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Food Blog Income Report and Food Blog Traffic Report numbers for April 2021. Learn how we achieved over 1700 page views after only two full months!
Welcome to Cooking with Carbs’ monthly Food Blog Income Reports. Today’s post will be the Food Blog Income and Blog Traffic Report for April 2021. While the majority of the posts on this site are written by Cooking with Carbs chef/recipe creator Anneke Silva, the posts in the blogging section will be written by me: her husband Isuru.
If you would like to find our previous income and traffic reports or start from the beginning of our journey, please find the link below:
Month 1: March 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Blog Posts 28 / Sessions 474 / Profit -$2,236.59 (Q1)
Continue reading to learn how we passed 1100 sessions and 1700 page views in our second full month!
Blog Traffic Report – Google Analytics Data Analysis
This section will be in each food blog income report and will contain a deep dive deeper into Google Analytics. As I get more data I hope to explore more areas of the Google Analytics dashboard, but in today’s post I will focus on the Audience Overview, Users Overview, and Traffic Source/Medium.
For more information on where to find the relevant information in Google Analytics and definitions of relevant terms, refer to our First Food Blog Income Report.
One important figure to note before diving into the traffic numbers is the number of blog posts on our site, as all of our figures are tied to the amount of content on the site. This month we wrote 14 posts and finished the month with a total of 42 blog posts.
Users Overview for April 2021
This month our referral traffic increased from about 13% of our total traffic to above 27%. The main reason for this is our contributions to food recipe sharing site foodgawker. Foodgawker is competitive and the review process is slow, but we have managed to have 100% of our images approved so far (2 every 2 weeks). Each approved image seems to bring in about 50-100 monthly visits the month it’s approved, but it tails off after that.
The image below compares our March 2021 and April 2021 User Overview numbers. April experienced a significant gain in users compared to March (130% gain, up to 720). This overall gain is in large part due to a large boost in referral traffic from foodgawker (as mentioned above) as well as growing organic traffic from google (104% increase).
In addition to growth in referral and organic traffic, we also experienced a 63% growth in Social Traffic, the majority of which is due to our activity on various FB groups, blogger groups and food blogger groups.
Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for April 2021
We’re quite happy with our traffic this month and the fact that we cracked 1000 (over 1100 in fact!) sessions in only our second full month!
With 1101 sessions in April, we experienced over 130% growth month over month and 80% growth in total page views at 1718. Although our sessions and page views went up, our pages/session and session duration both went down. This is likely due to traffic coming from FB groups as these users will likely just visit one page quickly and bounce.
Most of our users and visitors continue to be new , which is to be expected for a new site. Our mobile users are still lower than I would expect for a food blog. Some articles have mentioned that a low mobile user rate may be indicative of poor mobile user experience so this may be something to monitor moving forward.
Food Blog Traffic Report: All Traffic Source/Medium for April 2021
From the above table it is clear that a significant majority of our traffic comes from direct traffic, foodgawker and facebook.
Although many of the above sources include “/ referral”, those originating from a social networking site are categorized as social, whereas the others (foodgawker, yummly) are categorized as referral.
The chart above aims to give a clearer picture of the traffic distribution by grouping all sources for the various social networks together (ie: m.facebook, i.facebook and facebook all grouped as All Facebook). The largest segments of our traffic are split evenly across direct traffic, foodgawker and facebook.
Foodgawker had significant growth (405%) into April, but moving forward that total will likely be the most for any month. Our plan is to post 12 food blog posts per month, however, foodgawker only seems to review/approve at most 4 posts a month so we will have to choose our best photos for submission.
One area we are happy about is our Pinterest growth at 256%. Although this traffic source is still small, it is also very time consuming, so seeing growth here is a welcome sight!
Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for April 2021
Google Search Console, like Google Analytics, is a free service offered by Google. This tool links to your website/domain and provides invaluable data on how your blog is doing in google search results.
The Google Search Console results can help you find queries that people are inputting into google that result in either search impressions of your blog posts (people see your result in google) or better yet clicks to your blog post (people see your result in google AND click it).
The above table shows total google clicks and google search impressions since our website started in February. From this graph we can see a strong upward trend in total google impressions, though clicks seem to be much more variable.
April saw considerably stronger results from Google than prior months. The number of clicks increased significantly (150%) as did the total impressions (215%). In the short term I will be more focused on SEO and ensuring growth in impressions (the better the SEO –> the more keywords we rank for –> the more impressions). The next step would be to find search queries with high impressions but low click rates and try to optimize those (better more engaging titles? better google preview text? rich text picture or ratings?)
I’ve also started tracking the number of search queries with over 50 impressions or 5 clicks. This will help monitor to see if there are any new queries that weren’t relevant in prior months, or if we lost some that we were previously performing well in.
Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for April 2021
Instagram continues to be the social platform with the largest following, at 1547 followers at the end of April. Our Pinterest account is much smaller but saw a 289% increase in followers over the course of April, up to 70 followers. If you would like updates on future income reports, please follow us on Pinterest!
The website freebie is still in progress, so email growth has been very slow in the last month. Getting a freebie up on the site to encourage email subscribers will be the next short term step. Our previous plan was to use an ebook as a freebie but we are now leaning more towards conversion charts.
Food Blog Income Report for April 2021 – Expenses and Revenues
In this section I will outline the numbers behind our Food Blog Income Report. Unfortunately at this point calling it a food blog expenses report is likely more fitting, as we don’t have any income to report for April (Spoiler!).
