Monthly Income Report - January 2014

Welcome to our first monthly report of the new year! For our Monthly Income Report – January 2014, I’m sorry to share that we, yet again, made zero. Nada. Zilch! But, even though we made nothing from a revenue perspective (an important component when you are running a business), do you think we were sitting back on our heinies waiting for readers and opportunities to come to us?

No siree bob! We were busy, busy, busy and here’s the proof:

In the month of January, we almost doubled our traffic! Yes, we almost double it!!! Here’s December’s graph so that you can compare:

Visits: January 14,195 minus December 7,845 equals an increase of 6,350 visits (45%)
Unique Visitors: January 12,774 minus December 6,767 equals an increase of 5,977 unique visitors (47%)
Pageviews: January 20,282 minus December 12,205 equals an increase of 8,077 pageviews (40%)

I bet you are wondering what happened, huh? You want to know how we did it, don’t you?

Hard work.

Yep, plain and simple, we worked at it. Hard.

Here’s what we have come to realize: that in order to generate income on our beautiful, beloved blog (at least to us!), we need to increase our traffic. Highly successful blogs, generating thousands of dollars a month in revenue, have serious levels of traffic. And, if we are ever going to make any money, we need to increase our traffic. After all, even if we don’t ever make enough money to make a living at this, we at least want this blog to be self-supporting instead of a money pit {grin}!

So, how do you gain traffic and readership on a blog? By getting your blog featured on other sites that provide links back to you. Such as Pinterest.

The major driver of traffic to our site remains Pinterest. What are we doing on Pinterest to gain traffic? Creating pinnable content.

What does that mean? Well, food is one of the highest pinned items on Pinterest. This is good for us, because we really aren’t a fashion blog, a hair blog, a travel blog, an animal blog, a decorating blog, a design blog, a crafting blog – I could go on about what we are NOT, but you get the point.

So, we are making an effort to improve our photography, create pinnable (translation: vertical) pins of recipes. And, we are pinning our food to group boards on Pinterest.

Pinterest is really a numbers game. When you belong to a group board that has 10,000 followers, your pin is seen by thousands every time you pin it. If the photo is “pin-worthy”, it will get pinned by someone, who in turn has their own followers, etc. So, the potential of a pin going “viral” is better if you belong to several group boards and pin to those group boards. The beauty of recipe posts is that those pins often generate traffic to a site because the pinner wants the recipe.

I’m not sure how much traffic to other sites is generated by fashion, hair, travel, animals, decorating, design, etc. The only category that may be close to food in generating traffic from Pinterest to a website might be crafting/diy. Because, just like food, readers want to get the instructions!

Did I say I love Pinterest?

I love Pinterest!

We really didn’t consider ourselves to be a food blog, until last month when I ‘fessed up and said, yep, we are a food blog! We aren’t going to become solely a food blog, in that we aren’t going to post recipes every day instead of other types of posts, even if our traffic continues to be driven by our recipe posts. Because, in all honesty, creating a recipe post is 10 times more work than any other kind of post (except maybe a crafting/diy post) and we simply don’t have the time! Heck, we can only manage to do 2 recipe posts a week right now!

In addition to Pinterest, though, we’ve been exploring other ways to gain readership. The chart above lists 580 visitors from All Free Casserole Recipes that I’ve discussed in other reports (so refer to our other Monthly Income Reports for more details), but new to this month’s report is My Honeys Place, My Recipe Magic and Tasty Kitchen. I’ll talk about each of them separately.

There are quite a few “recipe content aggregators” on the web. Probably the one that readers are most familiar with is All Recipes because that site usually comes up first or near the top in a recipe search when your query a search engine. They allow readers to input recipes on their site doing two things: (1) having others input stuff on their site (so they don’t have to do it) and (2) gaining tractor because they have thousands and thousands of recipes put on their site by others. So, their content is highly “searchable” because of the volume of recipes on their site.

There are many others like All Recipes out there, all allowing readers to join and input their recipes. Because of the high traffic to these sites, they are making serious revenue through the advertising that runs on their sites.

However, with sites like All Recipes, the recipes are on their site in full. What I mean is that they are not “truncated” requiring readers/visitors to go somewhere else to get the recipe, like Pinterest does. So, for recipe food blogs, posting recipes on these type of recipe content aggregators is self-defeating.

