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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)
The Best Thanksgiving Recipes for 2016! I've got you covered with everything from traditional sides (helllloooo creamy corn casserole) to healthier options (gimme all that salad) to dessert (pecan pie bites anyone?), drinks, what to do with leftovers and more! showmetheyummy.com #thanksgivingrecipes #thanksgivingdesserts
Roasted Fall Vegetable Pasta 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
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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
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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
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This light greek yogurt cream cheese cheesecake has decadence written all over it, but I love that it's lightened up! I promise you won't miss the full fat cream cheese and heavy sour cream. This cheesecake is light and fluffy, but still rich, has a very subtle lemony flavor and it won't leave you feeling guilty! showmetheyummy.com #cheesecake #greekyogurt
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Home Income Traffic and Income Report – November 2015 – $4,546

Traffic and Income Report – November 2015 – $4,546

by Jennifer Debth December 22, 2015
15 Comments

TrevorHeadHello again everyone! Trevor here, excited to dive into our second traffic and income report. Our first traffic and income report covered our entire first year of blogging and it was LOONG. To say there was a lot to cover would be an understatement, so I’m thrilled to be able to focus more this month on some specific themes.

For those of you asking yourselves, ummm… where the heck is the food (don’t worry, it’s back tomorrow), 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 get the details.

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

Income: $4,546.89

AdThrive: $2,798.22
Google AdSense: $1,436.37
Gourmet Ads: $67.31
Swoop: $168.20
Amazon Affiliates: $62.25
YouTube: $14.54

Expense: $239.72

Synthesis Hosting: $87.33
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: $4,307.17

November was definitely a big month for us, the biggest yet. We crossed the 300K mark for the first time and as you can see in the chart above, the week of Thanksgiving ramped up to a couple huge days for us.

Something’s A Brewin’

If you follow along on the blog, you’ve heard Jennifer mention that I’ve been working on a new project. Well I’d like to make a big announcement…

Next month 🙂

On January 15th, we’ll be announcing something big. Something HUGE. Something that will literally shake the very ground that you walk on!

Okay, I may be getting ahead of myself, but you should really tune in because we’re really excited about it!  If you sign up for the Blogger Tips at the end of this post, you’ll find out even sooner!

Happy Holidays

November marks the beginning of the holiday season here in the US with Thanksgiving landing on the fourth Thursday of November each year. This means food, food and food. That translates to a lot of increased traffic searching for recipes. That increased traffic helped us hit our biggest day ever the day before Thanksgiving with 32,000 pageviews.Apparently we’re not the only procrastinators out there 🙂

Over 40% of our traffic comes from Google searches, so we were expecting an increase in traffic because we had already visualized the search trends for November. We do this by using Google Trends. Google trends is a tool that displays the search volume for a particular term in relation to all searches globally.

Here’s the 2014 Google Trends graph for the search term “Recipe”:

Those are pretty big spikes representing millions of additional searches for recipes in general.

Google Trends can also be incredibly useful to if you’re trying to gauge the seasonality for a particular recipe. Here’s an example of “Crockpot” over the past few years.

So, what does all of this mean for a food blog?  It means there is a boatload of potential traffic out there with a good amount of predictability if you’re ensuring that each post you create employs solid SEO practices.

Food Blog SEO Tips

SEO is a highly complex topic and a detailed strategy is beyond the scope of this traffic and income report, but here are a few of our best food blog SEO tips to increase your rankings:

SEO Plugin

Be sure you’re using Yoast SEO or some other SEO plugin if you’re using wordpress and aren’t already implementing one. They make it very simple to customize how everything appears in search results as well as guide you through the process of SEO optimization.

These plugins help to analyze the text of your posts to ensure they meet known SEO best practices. Things like, including your target keywords where you should be, checking for an appropriate keyword density within your post, including internal links, etc.

By just following the guidelines that these plugins layout, you’ll be on your way to having content optimized for search engines.

Don’t be Cute

We learned this lesson early on. We made magic bars the first month of the blog. They turned out looking pretty ugly, so I had the genius idea that it would be really cute to call the post “Ugly Duckling Bars” instead of “Magic Bars” because people would just love it.

Well.

Maybe some did. They probably didn’t. People certainly weren’t searching for ugly duckling bars in google. They also weren’t searching our own site for that. So, we’ll call that a huge…

FAIL!

The silver lining to the story is that we realized this soon after in month one and made sure to not make that mistake moving forward. I guarantee you if that post had been called simply “Magic Bars” we most likely would have received ten times more traffic from it in the past year.

