Traffic and Income Report – July 2016 – $7,205

Trevor here, popping in for our July 2016 Income Report and I’ve got an exciting announcement below!

If you’re just joining us, normally you’ll find me over at The Blog Village helping other bloggers create, grow and monetize their blogs.

Okay, on with the income report!

If you’re new to Show Me the Yummy, one thing that we embrace is transparency and we want to show people how the business side of blogging works and that is absolutely possible to make an income doing something you love and working on your own terms. Don’t worry, the food will return shortly. If you’re not a fan of income reports, I suggest making these Blueberry Muffin Energy Bites which I’ve completely been falling in love with, a new recipe will be coming Monday!

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 a little over a year and a half 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.

Income reports are what showed us that it’s possible and gave us the courage to take that leap. 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 whole story. As time passes they can make things seem out of reach, but they aren’t at all. 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 from our first month where we made $28.

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

Traffic is finally back on the rise and we’re hoping this is a trend that continues through to the end of the year.

We really feel like this year is finally giving a us a baseline of traffic trends for SMTY in the future, so it’s been very interesting to watch. Our goal has been to be patient and to not be too concerned about any dips like we saw last month.

As another new edition, here are the detailed social analytics for July from The Blog Village Social Stats Dashboard:

Show Me the Yummy Video Workshops

Before we get into the discussion, I’m excited to announce that we are going to begin offering workshops for how to shoot and edit awesome food videos soon!

Our videos have helped us grow our social media presence at a rapid rate and provided an entirely new revenue stream. 75% of our sponsored clients in the last three months have requested videos which translates into a 50-100% increase in revenue.

We will be making it easy to learn how to shoot, edit, create an efficient workflow and make professional quality food videos!

There will be a very special deal for the first workshop, very limited space and our notification list will get early access. So, if you’re interested, sign up now to be notified when registration opens.

So much more to come about these soon, we’re super excited!

New Recipe Search

We redesigned our recipe search page for desktop users, greatly enhancing the functionality and ease in finding recipes our readers are looking for. We plan on incorporating this into our mobile site as well in the near future when we do a site redesign.

Any time you can make it easier for readers to find content, you’re winning in two ways:

1.) Ease of use means people keep coming back.

2.) The easier it is to find content, the more content people will consume.

The new search incorporates custom taxonomies to allow users to search by combining multiple things they are looking for. Think: I want a healthy dinner I can make in the crockpot that’s vegetarian:

To create the page we used the Search and Filter Pro ($20) plugin as well as the Custom Post Type UI (Free) plugin.

The Custom Post Type UI plugin allows you to create custom taxonomies that are available in every post. They appear very similarly to how categories and tags appear in the sidebar when you’re creating a post.

If you’re wondering… yes, that means going into all of your existing posts to add the new taxonomies in, but we think it’s definitely worth it.

Custom taxonomies are a way to organize your content and by creating taxonomies such as Meal Types, Dietary, Season, etc. we’re then able to use Search and Filter Pro to do all the heavy lifting for us.

The other nice thing about Search and Filter Pro is it uses AJAX to perform the searches, which essentially just means that the entire page doesn’t have to reload as people narrow down their selections, making the user experience much better.

Never Stop Pushing Yourself, Learning and Experimenting

We all get comfortable.

We all like feeling like we know what we’re doing.

There’s a great Mark Twain quote that goes like this, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

I think one of the most important things that you can do is to keep learning from any and everywhere you can.

Do something you’ve always done one way an entirely new way. If you don’t know how to do it that new way then learn as you go.

The results can be powerful, give you perspective, humble you and remind you that there’s always more to learn so don’t get too comfortable.

I’ll give you an example:

We’ve been shooting a lot of videos lately and the video we shot on Friday we wanted to try something a little different. We wanted to mix it up a bit.

We’ve been focused on making everything fast and we thought we’d pull a George Castanza and do everything opposite (brownie points if you know the reference).

It made us test things, learn post production techniques, experiment with new lighting and approach everything differently.

It was exhausting, a bit frustrating at times, put a lot of doubt in us as to whether it was going to turn out really bad and was also a lot of fun.

I’m happy to say that (just like George) the result was one of my favorite videos that we’ve done yet and a reminder to push, explore and experiment whether that’s with your writing, photography, videos, social media strategy, schedule, workflow and everything in between.

Thanks for hanging out and I’ll see you next month. If you want to spend a lot more quality time together (who wouldn’t?) head over to The Blog Village, we’d love to have you!

As always, if you have any questions, leave a comment below. I answer every one!