September Blog Income Report

This is Kristen and I'm taking a break from creating recipes so I can share this month's food blog income report with you. You might be wondering why I'm sharing all the nitty gritty details of the income I earn through TEM, and it's a good question.

Back in March 2012, I started recording and sharing my blog's income with you for the first time. That month I made a whopping $12.67, and I thought it was awesome. Since then I have put a lot of time and effort into creating recipes, improving my photography and trying to make TEM the best that it can be. It's grown into an almost full-time job, with more than full-time hours.

I share these food blog income reports with you for a few reasons.

1. When I started food blogging four years ago there were very little online resources available for new food bloggers. I was interested in monetizing TEM early on, and I would have loved to see what someone else was doing. I hope that by sharing these reports you are able to learn a little something that will help you with your food blog.
2. I love food blogging. It began as a hobby and turned into a completely unexpected career. Since I started, I've never looked back. I would love to be able to inspire you to start your own food blog, too.
3. These income reports help to keep me accountable for the monetizing side of running a blog by forcing me to look over the nitty gritty each month.

Let's look at the numbers …

Income

• Gourmet Ads – $223.29
• Conversant – $279.00
• Sovrn – $352.85
• SRAX – $5.87
• Sponsored Posts/ Photography/ Recipe Licensing – $400
• Switch Ads – $149.06
• Say Media – $5.54
• Gamut – $8.47
• Triplelift – $1.20
• Infolinks – $1.66
• Affiliate Sales- $38.10

Total Income: $1465.04

Expenses

• Media Temple –  $45.83 – My web hosting company – they are AWESOME!
• MailChimp – $50 – The company I use to send my newsletter updates
• OptinMonster $21 – Popup plugin and sign up forms
• BoardBooster – $5 – Pinterest scheduler
• Vaultpress – $5 – Backs up all TEMs files
• Codeable – $172.50 – WordPress Outsourcing Service
• SurveyMonkey – $30

Total Expenses: $329.33

TOTAL PROFIT: $1134.05

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.

RPM stands for Revenue Per Mille. It represents the amount of money your blog makes per one thousand (mille) pageviews. To calculate your blog’s RPM, you can use this simple formula:

Total Profit ÷ Total Pageviews x 1000 = RPM

If your blog had 10,000 pageviews and earned $100 then your RPM would be $10.

$100 ÷ 10,000 x 1000 = 10 RPM

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What's working

This month The Endless Meal had a big time fail. It was brutally slow for four days and was completely offline for another. As a fellow blog owner, I know you understand the stress caused by your site going down. It's an awful feeling, and I know you get it.

The thing is, technical problems will happen and your site will go down. And unless you're a developer or a tech wizard, you will need help.

I'm sharing this because I want to give a shout out to, and let you know about, two great companies. The first is my hosting company, and the second is an outsourcing service.

Media Temple

Earlier this year I switched to Media Temple as my hosting company. I wanted a hosting company that offers fast and reliable hosting + excellent customer service. I've been impressed with them from the beginning. When problems arrive it is so important to be able to contact your hosting company and get a fast response. With Media Temple, I can pick up the phone and someone is always there to help. Their techs go out of their way to help problem solve and fix the issue I've had. Trust me, it's not like this with every hosting company.

Media Temple was able to find and repair a few issues that had come up that were causing TEM to go offline. They also found a whole slew of PHP errors that were causing the pages to load very slowly.

Codeable

Fixing PHP errors is something that is more technical than I'm comfortable dealing with, so I reached out to Codeable. Codeable is an online outsourcing service for WordPress experts. Basically, they have experts that you can hire when you need technical support for your WordPress site.

I was seriously impressed with their service. I was able to get all my initial questions answered immediately and found and hired a developer within minutes of posting the job. The developer, Anthony Brown, found the source of the issues and had TEM running smoothly within hours.

Dealing with this issue this month made me realize the importance of having reliable and effective support to reach out to when problems arrive.

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What's not working

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Back in 2012, I put the first few ads in TEM's sidebar, and they have remained there ever since. Expecting to get better results puts me dangerously close to insanity.

I've decided to make some big changes to the ad placements on TEM. For the month of October, I have removed all but the bottom (which is my highest performing) sidebar ad. Two of the sidebar ads have been moved in-post and the leaderboard ad from the very top of the page has been moved between posts excerpts on the homepage.

In an attempt to reduce the number of ads, and hopefully increase page load times, I have removed one sidebar ad and the below ad post completely.

It is too early to comment on how this test is performing, but make sure to read next month's income report to find out how it goes.

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Thank you for reading this month's Food Blog Income Report. I truly appreciate you being a part of this food blogging journey.

If you have any questions or comments please say hi in the comments section below!