Keep it descriptive.

Keep it simple.

Most importantly keep in mind what people will be typing into a search engine to find it, these are your “target keywords”.

Stop Wasting Your Title

If you’re like 99% of bloggers, you’re doing the following:  All of your posts have the post title and then your website name as the <title> of your page.

Well.

That’s just throwing away a lot of prime real estate.

You get 70 characters of pure gold from Google. Big, blue, click on me gold. I’m referring to the title as it appears in search results. Don’t take my word for it, let’s look at an example of search results for the same recipe both ways:

The second example gives you a lot more valuable information than your site name.

Google’s algorithm for search results is top secret, but there are a few things that most definitely feed pretty strongly into it: domain name, URL and title. No one will argue that it’s important to get your keywords in these three places whenever possible.

Domain name (showmetheyummy.com for us), isn’t something that’s going to change post to post, but URL and the title are. We make the URL our exact target keywords and use the title to get a little extra SEO juice and inform the searcher. Even if you remove the potential SEO juice, that extra info very likely will grab people that would have clicked on another result. Especially, if they love quinoa or were already looking for something using turkey in the above example.

If you’re concerned about branding, I assure you, it’s much more valuable to get someone to your site, have a great recipe (content) and have it turn out well for them.

Add these to your arsenal of SEO practices and watch your organic traffic benefit!

Little Victories

This month reminded me again how much fun we have with this blog. It’s a ton of work but we have so much fun with our little victories. I’m not talking about big milestone successes (which are great) like a million pageviews, I’m talking about the myriad of small little things we get excited about. Things that are just as much fun now as they were the first month we were blogging.

For example, we still to this day get equally excited when we have the most people on the blog that we’ve ever had. For November that was 316 people on at once. November also had the first time we hit 100 and 200 people on at once. But I have to tell you, we were just (if not more) excited when we had thirty people on at once for the first time.

The same thing goes for money earned in a day. It doesn’t matter if it was 26 cents to 30 cents or $26 to $30. Every single one of these mini-victories gets an equally loud and dorky song and dance. Perhaps some day we’ll share a video 🙂  … you probably don’t want to see it, it’s bad.

My point is this:

I’m a huge proponent of setting big goals and striving to reach them. I think it’s incredibly important though, to keep yourself motivated throughout the process by celebrating every little victory you can find along the way. Best photo, best recipe, most traffic, most money in a day, most traffic for a specific post, most traffic by noon, funniest post, highest ranking in google, best food styling, the list can go on and on.

Don’t be afraid to pat yourself on the back for the little stuff.

Celebrate, sing, dance and enjoy the ride!

If you want to get more tips and fun stuff, be sure to sign up below for our Blogger Tips!


Filed Under: Income

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  1. Igor

    Kaunas, Kaunas

    May 13, 2016 at 11:05 am

    Hi, Trevor! Love your the advices here, but I have one question though. You say to not waste your title space and not to include your brand name. I loved this idea and I actually used it but now I see that Google adds the brand name by itself in some posts. Actually in half of all my posts, or even more. I looked through your posts and the same thing is happening. What are your thoughts about it?
    Reply
    • Trevor @ Show Me the Yummy

      May 13, 2016 at 11:33 am

      Hey Igor, Google should always use whatever your page has set as the title. If it isn’t, it’s possible that you updated the title but Google has not yet re-indexed the page OR it isn’t getting updated in whatever SEO plugin you’re using. The only modification to your title you should see by Google is trimming it if it’s too long. You can check this by viewing the source code of a page that isn’t displaying correctly in Google and look at the element to see what’s listed. If it’s correct in the source code, you’ll need to request google fetch the page and update it using Google Search Console (formerly webmaster tools). Any Show Me the Yummy results not showing a custom title are most likely older and we just haven’t updated them yet.
    • Igor

      Kaunas, Kaunas

      May 13, 2016 at 11:44 am

      I don’t know if you misunderstood me Trevor, or read my post too quickly and didn’t catch all things :)) I’m saying that these things are happening with your site too – Show me The Yummy. For example go and search the keyword “Pumpkin Cornbread”. You are in top 10, now look at your title 🙂 It is changed. In fact, it’s not the surprise that Google is changing titles, it’s doing it for a long time now. The question is, should we pay attention to the fact, that the half of our titles look not-so-pretty right now and the fact that our main keyword is losing the power because we have a zillion of other words after it, or should we just close our eyes and that’s it.
    • Trevor @ Show Me the Yummy

