Monthly Income Report - February 2014

We’re in the money, the sky is sunny! We’ve got a lot of what it takes to get along!

I’m paraphrasing an old Depression-era song from the Depression-era movie, “The Gold Diggers of 1933.” And while I’m old (a Baby Boomer), I’m not that old! I’ve never seen the movie, but I do remember my grandmother, Dorothy, playing this song on the piano when I was a little girl. She loved to play the piano and sing to us when we were around…

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been posting these Monthly Income Reports for a year now! Anyway, after two months of no income, I’m happy to report that we are back in an upward trend and are hoping that this trend continues to climb! Where did our $27.72 come from? Two sources: $1.72 from My Recipe Magic and $26.00 for writing a guest post on another blog! Isn’t that wonderful?

Let me tell you a little about both:

My Recipe Magic

My Recipe Magic is a recipe aggregation site run by Six Sisters Stuff. The 6 sisters (yes, they are sisters!) started a blog a few years ago that has morphed into a powerhouse company. As bloggers, they understand how blogs make money and decided, early on, that content aggregation was the way to go. And, a natural fit for them, because their site was recipe-heavy, was to create a recipe site for others.

So, they encourage bloggers to load the blogger’s recipes into their site. Many recipe content aggregators allow you to do that. But, My Recipe Magic pays you to do that! They pay bloggers a small fee based on the number of views the recipe receives on their site. In addition, they pay bloggers if readers come into their site from the blogger’s site.

Genius! Don’t you think? They are encouraging people to load their site, but motivate them to do so by paying them! To my knowledge, no other site is doing this (yet). We only have 9 recipes in there at the moment because it is labor-intensive to load your recipes into other recipe sites. But, once the recipe is there, it creates the opportunity for “passive income” over-and-over-and-over again!

If the other sites aren’t paying us to load recipes on their site, why would food bloggers (and others, like craft bloggers) consider doing it? Because it gives them “inbound links” from other sites, which:

increases their Google “authority” level (importance)
increases the blog’s “Page Rank” with Google
and is a another way to maximize SEO (search engine optimization).

All important things to do, if you want your blog to grow. But, like I mentioned above, it is labor-intensive on most sites. Some sites will do it for you and I’ve mentioned them in earlier posts, which you can read here and here.

Guest Blogger Opportunity

After developing a relationship with AllFreeCasseroleRecipes.com, one of the editor’s (Emily) reached out to me and asked if I’d like to create a recipe for them, photograph it and write a guest post for them on their blog, Recipe Chatter. Since creating recipes is what I do normally, for me and for our blog, this is a natural fit! So, they pay me for the rights to post my recipe on their site! The compensation varies depending on the number of photos they use.

I have done three for them so far, but in February, I only received payment for one. Rest assured, I have been paid for the other two – I was just paid in March. So, that will reflect on my Monthly Income Report for March next month! Here are links to Recipe Chatter and the 3 guest posts I have done for them:

Other than compensation, why would a blogger decide to guest post on another site?

Exposure
Branding
Increasing reach
Community

Okay, enough about HOW we made money this past month, let’s talk about the numbers:

Google Analytics Audience Overview

We are down 18% in Visits, Unique Visitors and Pageviews compared to the month of January. Yes, January had 31 days and February only has 28 days, but factoring in those extra days, if that was a reason for the decline, we should only be down by 10%! So, I can’t use the January days vs February days as an excuse! And, you will notice that on February 24th, we had a huge uptick in traffic! Without that uptick, we’d be even further down compared to our January numbers.

So, what happened on February 24th to drive traffic to our site? AllFreeCasseroleRecipes included one of our recipes (Peach Pineapple Dump Cake) in one of their newsletters! Imagine that – a newsletter generated that huge amount of traffic to our site in one day! And, it broke our previous daily visit record!

