In this post you will find out how I made $4 612 from food blogging and what I'm doing to grow my traffic even further. I hope you will get as much value from these, as I have from other bloggers' income reports! Find all the income reports here.
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Why do I share my income reports?
I decided to start sharing my income reports for four reasons:
- Keep myself accountable! What better way to make sure I reach my goals, than to share them with you?
- Give back! I've found so much value from other bloggers' income reports over the years, it's time I started sharing what's working for me as well!
- De-mystify blogging! Food blogging is a marathon, not a sprint - and entirely possible to succeed with.
- I love sharing my journey! And I hope you enjoy following along.
February 2023 Recap
February is usually when my traffic starts to decline after the Q4 holiday & January healthy recipes + air fryer boost. This year was no exception, but the decline was not at all as large as I had anticipated. I also saw RPMs that were better than what I had even hoped for.
All in all, a great month where I tested out some new tools & strategies. Below you'll find what I did, more specifically.
Published 3 new recipes:
Re-published 1 recipe with new photos:
Other things I did:
- Updated 7 recipes
- Started publishing to MSN with the help of The Insiders mastermind program*
- Published 8 slideshows to MSN
- Hired a VA to help with e-mail - she's been setting up quick start sequences, moved my whole e-mail list to ConvertKit, and started sendin out weekly e-mails. Click here if you haven't signed up for my newsletter yet!
February 2023 Traffic
I share both current figures and where I was a year ago, as I find it encouraging to see the progress I'm making even when it feels like I'm not where I want to be... yet!
| February 2023 | February 2022 | Growth | |
| Page views | 227 979 | 130 997 | 74% |
| Sessions | 198 555 | 113 318 | 75% |
| Users | 161 751 | 92 530 | 75% |
Traffic Sources
Organic search: 79%
Direct: 11%
Referral: 6%
Socials: 4%
Demographics
US: 54%
UK: 22%
Canada: 8%
Australia: 5%
Other: 11%
February 2023 P&L
Let's see what this traffic brought me in terms of monetary results!
February 2023 Income
I make almost all my income from AdThrive through display ads on my website.
| February 2023 | February 2022 | Growth | |
| RPM | $19.63 | $17.75 | 11% |
| RPS | $22.56 | $20.32 | 11% |
| Total Ad Income | $4 474 | $2 245 | 99% |
RPM is what I make per 1000 pageviews, RPS is what I make per 1000 sessions.
I also make a very small income from affiliate programs*:
Amazon: $37.90
Other affiliate: $100
Total income: $4 612
February 2023 Expenses
I run my own business full time and divide my time between food blogging and business consulting. Here I only include the expenses that are directly related to my food blog - other shared expenses like cell phone costs, company car, new computer, etc. are not included here.
(This section contains Affiliate links. Affiliate links are marked with *.)
Groceries: $411
Nerdpress: $379 (these guys are my lifesavers!!)
SEMrush: $117
Keysearch: $14
RankIQ*: $29 (RankIQ helped me 3X my traffic in 6 months!)
Lightroom & Premiere Pro: $45
Feast Plug-in*: $8
Big Scoots hosting*: $48
Mailchimp: $41 (switched this month)
ConvertKit: $24
Canva* (for making collages & printables): $10
Akismet (site security): $7.50
Jetpack: $2.50
Virtual Assistants: $850
Total expenses: $2 319
February 2023 Profit
| Income: | $4 612 |
| Expenses: | -$2 2319 |
| Profit: | = $2 293 |
The profit above does not take into account taxes.
While it's not enough for me to live on quite yet, it does pay for my rent & my very expensive horse riding hobby!
Goals and Plans for March 2023
I'm really excited about March and especially to see what posting on MSN will do for me when it comes to both SEO (backlinks), traffic and additional income.
March Goals
Pageviews: 230 000
Total income: $5 000
March Action Plan
- Post 1 new recipe per week for a total of 4 posts
- Update 2 posts per week for a total of 8 posts
- Create 1 new resource per week for a total of 4 resources
- Publish one MSN slideshow per day during this month
I hope you got some value out of this income report. If you did - please leave a comment below and let me know what was most valuable to you! And if you have any questions, please reach out through commenting or by sending an e-mail to emmeline@alwaysusebutter.com
What are you most excited about for the coming months?
Emmeline
Delia Gallucci
Having read this I thought it was really enlightening. I appreciate you taking the time and energy to put this short article together. I once again find myself personally spending way too much time both reading and posting comments. But so what, it was still worthwhile!
Rachel
What would you say is your biggest tip to help growing your session numbers? Keep producing content and live by the "if you had 100 posts, 20 sessions each would give you 2000 sessions a day?" mentality?
Emmeline Kemperyd
Good question! I'm definitely not one to go for as many posts as possible, at least not any more. It takes so much time to create a recipe post that it needs to have the potential to bring in a lot of traffic. If not today, then in a few years.
If I can give just one tip - I'd say link building. If you spend 10 hours creating one post, you might get traffic to that post. But if you spend 10 hours building links - both to individual posts and to your main page - you will over time increase the traffic to all or most of your posts. I'm not saying to not create new posts and update old posts - especially updating can be very rewarding vs the time spent. But to also spend a decent amount of time on getting links and not just hoping it will happen by itself. It might, in time, but you can make it happen so much faster. I started out doing this through roundup groups on facebook, and lately I've moved to using The Insider's Mastermind group for this instead as it gives me higher DA backlinks. If you want to try it out I think they still have a $1/month trial for the first 3 months: https://gumroad.com/a/480360659/dQWfTe
Let me know if you have any more questions! 🙂
/Emmeline