But, there are many, many, many other recipe content aggregators out there (I’m developing a list!) that are “blogger friendly”. What I mean by that is those sites allow you to put your recipe on their site, but the recipe is “truncated” in that the entire recipe isn’t available on their site. Instead, they provide a link to your site. Usually on these sites, the recipe will include the ingredient list and then to get the entire recipe, you need to click over to the blog.

That’s what All Free Casserole Recipes does, as does The Best Dessert Recipes, My Recipe Magic and Tasty Kitchen.

My Recipe Magic is owned by Six Sisters Stuff. You may have heard of them. They are 6 sisters that started a blog about 3 years ago and they have skyrocketed in readership! They created the very blogger friendly My Recipe Magic site. The unique thing about My Recipe Magic is that they pay bloggers to post their recipes on their site. Isn’t that fabulous?

So, in addition to gaining traffic, bloggers get paid! It’s a very small amount (the information is available on their site), but over time, this could develop into a decent revenue stream. It definitely makes it worthwhile to add your recipe to their site.

Tasty Kitchen is owned by Ree Drummond, The Pioneer Woman. While she doesn’t pay bloggers to post recipes, she does truncate the recipes plus, she is so highly successful and receives millions of views a month that not posting recipes on her site is almost silly!

With both My Recipe Magic and Tasty Kitchen, you have to physically type the recipe into their site. So, it’s time-consuming and labor-intensive, but once it’s done, it’s done.

All Free Casserole Recipes and The Best Dessert Recipes are part of the Prime Publishing network. In addition to those sites, Prime Publishing has the following additional sites:

All Free Slow Cooker Recipes
All Free Copycat Recipes
Recipe Lion
Fave Healthy Recipes
Fave Gluten-Free Recipes
Fave Southern Recipes
Plus, they have their own blog, Recipe Chatter.

On all these sites, bloggers work with an editor to get their recipes featured. You email the editor a link to your post, the editor reviews it and decides whether or not its a fit. If it fits, the editor creates the post on their site and links back to your site. So, the work involved in dealing with all of Prime Publishing’s sites is negligible and certainly worth an email to an editor!

My Honeys Place is probably the easiest one to work with from a blogger’s perspective because all they require is that you provide a link to your recipe in their comments section. They do the rest. They only have 3 rules:

You can only submit one recipe link a day
It must link to an actual recipe and not a spammer-type site
It needs to have a useable photo available in the post that they can copy and add to their site.

My Honeys Place has a large Facebook presence and I suspect the traffic is driven through their Facebook page.

The way to find out which recipes on My Honeys Place are driving traffic to our site is to look at the Trackbacks report (above) on Google Analytics. Unfortunately, this report doesn’t “roll-up” in the same way as the other reports, so to show you a complete Trackbacks Report is problematic. But, this gives you a peek at how it looks. You can see that Gail’s Potato Chip Cookies were very popular on My Honeys Place.

So, why would a blog want to share recipes with these sites? Why wouldn’t a blog just want to keep their recipes all to themselves and not share? A couple of reasons:

Having links from other sites to your site increases your authority with Google and increases your search engine results, your page rank and a whole lot of other good things.
Having links from other sites to your site increases your traffic and brings new readers.

Both good reasons in my book! Here’s a look at what readers looked for when they came to our site in January:

Recipes! Only one, #10 – “12 Favorite Quotes of 2013”, is not a recipe!

By the way, this “food blogger” (me) loves doing these reports because I always learn so much from them while I’m doing the research to write them!

Lastly, I’d like to invite readers to follow us! Follow us on Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook. Plus, we’d really appreciate it if you would “Like” us on Facebook. We are trying to build our “likes” and “follows” on all the social media sites, because in order to get paying opportunities from other sources, they look at things like traffic number, Facebook Likes, Twitter followers and Pinterest followers.

And, you can “subscribe” to us several ways: via email, RSS, or through Bloglovin! You can also follow us on Google+, Instagram, StumbleUpon and Tumblr. But, with limited time in our day (I know, I know – we all have the same 24 hours!), we just aren’t yet very active in those arenas. You have to “pick you battles”! As time permits, we will keep increasing our presence in those areas, so stay tuned!

To all of you out there that are regular readers and read my incredibly long Monthly Income Reports, I thank you! Sending you a big hug…

Tootles,

(other Monthly Income Reports)

Related Posts:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply