To track down shares on an older post, you'll want something called Crowd Tangle. It's a free Chrome extension.

When you install it, go to a page on your website then click on the Crowd Tangle button in your toolbar. It will bring up all the shares social shares and let you know how many times it has been reshared. Using it, I was able to find this share on the Real Housemoms' Facebook page from July 22nd, 2016.

I shared it on our Facebook page to keep the Facebook Juice flowing.

Choosing an audience

99% of the time we share our Facebook posts with everyone. But, once in a while, we have a post that's not meant for everyone. That happened this week.

Earlier this week I shared a recipe for some Sesame Pineapple Sausage Bites. Have you seen it? They're so delicious. Along with the recipe, we are hosting a giveaway of the sausages used to make the bites. While the recipe is (obviously!) for everyone, we are only able to ship the sausages to a Canadian address.

When promoting the giveaway on Facebook, I used this Preferred Audience Tool so that those posts would only be shown to Canadians as I didn't want to tease followers with a giveaway they couldn't enter.

Using this tool, you can choose to include or exclude followers based on age, gender, location, language, and interests.

 

Do you have any Facebook tips or tricks up your sleeve? If you do, share them in the comments below so we can all learn from each other!