Monthly Income Report - July 2014

Welcome to my Monthly Income Report – July 2014! Every month, I write a post about what Toot Sweet 4 Two earned in the previous month and include information on how I made money from my blog. I do this for a few reasons:

I’m inspired by other bloggers who do the same (primarily Pinch of Yum and Smart Passive Income)
It helps me to evaluate what I’m doing and how I can make improvements
I hope that it helps other bloggers learn more about the “business” of blogging!

Anytime I make more than double-digits on my blog, I deem it a successful month! This month I made $365.03 – woohoo! Here’s the breakdown on how I made this money:

$150.00 – Sponsored Post
$ 60.00 – Recipe Development
$153.00 – Guest Posting on other blogs
$ 2.03 – Affiliate advertising income from another site

So, you can see that none of this income is from directly “running” this blog! In other words, I did not receive any revenue this month from the three possible sources of “passive” income on this blog, which are:

Google AdSense
Amazon Affiliates and our Shop Toot Sweet site
Other affiliates running on the sidebar

Both Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliates (Shop Toot Sweet) require a minimum account balance of $100.00 before they send payment. So, while revenue is collecting under each, I only count revenue received, “in hand”, rather than earnings. So, when both revenue sources next send payments, those payments will reflect in a future report!

As respects the “other affiliates running on the sidebar”, currently there are two: Tasty Food Photography and Mom Blog To Money Blog. To make money from these two affiliates requires that visitors to my blog (1) click on their ads and (2) purchase their product. When that happens, I receive a commission from the sale. So far, I haven’t made any money from either of these affiliate links, but I’m hopeful that I will in the future.

I have a “theory” about why I’ve yet to make money from these two affiliates after more that a year of running their ads on my site: my visitors are primarily people interested in checking out my recipes and are not bloggers. Both of these affiliates are geared towards bloggers, or people who are thinking about becoming a blogger. But, as my traffic grows, I’m hopeful that these two affiliates will become sources of revenue.

Let’s look at this month’s numbers:

9,569 visitors came to my blog this month! That’s an average of 308 a day! Even though traffic is down from last month and significantly down from my all-time high of 14,308 visitors (in April), I’m thrilled that the graph above is, well, “steady”. I’m happy about that because I feel quite confident that 300+ a day in visitors is my “new normal” without me doing any additional significant work.

What I mean by that is that I’ve slowed down on social media the last several months and haven’t spent nearly the amount of time on social media as I used to. I plan to start again soon, but I’m working on other projects within this blog and want to get those projects done before I spend time doing social media. I want my site to operate in the best possible way that it can and have been concentrating my efforts there.

Are you curious about what I’ve been doing on my site? Here’s a list:

Re-sizing the photos. When Toot Sweet 4 Two went through a major site redesign in February 2013, all the photos were too big for blog’s redesigned margins. I’ve had to go in and manually fix every single photo. With over 4,000 photos on this site, it’s been a major project! But, I want visitors to have a good experience on my blog no matter which post they are reading; whether they are reading a post from 2012 or a newer post. This project is still not done, but I’m 85% finished!
Categorizing and tagging posts. I read a post by another blogger a few months ago that helped me to better understand “categories” and “tags”. After reading her post, I’ve gone through all 750+ blog posts and re-categorized and re-tagged them. In the past, I’d sometimes put a post under two different categories. For example: Dorothy’s Stuffed Mushrooms – I categorized it “Recipe” but also “Sweet Memories” because I talked about my grandmother. Assigning a post to two different categories on your blog can lead to a Google spider meltdown {grin}! Since I’ve taken the time to update all categories and tags, my Google “organic” traffic has grown from 24% in January to 34% in July!
Fixing recipes. I recently “audited” my recipes and discovered that 43 recipes did not have a “printable” recipe. When you click on the link to print the recipe, none of the ingredients or directions are on the printable copy! Only the name of the recipe and the photo! Well, I don’t want my visitors to not be able to get a printable recipe! That’s a biggie for me. I don’t know what happened, but maybe in one of the recent plugin upgrades something made them go haywire! There are still about 150 printable recipes on this site, but I want all the recipes to work! This project is slow-going and will probably take me many months, but it will get done!
Broken links. I recently installed the Broken Link Checker plugin and was surprised to see 50 broken links! I’ve fixed them all, thus far, but the link checker plugin is only about halfway through my site, so I expect it will find many more! How does that happen? Well, if you link to sites within your blog’s posts, there is always a possibility of the link breaking in the future. One way, for example, is for the website/blog to close down. Or, a restaurant that you’ve linked to going out-of-business and shutting down their website. Both have happened to links on this site. And, I want to fix any that I have because I want my readers to have the best possible experience they can have on my site and if that includes leading them to other sites, I want those links to work!
Working ahead. Yes, you can “schedule” a post to publish on a certain day. I’m going on vacation and I want my blog to keep publishing fresh content while I’m gone, so I’m working ahead!

