>> Interested in learning more about blogging and getting these income reports sent to your inbox? Subscribe here!
Today we’re talking food blog income! If you’ve ever wondered how a food blogger makes money, are wanting to grow your traffic, or maybe even start a blog, these monthly blog income reports have tons of resources and tips. You can check out why we started these income reports in our first one (Monthly Blog Income Report – April 2017)! As a reminder, these monthly blog income reports are NOT about the money, but are instead a way for us to share how we’re reaching our goals as a business and what we’re doing to grow. They’re a way for us to be transparent with you guys in order to (hopefully) help you achieve your blogging goals!
If you have any questions or thoughts, be sure to let us know in the comments below (or email us over on the contact page). We want these reports to be helpful to you guys!
Here’s October’s Monthly Blog Income Report:
Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links. These are products that I’ve used before and stand behind!
INCOME:
- A Month Of Healthy Eats Paperback – $96.46
- Sponsored Posts (Ahalogy, Sway, Linqia, and brands) – $516.60
- A Month Of Healthy Eats Ebook – $19.11
- Amazon Affiliate – $80.97
- Mediavine Ads – $1,212.13
Total Income: $1,925
EXPENSES:
- Food – $114.14
- Facebook Ads – $91.60
- 1&1 Internet – $10.99
- Food Blogger Pro (paid yearly) – $0
- Active Campaign (paid yearly) – $0
- Tailwind (paid yearly) – $0
- CoSchedule (paid yearly) – $0
- Miscellaneous – $151.50
Total Expenses: $368
NET REVENUE: $1,557
This month, we invested a little more in photography! This included a few extra props (can never have too many props, right??) and new VSCO presets. Does anyone else use VSCO for their photos? We were using the film 4 presets for Lightroom before (and loved it), but recently switched over to using the new mobile presets (preset 1) since they’re similar to the mobile app. We absolutely love editing photos with VSCO!
Side note: several people have asked us what we’re using to take photos. We currently have a Canon 7D camera body and a Canon 50mm 1.8 lens! We are, however, highly considering upgrading to the 50mm 1.4 lens in the near future 😉 The 1.8 works really great and we’ve used it for over 2 years now, but we’ve heard that the 1.4 can get a little bit of a sharper image. For the price, however, the 1.8 is REALLY great. If you’re starting out as a photographer and don’t have a high budget, we definitely recommend the 1.8! And as far as learning photography, we really love the courses in Food Blogger Pro!
Traffic
Pageviews were higher than they’ve ever been this month – yay! Pageviews typically peak in October and then drop down in November and December (then skyrocket in January). This is because people aren’t as interested in healthy recipes around the holidays. Totally understandable! We’re taking this down time to work on some of the rebranding we talked about last month and design the new website.
Goals & Takeaways
Something we really want to work on this month is improving our email marketing! We love using Active Campaign for emails (read Cody’s section below). Our goal is to not only continue our RSS feed to subscribers, but find new ways to really provide value. This might include some sort of healthy eating challenge in the new year and/or sending them special freebies. To achieve this goal, we recently created a small automation that takes our new Jar Of Lemons subscribers through a process of freebies and information before we start sending them the usual RSS feed! (Subscribe here to see the automation!)
If you’re looking to really grow your email list, we have definitely found that having a freebie (like an ebook or download) has been helpful. Taking them through an automation has also helped with engagement as a next step!
Tools to design your RSS feed email
Hey, friends! Cody here. Excited to share something with you that you may or may not be familiar with. RSS emails! 🙂
They can be both amazing and frustrating at the same time. Amazing because they automatically take your blog post and distribute it to your audience in a schedule that you set up. Frustrating because taking a beautifully designed web page and turning it into an email that looks just as good is, well, difficult. Thankfully there are some tools out there that can make this process a bit easier.
We use two tools (although there are many others out there depending on what you want to accomplish):
Active Campaign
Active campaign is not only a really good email marketing tool, it’s also a really good customer relationship management tool. It can help you to deliver a better experience curated to your viewers by helping you build a profile and give them what they are looking for.
It also takes care of RSS feeds. We use active campaign to design and deliver our recipes each week to our followers.
While active campaign makes this easier you still have to do some work before to get a nice header image into your feed. Enter the Featured Image in RSS Feed plugin.
Featured Image in RSS Feed (free & paid versions)
By default, RSS feeds are mainly plain text with a logo. Some email marketing software can pull in images from within the post. The Featured Image in RSS Feed plugin, however, will pull in any image you have available for the post and place it as a header image for you. WIN! If this is something that is important to you then this plugin can help make life a bit easier.
That’s all for now, folks! If you’re interested in getting these income reports sent to your inbox every month, be sure to subscribe!
Have questions or thoughts about this month’s report (or blogging in general)? Be sure to let us know in the comments below!
Embankment Stairway says:
Oh my gooooooooosshhhhh!!! Such a great idea to do these posts. They are so relatable to newer bloggers, and this gave me a great benchmark. Not that we should compare ourselves to other bloggers, since every niche is so different. But it’s nice to have a ballpark! Thank you thank you thank you!!!!
Christine McMichael replied:
So glad you enjoyed the post! 🙂 I’m glad to hear that it’s helpful!
Aysegul Sanford says:
It is embarrassing to admit, but I do not have my RSS set up. But after reading this I am jumping on it. Thanks so much for sharing your valuable knowledge friends.
Cheers to you and your success!
Christine McMichael replied:
It took me awhile to get mine set up, so no worries! Love that you’re getting it set up, though. Thanks for stopping by, Aysegul!