This Food Blog Income Report is part of a series, documenting the income and traffic my blog, elizabethchloe.com, receives in an average month. I discuss things I’ve learned and goals as I grow and move forward. So take a seat and let’s take about what happened in March!
I can’t believe March has come and gone and we’re past the first quarter of the year! When did that happen! March has been a funny month for me in regards to blogging, my focus has been a little all over the place and I think my content and blog is reflecting that – at least it feels that way to me!
I’m going to keep this income report a little more succinct and to the point, but if you’d like more information on why I’m writing these income reports and what I hope to get from them then you should definitely check out January’s Food Blog Income Report and maybe Februarys too!
With that in mind, let’s crack on!
The March Income & Traffic Report
The Income Breakdown
Gourmet Ads: $15.96
Google Adsense: $9.01
Amazon Affiliates: $0.72
Siteground Affiliate: $0
Food Blogger Pro Affiliate: $0
Nutrifox Affiliate: $0
Pinch of Yum eBook Affiliate: $0
StudioPress Affiliate: $0
Tailwind Affiliate: $0
WP Tasty Affiliate: $0
The Traffic Breakdown
Total: $25.69 (£19.68)
Total RPM
RPM = Revenue per mille aka how much you earn per thousand pageviews aka (earnings/pageviews) x 1000.
RPM: $2.98 (£2.28)
SEO Traffic
One of the things I am unbearably proud of this month is the traffic I am seeing from Google! Considering I only really learned about search engine optimization (SEO) towards the end of January, the growth I am seeing now is amazing! I put this all down to optimizing my content to make it keyword rich and well structured. In January my traffic from Organic Searches was 370, in February we hit 532 and now in March, I’m receiving 1082 users from Google alone! That’s more than double! I’ve worked hard on optimizing my content and I’m really glad to see it is paying off. I’m not in the number 1 spot for any of my recipes as of yet, but quite a few are now on the front page. Success! In fact, my Moroccan Vegetable Tagine Recipe is my third highest bringer of traffic (that’s after my Mediterranean Roasted Vegetables with Mixed Grains and Feta recipe and my Fried Halloumi with Roast Carrot and Chickpea Couscous recipe – all of that traffic coming from Pinterest) and that’s all from google! It’s a drop in the ocean compared to some bloggers but it means a lot to me 😁
Now, Pinterest has always, without question been my number one source of traffic. I have probably two recipes that went viral(ish) early on in my blogging career and they’ve not really lost a whole lot of momentum since (Thank you Pinterest Gods!). I use Tailwind to schedule posts, to loops my posts and to take full advantage of their tribes feature. Tailwind tribes are absolutely fantastic for getting your content shared by other bloggers. Find a tribe that suits your niche, post one of your own pins into the tribe and make sure to share someone else’s. That’s it!
While I’ve had a lot of success with that I wanted to see if I could build on that in March. Plain image pins, which is what I have been pinning so far, are great but maybe not as eye-catching as the other pins you see on Pinterest. So one day I sat down and created completely new Pinterest graphics with text on. I’m really happy with how they look (see below!) but I’ll have to wait and see in April if they make more of an impression. There’s another part of me that is considering making some ‘long pins’ and trialing them out, but that’s a discussion for another time!
As well as creating new pins this month, I have also made an effort to join more Pinterest group boards with some success! Group boards can be another great way of getting your content seen by lots of different Pinterest users, although with their constant algorithm changes, this method is become less successful that it was in the past. Nevertheless I don’t think it can hurt! We’ll have to see if it’s made much of a difference next month!
Affiliate Links
As you can see from my income I earnt next to nothing from my affiliate links this month. Now, so far I have earned nothing from the affiliate links I’ve placed on my Blogger Resources Page. I kind of accept that. It needs a little bit of love and some proper sharing on social media – It’s on my to-do list I swear! But this month I’ve also noticed my Amazon Affiliate income go down. There are probably some very valid reasons for this, like people just not feeling super spendy in March, but one thing I have done as I’ve been updating my content for SEO is to change how I deliver my affiliate links.
As I’ve been updating my posts I’ve been including native shopping ads. Those are the image and text links you can see linking to certain Amazon products that I use/recommend for each recipe. Withing the recipe post I’ve been including a section called ‘You may also need…’ which includes these native ads. I’ve been including these above the recipe card, normally after the process shots and recipe FAQ. My thoughts are that because this ad box is in the middle of the text, people aren’t really giving it much attention. Instead, they are scrolling down to see the recipe and missing the native ads, which could be one reason why people aren’t clicking. My plan for April is to rethink how I use native ads to make them more clickable to users. If you’d got any thoughts on that let me know in the comments!
Goals for April
As I’m writing this it is 22nd of April, so maybe I’m a little bit late to be discussing what I plan to do! Nonetheless I can tell you my main goals have been to continue working on SEO, getting out content and actually being a little more organised! Although perhaps seeing that this was written on Easter Monday I think it’s safe to say the organisation goal may have gone out of the window a little… I’m working on it though guys!
Let me know if you have any questions, curiosities or advice by leaving a comment – I love to know what you think!
And if you’d like to check out more in this series head to one of the links down below!
The Food Blog Income Report Series:
Food Blog Income Report: January 2019
Food Blog Income Report: February 2019
Food Blog Income Report: March 2019
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