One-Time Expenses: $1,018
The vast majority of our expenses this month were one-time expenses and rather large expenses as well. The first, and most important, was spending money to make our blog legally compliant. My wife, the chef and recipe maker of this blog, is actually a lawyer so she understands the importance of protecting our blog from a legal perspective.
Legal Template: After comparing a number of options, including many free templates, we chose to purchase legal templates from Amira at aselfguru.
We chose the premium legal bundle that comes with an easy to use privacy policy template, disclaimer template and terms & conditions template that every blog should have. It also comes with a few other documents, including a sponsored post contract template and guest blogger agreement template that we hope to use in the future.
The peace of mind alone was easily worth the cost, which is FAR less than what my wife said going to a lawyer would cost. They also have a starter legal bundle which is valued at over $2,500 but sells for a fraction of that cost!
Education: One of our goals for April was also to learn SEO, so we spent over $100 on education in the form of SEO ebooks. We purchased Debbie Gartner’s ebooks on On-Page SEO, Backlinking and Google Analytics.
Cooking Gear Tools: We had one final expense which really put a big dent in our one-time expenses for the month. I wavered on if it should be included, but it is food related and we purchased it for blogging purposes (though it will be for family use too!).
After much deliberation we spent about $670 on a Gozney Roccbox Pizza Oven. Once we get more recipes and practice using it we aim to start doing Friday Pizza Days where we re-live our childhood School Pizza days and post a Pizza recipe once a week every Friday.
Recurring Expenses: $58.95
Mediavine Grow Plugin – We purchased this plugin this month for sharing our page. It allows for easy sharing and also shows you how many shares a post has received which is nice. It costs $34/year which is pretty affordable relative to $700 pizza ovens.
Jetpack Backup – We are using Jetpack Backup to backup our website daily, at a cost of $9.95/month.
Education – We subscribed to MasterClass due to the number of both cooking and photography courses. The courses are great. The only obstacle at this point is finding the time to watch them! This costs $15/month.
Lessons Learned Regarding Expenses/Spending
Lesson for the month: Education is worth the money!
I see a lot of bloggers posting in various FB groups about trying to start a blog but not wanting to spend money. I just can’t get behind this mindset. Ultimately any dollar spent should come down to whether the Return on Investment is worth it.
Is a $300 course worth it? That depends on what you will gain. If it will help you learn SEO and thus will help you get onto Ezoic or Mediavine 4-5 months earlier than otherwise (where you will presumably make at least $100/month), then yes of course it’s worth it.
We’re still in the early stages, so it’s hard to say conclusively if any course so far has been worth it, but the mindset on expenses should still come down to ROI.
Was the $700 pizza oven a good ROI? Well that’s a different story. The lesson of the month was that education was worth the money. Not necessarily Pizza ovens!
Revenue from April 2021 (How do food blogs make money?!)
TOTAL REVENUES: $0.00
Well that’s a shame. After having some minimal revenue last month, we’re back down to $0. We had one sale that seems to have been returned, so the commissions from Amazon went with it.
I’m really not concerned with revenue at all at this point. I’m focused on traffic first. I know once we get the traffic, we can convert that into revenue and it’s just a conversions game. How to optimize the traffic we get into subscribers or purchasers. But if traffic is low it doesn’t matter how well you convert, your revenue will be low.
The goal for this year will continue to be content, getting 3 posts out a week and hopefully end the first year at around 150-160 posts. With that I know we will have the traffic and the revenue will come.
Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals
Short Term Goals:
We had a number of short term goals for April (6) and we accomplished 4 of them which isn’t so bad.
Goal status:
- We added Legal Templates as was discussed above
- We pivoted away from Digital Cookbooks and may look into free printables as the freebie. In progress.
- Tied to above, we need to add a popup for the freebie to encourage subscribers.
- All blog pages have fixed amazon links to the short form and opening in new tabs.
- Grow plugin was added.
- We joined some affiliate programs but that is still in progress.
New Goals:
- Finish digital freebie and popup
- Catch up on Pinterest Pins. I had scheduled ~ 6 pins on my earlier set of posts that have long been pinned. I would like to go back to these posts and create some fresh pins but I’m way behind (20+ posts behind probably!). Lots of pins to be made.
- I would like to write a blogging post about an affiliate program I strongly believe in. I will likely focus on Amira’s legal pages first.
Long Term Goals:
We had a number of Long term goals for April (6) and we accomplished 1 of them which isn’t so bad given these are intended to be longer term.
Goal status:
- The only long term we accomplished was improving our SEO knowledge. As was mentioned above we purchased a few SEO ebooks and implemented those findings. The one area we haven’t implemented is backlinking as that is far more challenging than simply optimizing on page content.
New Goals:
- We have some ideas about selling printables, conversion charts and templates, but this will require a digital store. There are a number of options to look into, including Gum Road, Send Owl and Etsy.
We will continue posting these Food Blog Income Reports monthly. While you’re here please visit some of our other blogging articles or delicious food recipes!
You can start at the beginning of our financial blogging journey here:
Month 1: March 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Blog Posts 28 / Sessions 474 / Profit -$2,236.59 (Q1)
Or check out the Income Report for next month!
Month 3: May 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Blog Posts 55 / Sessions 1708 / Profit -$859
