• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Show Me the Yummy

  • Recipes
  • Breakfast
  • Lunch
  • Appetizers
  • Dinner
  • Dessert
  • About
  • Income
This Vegan Flourless Chocolate Cake Recipe is easy to make, gluten free, & is made w/ better for you ingredients to make a slightly healthier, fudge-y cake! showmetheyummy.com #vegan #flourless #chocolate #cake
Vegan Flourless Chocolate Cake Recipe
This creamy corn casserole tastes like an extra creamy cornbread that you eat with a spoon! It’s the perfect Thanksgiving side dish. The bonus? It’s so easy! Just dump all the ingredients together in a bowl, stir, and bake! https://showmetheyummy.com #thanksgiving #corncasserole
Corn Casserole
These Thai Peanut Noodles are made w/ ingredients you probably already have at home! They're easy to make, truly delicious, & take 10 mins to whip up! showmetheyummy.com #thainoodles #peanutnoodles
Thai Peanut Noodles Recipe
How about a steaming hot bowl of Slow Cooker Chicken Lentil Soup on a chilly day? This soup is easy, healthy, and has less than 350 calories per serving! showmetheyummy.com #slowcooker #chickenlentilsoup
Slow Cooker Chicken Lentil Soup
#ad This Healthy Turkey Taco Chili comes together in just over 30 minutes! It's healthy, gluten free, loaded with veggies and lean protein, and absolutely delicious! showmetheyummy.com #SwitchCircle #JennieO
Healthy Turkey Taco Chili Recipe
#ad These Parmesan Drop Biscuits are made with a secret ingredient - mayo! - and are ridiculously easy to make and even easier to eat! Especially when paired with a steaming hot bowl of Cheddar Broccoli Potato Soup. showmetheyummy.com Made in partnership w/ @idahoanfoods
Parmesan Drop Biscuits Recipe
People Also Viewed
This Vegan Flourless Chocolate Cake Recipe is easy to make, gluten free, & is made w/ better for you ingredients to make a slightly healthier, fudge-y cake! showmetheyummy.com #vegan #flourless #chocolate #cake
Vegan Flourless Chocolate Cake Recipe
This creamy corn casserole tastes like an extra creamy cornbread that you eat with a spoon! It’s the perfect Thanksgiving side dish. The bonus? It’s so easy! Just dump all the ingredients together in a bowl, stir, and bake! https://showmetheyummy.com #thanksgiving #corncasserole
Corn Casserole
Pre made biscuits are stuffed w/ pizza sauce, cheese, sausage/pepperoni & smothered in butter & pizza spices to make this gooey Stuffed Pizza Rolls Recipe! showmetheyummy.com #pizzarolls #sausagepizza
Stuffed Pizza Rolls Recipe
This Tom Kha Gai soup may not be 100% authentic, but I'd take this over take out any day! It's really easy to put together and it's a whole heckofalot cheaper than paying someone else to make it for you! This soup is a little limey, so creamy of the coconut milk, has a nice back heat from the cayenne, and is full of tender chicken! showmetheyummy.com #tomkhagai #soup #coconut #chicken #coconutchickensoup #spicy #thai #ethnic
Tom Kha Gai Soup (Coconut Chicken Soup)
These Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies are ultra chewy and naturally gluten free. These cookies are full of oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, and chocolate chips! showmetheyummy.com #oatmeal #cookie #chocolatechip
Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe
My favorite Mother's Day Recipes! All light, fresh, and springy for brunch, dinner, dessert, & of course, drinks... because sometimes mama needs a cocktail! showmetheyummy.com #mothersdayrecipes #springrecipes
Chocolate Strawberry Cupcakes Recipe
This is the BEST Green Bean Casserole Recipe. It's creamy and full of bacon, mushrooms, cheddar cheese, and French-Fried Onion Rings! The perfect side dish. showmetheyummy.com #bacon #greenbeancasserole
Green Bean Casserole Recipe
This crockpot mashed potatoes recipe is SO easy & full of rosemary, thyme, cream cheese, parmesan, & sour cream! A great addition to your Thanksgiving meal. showmetheyummy.com #thanksgiving #mashedpotatoes
Crockpot Mashed Potatoes Recipe
This Healthy Alfredo Sauce is a lightened up version of a classic (130 calories per serving). Made with greek yogurt, skim milk, and parmesan! showmetheyummy.com #healthy #alfredosauce
Healthy Alfredo Sauce Recipe
Add this Christmas Crack (aka Easy Saltine Toffee Candy) to your holiday baking list! Only 6 ingredients necessary to make the most addicting holiday treat yet! It's the perfect combo of sweet/salty/crunchy! showmetheyummy.com #christmas #candy #christmascrack #saltinetoffee
Christmas Crack Recipe
Cut out sugar cookies with cream cheese frosting! These are perfectly golden on the outside yet remain fluffy in the middle! showmetheyummy.com #sugarcookies #cookies #creamcheese #frosting
Cut Out Sugar Cookies with Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe
This Easy Crockpot Vegetarian Stuffing Recipe (can be vegan!) only takes 15 minutes of prep! The perfect Thanksgiving side dish! showmetheyummy.com #thanksgiving #crockpot #vegetarian #stuffing
Crockpot Vegetarian Stuffing