      May 13, 2016 at 12:14 pm

      Hey Igor, Did read it… just didn’t see it happening when I searched our site on google. Thanks for the cornbread example, that is odd. I did some googling and it does in fact look like occasionally Google will add on your site name, though no one knows exactly why/when they choose to do this. e.g. It looks like most of our site titles don’t have it added. Personally, I don’t mind if the title gets cut off in the event that they add it. I want to have anything additional that may encourage someone to click-through. There have been some experiment run and click-through rate is absolutely a signal that Google uses. So, to use the pumpkin cornbread example, I prefer Pumpkin Cornbread – Easy Vegan Side Dish – Show Me the Yumm… to Pumpkin Cornbread – Show Me the Yummy Even though google is adding the truncated site title. For me adding the “Easy” or “Vegan” keywords could encourage some clicks. If you don’t like the truncation of the title though, you should be able to add your site title back on, re-submit to google and it will be fixed. We’ll never be able to predict what Google adds/removes, this is a perfect case in point, so I like to do it as I’d like it and then what Google does with that is out of my hands. Never know, next month they may turn that off and it doesn’t happen anymore.
    • Igor

      Kaunas, Kaunas

      May 13, 2016 at 12:54 pm

      Thanks for your thoughts, Trevor. I am thinking to leave everything as is too.
  2. Chad

    Orlando, Florida

    January 1, 2016 at 7:51 pm

    Congrats on the month! Question on your income statement: I get $4546.89 when I add up the revenue streams listed, not $4532.45. Typo somewhere? Thanks!
    Reply
    • Trevor @ Show Me the Yummy

      January 2, 2016 at 2:57 pm

      Ha! Flashback to two weeks ago… Trevor: “Damn, I forgot the YouTube income. Do you think I should redo the graphics?” Jennifer: “No. There’s no way anyone is actually going to add those up.” Trevor: “Yeah, you’re right. No one will know!” Murphy’s Law: If someone can add up totals and show that you’re lazy, they will. Moral of the story, everything is updated and should add up now 🙂 do it right the first time. Thanks Chad!
    • Chad

      Orlando, Florida

      January 2, 2016 at 6:07 pm

      Hey, the point of accountability partners is to hold each other accountable, right? 🙂
  3. Molly

    Bedford, Ohio

    December 29, 2015 at 3:49 pm

    Wow! Thank you both so much for being so transparent and sharing all of this with everyone! It really is inspiring to see how far you’ve come in a year. We launched in August and would be thrilled to see this kind of growth our first year. Congratulations on all your success! It’s very clear you are reaching your goals of creating awesome content- all your recipes look awesome. We love being a part of this wonderful community of food bloggers and really appreciate you sharing all of your knowledge!
    Reply
    • Jennifer @ Show Me the Yummy

      December 30, 2015 at 11:53 am

      Hi Molly! You’re so welcome! Congrats on your launch…cheers to a great 2016! 🙂
  4. Jess

    Denver, Colorado

    December 27, 2015 at 9:17 pm

    Trevor and Jennifer–congrats on another awesome month! I love the tip about customizing the title. Makes total sense. Looking forward to future income reports!
    Reply
    • Jennifer @ Show Me the Yummy

      December 28, 2015 at 9:33 am

      Thanks Jess! 🙂
  5. brita

    Nashville, Tennessee

    December 22, 2015 at 7:17 am

    wow! congrats!! I’m so incredibly inspired to see your blog continue to grow and to see all of your hard work pay off. Thanks for doing these reports- they are truly helpful!
    Reply
  6. Robin

    United States

    December 22, 2015 at 4:18 am

    Rejoicing for and with you over this latest report! : ) It’s wonderful of you to share your valuable experience and wisdom is order to help other aspiring folks trying to earn a living via a blog of their own area of interest. Hope you don’t mind me taking this space and opportunity to send our family’s sincere wishes for a very, Merry Christmas filled with God’s great blessings of peace, hope, joy and love!! May the coming New Year prove to show continuing growth and interest for Show Me the Yummy, further enabling the three of you to share all your days and dreams together! : ) Enjoy your holidays and your new, closer proximity to your extended family. Love and Prayers Always, Robin Shere and family
    Reply
    • Jennifer @ Show Me the Yummy

      December 22, 2015 at 8:13 am

      Thank you so much Robin! We really appreciate it 🙂 Wishing you and your family a happy holiday from Wisconson. And Teddy just dropped his ball at my feet, so I’m pretty sure that means he wants to say happy holidays too!

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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!
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