Cooking Up an Income: February Profits
Hello again!
I've got some exciting news for this month's income report. There's been a big jump in both the number of visitors to The Endless Meal and to the income. I've been doing my best to put out 2 blog posts every week and it has clearly been paying off. So here we go …
Here are the numbers for February:
- Google Adsense: $205.11
- Infolinks: $36.30
- Ligit: $16.29
- Other blog related income: $74.50
Total Blog Income: $332.20
Here's what Google Analytics has to say:
- 57,018 people visited The Endless Meal in February
- 1,524 of those people came by to look at the Chewy Peanut Butter Cookies
- 55.99% of all referral traffic came from Pinterest (Whoa, that's a lot!)
The best things that people searched for to get to The Endless Meal:
- Mini lettuce looking things – They found these Steak Salad Lettuce Wraps
- Little things in asian salad – Not sure what little things they were looking for in this Asian Salad Recipe
- kiss ass guacamole – Yep, I have to agree that this Aji Guacamole is pretty kiss ass!
- Is it good to have cucumber for breakfast – I think so. Especially in a Tomato, Cucumber and Avocado Breakfast Salad
I wanted to share with you a plugin that I installed the end of January and that I absolutely LOVE. See those capital letters? Yep, that's how much I love it. It's called Facebook Page Promoter Lightbox and it's rockin' my Facebook page world. In the 5 weeks since I have installed it, The Endless Meal page has received 532 new likes. Whoa! That's crazy, right? I think so.
If this is your first time to this site, or if it's been more than 10 days since your last visit, you would have noticed a little box that popped up as the page was loading. It would have looked like this:
I have to be honest with you, I was a little hesitant about installing it. I don't typically like pop ups when I visit websites. (I actually find them quite a bit annoying.) My plan was to do a 1 week trial and then immediately get rid of it. Obviously, I had some very high hopes for this test run!
But I'm keeping it. With its help, The Endless Meal has been averaging about 15 new likes every day. Every. Single. Day.
If I haven't convinced you to install it yet, here are the number of people who came to The Endless Meal from Facebook in January and (when I stalled it) in February:
- January 370
- February 1,117
And the past week and a half of March has seen almost as many people come from Facebook as all of February.
If you want to try it out on your own website ( I know you do!) here is a great little video about how to install Facebook Page Promoter Lightbox
That's it for February's Cooking Up an Income Report. If you have any questions, I will do my best to answer them!
~ Kristen
This is going to be your weirdest comment ever, since this post is so old.. but I love checking this series when I watch my own first-month numbers.. but..
I just got it! The little things in Asian salads they’re looking for are almost certainly chow mein noodles. Like.. these classy bites:
http://www.lachoy.com/images/products/rollover/cm_nood_ro.jpg
I’m sure they were pleasantly surprised by your recipe 🙂
Cheryl
http://thestylistquo.com
Lol yep they are!
I love all your advice about Facebook lightbox and can’t wait to try it. Can you tell me what settings for ligthbox work best for you??? how many ms delay??? show how many delay? and which pages? Thank you for all your help 🙂
Hey there,
I don’t know how I missed your question for all this time. I’m really sorry!
To answer your question I have FB Lightbox set to pop up once for every 10 days a person visits the site, unless they already like The Endless Meal;s FB page, then it doesn’t pop up at all. I have them shown on all pages and have the delay in ms set to 0.
When I started working with BlogHer I upgraded to the premium lightbox so that I would have control over the colours, etc. Now I have it set so that it pops up without shading the rest of the site, which would be against BlogHer rules.
Lightbox continues to be a great way for me to get Facebook likes. I highly recommend it!
Thank you for your question 🙂
Hi 🙂
I’m a big fan of you blog. not only it motivates me with your delicious recipes and pictures, it also helped me a lot in increasing traffic.
as a new food-blogger, i would like to ask you, how are you hosting your website? which web-hosting service.. and if you have any tips for people, like me, who’re thinking about moving to an actual “.com” website, and not just a simple blog.
Thank you 🙂
WOW how refreshing to have someone actually post their income stats, growth, and ideas on growth. I’ve been scouring the web for such info (which incidently is how I found your blog). I didn’t think my blog was ready for advertisements ( I blog about positive parenting at http://www.professorpoppins.blogspot.com) but I had 76,546 unique visitors last month so apparently that IS advertisement worthy! Thanks for the FB popup suggestion- I’m going to try it for a month and see what it does.
It’s funny because I only have 40 some odd FB followers, 700 some odd blogger followers, and yet over 70K visitors last month…. mostly thanks to Pinterest! Here’s hoping that the pop up will increase my FB following! I’ve “liked” your blog now so I can follow your blog growth/ideas (and maybe find a good recipe or two for my family in the process!)
Thanks again!
Thanks for the help! I was wondering how that Facebook promoter worked.
Oh my gah, you’re doing great. And I’m going to go install that FB plugin asap. I’m only getting like 2 a day now, just from doing nothing. I agree with not being a fan of pop ups, but sometimes, you just gotta do what you gotta do. THANKS bunches for this new suggestion, Kristen! As always, you rock! 🙂 xo
DONE! That was pretty easy… I’ll keep you updated on how many likes I get (I’m at 559 now).
The only thing I don’t like about it so far is that the box keeps popping up each time I go to my site. I’ve already liked my page, obviously. Then I unliked it and liked it again – but I don’t see an option to make it to stop popping up for those who have already “liked” my FB page. Any ideas? I wonder if you have to get the version that costs money to have all sorts of options. ?? I see that it’s not popping up constantly on yours.
This is really inspiring – I hope one day I have as many readers as you!