Home Income Traffic and Income Report – January 2016 – $3,497

Traffic and Income Report – January 2016 – $3,497

by Jennifer Debth February 19, 2016
9 Comments

TrevorHeadHappy New Year everyone!!! Trevor here, making my monthly appearance to present the January 2016 income report.

I’ve been cranking away on The Blog Village the past month, getting it ready for the launch on April 9th. I’m really excited to show it off to everyone, and hope to have a little preview in next month’s income report.

Well, it’s time for your resolutions, or on the business side goal setting! But before we get to that…

If you haven’t read one of our income reports before, you may be scratching your head. This is where we embrace our inner Jerry Maguire… no… not “You had me at hello”, the other one… “Show me the MONEY!” As always, the food will return shortly. If the idea of sharing income and learning how to make a living on this little thing we call the internet (it’s gonna be huge) isn’t interesting to you, then please treat yourself to a delicious fluffy chocolate chip cookie, they’re frickin amazing!

Here’s a brief introduction to these traffic and income reports…

If you’ve stopped by our about us page, you know that Jennifer and I started this blog thirteen months ago with the hopes of it earning an income for Jennifer. I’ve since quit my job and we’re taking a calculated risk that we can make this blog both of our full-time jobs.

We still have a long way to go before it’s to that place and we owe a lot of our realization that this was even a possibility to income reports like this. Our hope is that, for those interested, these reports can help to show what worked for us, the mistakes we made and that it is possible to make an income online doing something that you love if you work hard and stick with it.

None of these reports on their own tell the story of how to create, grow and monetize a blog. Think of each one as a chapter in a book that continues to be written. To get the full picture, I suggest looking at our traffic and income reports page where you can click into individual reports, like this one, to see the slow steady growth and get the details.

Okay, enough with the backstory, let’s get on to the report…

This month will illustrate very clearly, as with many industries, there are significant peaks and valleys with a food blog. It’s difficult to get the big picture with each of these monthly reports, so I’ve decided to add a new feature to the breakdown, “Rolling Annual Salary”.

The rolling annual salary will be a rolling twelve month total income after expenses which I think is a bit more relatable to most and a more balanced look at growth through the peaks and valleys. I’m using salary and not hourly wage… because… well… that would be depressing to see at this point 😉

Leave a comment and let me know if you guys like the Rolling Annual Salary and think it should stick around!

Income: $3,496.93

AdThrive: $2,389.31
Sponsored Content: $666.00
Google AdSense: $103.99
Swoop: $59.55
BlueHost: $130.00 <– this is from our How to Start a Blog page
Amazon Affiliates: $79.05
Genesis Framework: $0 <– the framework our site is built on
Gourmet Ads: $48.93
YouTube: $20.10

Expense: $315.72

Synthesis Hosting: $87.33
Audio Jungle: $76.00 <– music for our videos
Adobe Creative Cloud: $54.79
Capture One: $10.00
Tailwind: $11.00
Buffer: $10.00
OptinMonster: $16.60
VaultPress: $5.00
ActiveCampaign: $45.00

Net Profit: $3,181.21

Mayday! Mayday! The sky is falling!

Yes, it stings a little, but it’s just January and as we expected, with ad budgets resetting for the year and marketing strategies getting sorted out, ad spend is low in January. To be more precise, it was down 49% (Ouch!) from December which is the primary reason revenue and our RPM dropped by almost exactly that much.

On the positive side, traffic grew slightly because new years resolutions tend to include a new diet and people gotta find those recipes somewhere! If this year works out the same as last year, next month will see a decline in traffic before starting to rebound in March.

Overall we’re thrilled with where traffic stands as we start the new year!

Goals

Goals are so important to implement in your business and daily life, that’s why I love when January rolls around. January for us is time to put down on paper what we want to achieve in the new year and work hard to make that happen.

