July Blog Income Report

Hola! Salut! Chiào! Nǐ hǎo! Hello!

It's Kristen, stepping out from behind the camera and away from the kitchen to share with you this month's blog income report. Hi!

I first started sharing what The Endless Meal earned back in March 2012 (a whopping $15.37) then decided to take a little food-blog-income-report hiatus. At that time, I was quite new to blogging and super excited to share the tiny bits that I was learning. Since then I've learned a whole lot more about food blogging, and grown the blog a whole lot more too.

This is the second income report in the new series. I wanted to start these up again because:

1. There's so much to learn about food blogging and if I can share with you something that I've learned that will help you and your blog; I'll be stoked.
2. My goal is to grow The Endless Meal into a full-time job, and I'm hoping that these income reports will force me to look at the nitty gritty of what is working, and what isn't.
3. I'd love to inspire you to start a food blog of your very own. Will you join me and become a fellow food blogger? 🙂

Let's hit the numbers.

Income

• Gourmet Ads – $323.10
• Conversant – 185.40
• Sovrn – $206.21
• SRAX – $9.17
• Adsense – $13.09
• Sponsored Posts/ Photography/ Recipe Licensing – $300
• Switch Ads – $4.38
• Triplelift – $0.31

Total Income: $1,041.66

Expenses

• Media Temple (web hosting) – 45.83
• Mailchimp – $25
• OptinMonster $21
• BoardBooster – $5
• Vaultpress – $5

Total Expenses: $101.83

TOTAL PROFIT: $939.83

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

Knowing your blog's RPM is essential to understanding how profitable your blog is. RPM is an acronym that stands for Revenue Per Mille, or revenue per thousand pageviews.

To calculate your blog's RPM you can use this simple formula:

Total Profit ÷ Total Pageviews x 1000 = RPM

To calculate The Endless Meal's RPM for June the formula looks like this:

939.83 ÷ 185,986 x 1000 = $5.05

If you read last month's blog income report, you might have noticed that The Endless Meal's RMP decreased by almost $1.00. Even though that's a significant number, it is not one I'm overly worried about. Most of that difference came from a decrease in the income from sponsored posts /photography/ recipe licensing. I'm currently looking at ways to increase this revenue stream, and will share what I learn along the way with you.

What's Working

Roughly halfway through July I started using OptinMonster‘s lead generation software to help increase email subscribers. I'm going to wait until I have a full month's worth of data before I tell you all about it. But for now I'll say this: it's working amazingly.

What's Not Working

AdSense. Google AdSense uses both CPM (Cost Per Mille, or the amount you earn per thousand pageviews) and CPC (Cost Per Click, or the amount you earn each time someone clicks on an ad). The Endless Meal used to get decent enough CPM and CPC from Google AdSense to keep them on as a third-tier network, but not anymore. They've been so low for me that I don't feel there's any benefit in continuing to work with them.

For now I have replaced Google Adsense with some in-house ads to both the How to Start a Food Blog page and the 10 Photography Tips for New Food Bloggers page.

 

June's Traffic Overview

 

Top 10 Traffic Sources

 

Top 10 Best Performing Pages

If you're like me, you're probably thinking, ” Holy spicy chicken fingers, Batman!” If you're way cooler than me (which I have no doubt you are) you're totally not thinking that, though.

All cheesy sayings aside the Sweet and Spicy Paleo Chicken Fingers post has gone viral. It consistently ranks as The Endless Meal's #1 top performing page.

The real question is: What causes a post to go viral? And the real answer is: That's a tough one to answer.

While there's no magic formula for creating viral posts, there are several steps you can take to increase your chances.

1. Create quality content. This should go without saying but the better the content you create, the more likely it is that it will be shared. Before pressing ‘publish' on a post think to yourself, “Would I share this?”
2. SEO, baby! All of the top 10 best-performing web pages show up high in Google rankings. I recommend installing Yoast SEO Plugin.
3. Include at least one vertical image in your blog post. Vertical images stand out the best on Pinterest and are the most frequently repinned.
4. Create new content on a regular basis. The more content you have more likely it is that one of your posts will go viral.

Thank you!

Thank you for sticking around to the end of this month's blog income report. If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear from you in the comments section below!