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In this post you will find out how I made $7 674 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 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.
May 2023 Recap
May was another great month. Organic traffic was down slightly vs April - likely due to the "summer slumpe" - but MSN more than made up for it. In the end May was my best month yet - both traffic and income wise.
I kept creating a lot of slideshows for MSN - at least 1 new per day - and also tried to keep up and get ahead with all the other things like creating new posts and updating old ones.
More specifically, this is what I did this month:
Published 4 new recipes:
Published 3 new SEO:d resources and roundups:
- April 2023 Income Report
- 20 Light Dinner Ideas for Summer
- What to Serve with Fried Rice - 30 Easy Ideas!
Other things I did:
- Updated 6 recipes
- Created 30+ new slideshows for MSN
- Republished older slideshows on MSN
May 2023 Traffic
| April 2023 | April 2022 | Growth | |
| Page views | 317 450 | 112 700 | 182% |
| Sessions | 251 087 | 97 138 | 158% |
May was my best month yet and it blows my mind that I finally had a month over 300 000. And by quite a bit!
As you can see my page views grew more than my sessions. This is great! It means that every time a person clicks over to my site, they visit more pages than before. Users clicking over from MSN are especially good at this!
Traffic Sources
Organic search: 66%
Referral: 20% (a lot of MSN traffic is grouped here)
Direct: 12%
Socials: 3%
My organic traffic % has gone down - a year ago it was 74%. This is great and a goal of mine for this year. The more even the % between the different sources, the better, and the less vulnerable I am to changes in specific algorithms.
Demographics
US: 63%
UK: 17%
Canada: 6%
Australia: 4%
Other: 10%
My US traffic % has grown a lot (it was 54% a year ago) thanks to MSN traffic. This is also great, as it means higher RPMs.
May 2023 P&L
Let's see what this traffic brought me in terms of monetary results!
May 2023 Income
| April 2023 | April 2022 | Growth | |
| RPM | $30.40 | $20.26 | 50% |
| Page RPM | $24.05 | $17.69 | 36% |
| Total Ad Income | $7 608 | $1 919 | 296% |
The increase in RPM goes against the trend in the market - most bloggers see lower RPMs this year. My increase is a lot thanks to my MSN traffic. It's mainly US based, on desktop, and they visit more pages once they arrive on my site.
I've also made income from MSN but I don't get those numbers until earlliest end of July. It should be somewhere around $3 000, but I won't include it until I know for sure. This means May was in reality probably my first month above $10 000 - this has been a MASSIVE goal of mine.
Amazon: $65.75
Total income: $7 674
May 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.
Groceries: $519
Nerdpress: $379 (these guys are my lifesavers!!)
The Insiders Mastermind: $395 (this is how I can publish to MSN!)
Keysearch: $14
RankIQ*: $29 (RankIQ has really helped me grow my traffic!)
Lightroom & Premiere Pro: $45
Feast Plug-in*: $8
Big Scoots hosting*: $48
ConvertKit: $41
Canva* (for making collages & printables): $10
Akismet (site security): $7.50
WP Recipe Maker: $7
Jetpack: $2.50
VAs: $520
Total expenses: $2 025
April 2023 Profit
| Income: | $7 674 |
| Expenses: | -$2 025 |
| Profit: | = $5 649 |
The profit above does not take into account taxes.
Now this is money I can work with.
Goals and Plans for June
Last month before summer holidays, and I plan to push to the end!
June Goals
Pageviews: 330 000
Total income: $8 500 ad revenue
June Action Plan
- Post at least 4 new recipes
- Post at least 4 new resources & roundups
- Publish 4 slideshows in total to MSN - combo new & updated
- Find a new VA to help me with web stories, facebook, and more
- Find a writer to write AP posts and guest posts on other sites for me
- Shoot all recipes until end of September to be well ahead after summer holidays
- Write posts at least until end of August - hopefully I can finish September as well!
- BE SMART! MSN is giving great traffic and who knows how long this will be the case. It also gives great RPMs! So doubling down on that for now.
- Pack up my life! In the beginning of July I move me and the dog to a HOUSE!!!
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
All the best luck for June!
Emmeline
Alex
Hi Emmeline! Congratulation on your 300k pv! That is a great milestone!
A quick question about MSN, is there a free way to sign up to the creator program? or only it is invite only and I need to get into a "mastermind group" where they are sharing the invite codes?
Emmeline Kemperyd
Hi Alex!
It used to be possible to sing up on your own, if you're located in the US - however I heard they closed that recently. Not sure. I signed up through a mastermind. It's not just getting a code through this group, you also get lots of tips, know-how and more to help you grow there - and a plugin that allows you to create slideshows, which I don't believe you can do on your own. Those I've heard who do it on their own have maybe 200k PV on MSN per month, I had almost 5 million in my third month, so it does make a difference how you do it.
And regarding cost - I made 15-20x the cost of the program in May in MSN ad revenue + additional traffic, and I'm just getting started.
Hope that helps!
/Emmeline