Going into 2016 we want to push ourselves with our goals. Michelangelo said…

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that our aim is too low and we reach it.

So we’re aiming high and I encourage you to do the same! Here are our big goals for 2016, our 2nd year on the blog:

  1. $100,000 total revenue (4X our 2015 total)

  2. 1,000,000 monthly pageviews

  3. 100,000 person social reach across all social channels

  4. 250 members of The Blog Village

If you’re wondering, I’ll be honest, those numbers don’t seem easy… I’m not even sure they’re possible, but I’ve got an amazing partner and I believe we can do it! Goals make me pull up quotes, so let me then move on to the French author Antoine de Saint Exupéry who said…

A goal without a plan is just a wish

Well said, Antoine. So how are we going to make those lofty goals a reality? Here’s the 10,000 ft plan:

Revenue

To quadruple our revenue we can’t just depend on ad revenue and increased pageviews. We’ll be diversifying our income streams and be more proactive when it comes to acquiring sponsors.

Ad Revenue

Ad revenue was 82% of our income in 2016 which makes it very important to our business but we would like to reduce our reliance on ads.

This month is a good example of how much income can fluctuate when advertising rates dip, so we want to minimize our exposure to those big shifts. We’ll continue to work closely with AdThrive, our advertising partner, to ensure that we’re maximizing the revenue from the ads on the site.

Affiliate Sales

We can do a better job promoting the products that we use by featuring them more as the hero of posts, so we’re planning on creating product specific posts to help increase the income we see from these sales.

The Blog Village will also open up another affiliate sales channel where we can recommend the products we use on the blog creation side to our users. A key part of this channel will be revamping our How to Start a Blog page, redirecting users to a much more thorough learning experience at The Blog Village.

Sponsors

We haven’t been proactive up to this point about approaching brands and pitching what we can offer them. I really like this avenue for two reasons.

One, we have so many brands of products that we use and love that we haven’t worked with, it makes for a very natural partnership.

Two, it puts the ball in our court and lets us shape the potential work we will be doing. That’s not to say that brands will always jump at what we pitch, but I think it shows you’re thinking through what would make sense and if I’m in charge of marketing and you pitch me a great idea… heck, that’s one less thing that I don’t have to do.

The Blog Village

This is going to be where a lot of my time is going to be spent in 2016. I think it has a massive amount of potential and am so excited to share it with everyone. The thing that I’m most excited about is that the success of The Blog Village will be a direct correlation to the success that it’s members see. Success begets success.

Traffic

We have discovered a secret way to always rank as the first result on Google and will begin to implement it in February, the results should be amazing!

Ha! Wouldn’t that be nice.

In reality, this one is going to come down to… yes, I’m tired of everyone saying it too… quality content. What does that even mean, right? Where’s the quality content page test when we need it?!? As tired as it is, everyone keeps saying it because it’s true. So what is it?

Well, for a food blog it pretty much boils down to great photos and great recipes. Don’t get me wrong, writing is important too, but only for maybe 15-25% of people if that. Everybody else wants great looking recipes that will make everyone they make them for happy.

If there’s ever one thing you’re trying to focus on to grow your food blog, focus on your photos. They’re the key to everything else.

Here’s what we do with every post:

  • Jennifer works hard to make the photos more delicious
  • We try to be a little smarter with SEO
  • Plan the editorial calendar better
  • Try our hardest to put out recipes that our readers are looking for

Social Media

The good news about social media is that once you hit a tipping point on a certain platform, you start gaining a large following with minimal effort. The bad news about social media is it seems to take AN ETERNITY to reach that tipping point 🙂

Our 2016 plan for social media is to take a more analytical approach to try and find patterns in what works for us to attract a following. That includes when we post, what we post, how we caption, tag, etc. This means a lot of trial and error and we’ll be sharing our findings with you as we experiment.

Growing our social media presence is also about time. Dedicating time to each platform and determining where our time should be spent. In 2016 we’ll be giving weight to the platforms we’re seeing the most traffic and engagement on.

The Blog Village

My efforts in 2016 will be continuing to expand the membership of The Blog Village as well as building out content, tools and finding ways to make creating, growing and monetizing a blog easier for it’s members.

I’ll go into more details in later reports, but I’m particularly excited about all of this!

So if all of that goes perfectly, we’ll be 75% of the way there, the other 25% we’ll be figuring out as we go through the year!

That’s it!

There you go, our super-secret master plan for 2016. It can really all be summed up with two words. Hard Work.

Have you set your goals for 2016? Let me know about them below.