Well, I’ve since learned that Prime Publishing has 5.3 million newsletter subscribers (they have multiple newsletters), so being featured in one of their newsletters is bound to drive traffic to your site! We are beyond thrilled and can’t thank them enough for sharing our recipe with their newsletter subscribers. They didn’t tell us they were going to include us and it’s a funny story how I found out about it – me emailing Editor Emily; but I’ll save that story for another time!

Google Analytics Acquisition Report

This report shows where our traffic is coming from. As you can see, Pinterest is still the number one referrer. But, Google Organic is not far behind and if you add lines 8, 9 and 10 to line 2 (all organic search engine results), Pinterest is only 257 visits higher than organic searches! This makes me happy! Why? Because people are searching for specific things and Google is sending them to our site!

AllFreeCasseroleRecipes is the 3rd largest referrer of traffic to our site (thank you Editor Emily!), representing 16% of the traffic referred to our site. For a small referrer when compared to Pinterest (but an offshoot of a much larger company), that number is enormous! Don’t get me wrong, AllFreeCasseroleRecipes’ parent company (Prime Publishing) is huge, garnering 65 million pageviews a month (compared to the 16,000+ we got this month). Can you just imagine what nurturing this relationship is going to do for our pageviews in the future? The sky’s the limit, sweet peeps!

Readers coming directly to our site is in 4th place. Visitors actually type in our URL! Imagine that! 1,200+ people actually typed our URL into their search engine making a conscious decision to visit us! That is so frickin’ awesome! A giant thank you to our readers and visitors!

In 5th place is My Honeys Place and in 7th place is Four Seasons Recipes, a sister company of My Honeys Place. I’ve talked about My Honeys Place before and you can read about them here. A big thank you to My Honeys Place, too!

In 6th place is RSS. This means that readers subscribe to us through a feed reader. A big thank you to that readership, too, who consciously decide to subscribe to us AND click through posts that appear on their feed reader and visit our site!

I love doing these reports – they make me smile and remind me how grateful I am to be able to have a blog and create content that people actually read (including these very long Monthly Income Reports)! Blogging is hard work and the financial rewards nebulous, but by analyzing the traffic data, it makes one feel grateful; at least it makes me feel grateful and continues to motivate me to keep blogging.

This is just a pie chart showing the total percentages discussed in the paragraphs above. Almost 60% of our traffic is derived from referrals.

Google Analytics Behavior Report

The Google Analytics Behavior report is about the closest thing you’ll get to a “key word” search report from Google these days. For privacy reasons, they don’t report what search words sent readers to your site. But, almost as good, they do show you where the reader landed. As you can see by the report above, all but two of the top 15 posts are recipe posts. The number one was our Peach Pineapple Dump Cake, which was featured in the newsletter I mentioned earlier.

Still going strong is my Coffee Banana Protein Smoothie, even though it’s the dead of winter! My Sweetheart Pie Crust Cookies got good exposure for Valentine’s Day and my Hot Mexican Corn Dip got a fair amount of exposure, too (Super Bowl?). Don’t have a clue why number 5 is blank. Maybe I’ll try to figure that out in the future, but if one of our readers can explain it, please share in the comments section!

Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet

I find the above report fascinating. Between “mobile” and “tablet” (6,408 visits or 55%), readers access our site more from smaller devices than from desktop computers! I’d read a report recently that mobile viewing of websites was approaching 50%, but it looks like we’ve exceeded it!

If mobile/tablet readers have any suggestions about how to make our website more “friendly” for their user experience, please let us know in the comments section and we’ll work on it!

Thanks to everyone for your continued support as we grow our blog! We appreciate each and every one of our visitors! Please subscribe to us via email, RSS or Bloglovin’ and follow us on Pinterest, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Instagram (yep; we try to be everywhere!).

And, thank you Emily…

Tootles,

(other Monthly Income Reports)

Comments

Tana - Your Marketing BFF says

March 10, 2014 at 9:18 am

Very interesting! And your relationship with AllFreeCasseroleRecipes is a great score. Keep up the good work!!!

- Carole says
  
  March 11, 2014 at 6:46 am
  
  Thanks, Tana! And, thanks for always being a great resource and friend!