So, I’ve slowed down on social media including Pinterest and that slow-down is reflected in diminished traffic. But, the good news is that it’s still a steady stream of traffic even though I haven’t “worked” the social media side of blogging!

Also, in past months, my traffic has spiked when one of my recipes was featured in a couple of newsletters from one of Prime Publishing‘s sites. To read more about my ongoing, productive and collaboration relationship with Prime Publishing, check out my earlier Monthly Income Reports (links provided below at the end of this post).

The 2 moderate spikes in the graph above (on July 2nd and July 18th) were fueled by visitors from Fave Healthy Recipes (a Prime Publishing site). They followed a link from Fave Healthy Recipes’ site to my recipe, Dorothy’s Stuffed Mushrooms, that I launched on this blog last year (September 26, 2013). A delicious stuffed mushroom recipe taught to me by my grandmother, Dorothy, I recreated it using olive oil instead of butter, whole grain bread instead of white bread and reduced fat cheese instead of full fat cheese. Still a great recipe and nothing was lost in the flavor department from these healthier substitutions.

Anyway, a photo of this recipe and a link back to this blog lives on Fave Healthy Recipes’ site and it drove a total of about 900 visitors to my blog! A “shout-out” and big thanks to Natalie, the editor over at Fave Healthy Recipes! I’m taking this time to share this information with readers to point out that link backs from other sites can, indeed, bring traffic. Like Pinterest does. So, if you can get a recipe or a post featured on another site, it’s a win-win!

The day I wrote this post (Sunday the 3rd), this is what I saw on Fave Healthy Recipes’ site:

The other thing I want to point out about recipes: they are “evergreen.” In other words, even though I wrote Dorothy’s Stuffed Mushrooms almost a year ago, it is still driving traffic to my site! Exciting, right?

This is the “Behavior” report in Google Analytics. What that means is where visitors land when arriving on your site. You can see that the majority of my visitors are coming to my site and landing on a recipe. So, they are either coming via Pinterest, one of the Prime Publishing sites or by doing an organic search using key words and landing on my site.

The “Acquisition” report above supports what I just mentioned above. Google Organic is #1, followed by Pinterest, followed by Fave Healthy Recipes. Three of Prime Publishing others sites, All Free Casserole Recipes, The Best Dessert Recipes and Recipe Lion, are also in the top 10.

I just wanted to take another moment and share one last report:

This is Google’s “Keyword Acquisition” report. This report used to provide more detail. Where it now says “not provided” under #1, instead it would show lists of key words similar to #2 through #10. Google is providing extremely limited keyword acquisition information. Google has put the kibosh on websites trying to figure which keywords or long tail key words drive traffic to their sites. What I’ve read is that Google is trying to further inhibit spammers from loading spam sites with key words to drive spam sites to the top of Google searches. So while it is frustrating for legitimate sites to no longer be able to harness this information for their marketing efforts, it’s a good thing overall.

Because, we certainly could all use less spam in our lives, right?

Tootles,

(other Monthly Income Reports)

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