As always, if you have questions leave a comment below, I read and answer each and every one!

Filed Under: Income

Reader Interactions

Subscribe

Sign up to get recipes delivered to your inbox and our Free All-Stars e-cookbook

    Leave a Comment/Rating Cancel reply

    Include to be notified of replies

    Rate this Recipe




    Filter Comments
    All Comments 0 Questions 0 Reviews
  1. Joanie

    Louisville, Colorado

    February 21, 2016 at 5:19 pm

    Thanks for your transparency and here’s to awesome goals!!! You guys pretty much rock.
    Reply
    • Jennifer @ Show Me the Yummy

      February 22, 2016 at 8:34 am

      Thanks Joanie!! 🙂
  2. Whitney

    San Francisco, California

    February 19, 2016 at 5:10 pm

    I always really enjoy these posts and appreciate you taking the time to walk us through a side of blogging that readers don’t often get to see! One question I’m curious about is how you balance a blog’s economic sustainability against its usability. As folks trying to generate income, I assume that ads and sponsored posts are among the best ways to do that, but as a reader, too many of either of those things on a blog can be a turn-off. Is it just trial and error? Or creating the best possible core content (which you guys have nailed) and hoping that outweighs other factors?
    Reply
    • Trevor @ Show Me the Yummy

      February 20, 2016 at 10:35 am

      Great question Whitney. I’ll answer in two parts. Ads: Ads have become so ubiquitous online that the hope is that there is an understanding either conscious or otherwise that something has to fund the creation of the content regardless of whether it’s ideal. Hopefully that content has a high enough value and production quality that people understand the need. E.g. I don’t love commercials on tv, but I understand the economics so I deal with them for 18 minutes of a show I like. Working with Sponsors: I think that food blogs luck out a little bit here. Fact of the matter is, since we eat and cook with a lot of different types of foods and products, we’ve typically already been using most of the sponsor’s products that we work with. Numerous times a sponsor will contact us and we have their products in our fridge or pantry already. So… that helps. We don’t ever feel that we’re stretching to make something fit or say we like something we don’t. We also don’t accept every sponsor that approaches us, we just said no to one yesterday. It has to fit, we have to believe in the product and hopefully our audience knows that. Our continued use of products outside of the sponsored posts helps to show that too, e.g. Pillsbury has sponsored a post before but our recent stuffed pizza rolls using Pillsbury grands wasn’t sponsored, that’s just what we use. In Summary: We try to be true to what we’d normally use in the kitchen, keep advertising reasonably on par with what you find on most other sites and create the highest value content possible. Hopefully that all balances out to a mutually beneficial arrangement for everyone.
    • Whitney

      San Francisco, California

      February 20, 2016 at 1:03 pm

      Thanks! Great to hear re: sponsored posts, too…makes sense, but they’re not something I’m used to seeing so I’ve wondered what to make of them. Keep it up — I love seeing such great work pay off for both of you!
  3. Lynn

    West Chester, Pennsylvania

    February 19, 2016 at 12:38 pm

    Nice work, friends! I, too, was super bummed about my January income, but February is already looking to be WAYYY better. Darn that January! Keep up the great work, you two. I love the income reports. It gives me ideas about how to better monetize my blog, and I think in the past 2 months of your sharing, I’ve been able to take a deeper look at mine. While I’m not necessarily looking to make this my FT job, the side income is hard to turn down!! Thanks for sharing, Trevor!
    Reply
    • Trevor @ Show Me the Yummy

      February 20, 2016 at 10:00 am

      Thanks Lynn! So glad you’re finding them useful 🙂 You’re very welcome!
  4. Janet

    Newton, North Carolina

    February 19, 2016 at 5:20 am

    Thanks for the info! You guys are amazing and so inspiring! Keep up the good (hard) work!
    Reply
    • Jennifer @ Show Me the Yummy

      February 20, 2016 at 9:53 am

      Thank you so much, Janet!! 🙂

Primary Sidebar

Hello and Welcome!

Trevor and Jennifer HeadshotWe're Trevor and Jennifer, we live in Raleigh, North Carolina with our 70lb lap dog, Teddy. We love food and together, we are on a mission to find all things YUMMY!
About Us

Footer

RECIPES

  • Breakfast
  • Lunch
  • Dinner
  • Snacks & Apps
  • Dessert
  • Drinks

ABOUT

  • About Us
  • Workshops
  • Income Reports
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy

SUBSCRIBE to get our All-Stars eCookbook free

Copyright © Show Me the Yummy © 2014–2023
|
Privacy Policy