Traffic and Income Report – October 2016 – $21,206.01

Trevor here, swinging in with our end of two years, October 2016 Income report!

It’s nuts, it’s crazy, I can’t believe it’s already been two years!

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 tomorrow.

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

You can stop by our about us page, to get the whole story, but in short Jennifer and I started this blog November 2014 with the hopes of it earning an income for Jennifer. Well… a lot has happened since… I quit my job eight months in and after two years, we’ve managed to grow this blog into our full-time incomes.

That probably never would have happened without income reports like these that 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 (especially if you’re just starting out), 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 and to see how things have grown over time, 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…

 
Here are the detailed social stats for October from The Blog Village Social Stats Dashboard:

Two Years In

Wow! We made it. Two years, what a blur!

It’s been so much work but SO gratifying every single day. Thank you to everyone who reads through these reports, visits our site, leaves a comment, shares a photo and participates in any way in this journey we’re on. We really couldn’t do it without you!

Sticking With It

I’ve talked before about how we see blogging as an investment that doesn’t necessarily see immediate returns, but like the stock market if you stay steady and do good work it can really pay dividends over time.

This month saw $21k of revenue which we never could have imagined reaching in such a short time, especially if we look back at where we were one year ago. At that time in the first 12 months of the blog we had brought in a total revenue of $9K. If we broke that down hourly, together Jennifer and I would have been earning $1/hr each, probably not even that.

Around that same time, I was headhunted and offered a job and we had to really look at our priorities to turn down that offer. In hindsight, it was the best decision we could have made but it certainly wasn’t easy at the time.

Things were growing and we wanted to keep investing in this new venture so we decided we should stick with it. Not because we saw tons of money right around the corner, but because we loved what we were doing, loved the time we got to spend together and loved being in charge of our destiny.

That was us 12 months in for us, but it could be anyone 24, 36, wherever you’re at, you never know what’s around the corner. If you’re enjoying what you’re doing and it’s fiscally responsible for whatever your situation is, it can pay dividends. It may happen faster, it may happen slower, the important thing is to enjoy the ride (even if that means sometimes your stomach is in your throat).

The point is, you’ll never know if you don’t stick with it!

Diversification

Ever since I quit my job in June of 2015, we have had plans to diversify as much as possible. This reduces our risk and dependencies on any one income stream (such as the blog). The first phase of that diversification was launching The Blog Village mid 2016. The second phase finally came to fruition in October with the start of our Show Me the Yummy Food Video Workshops.

We’ll be doing a whole post about the workshops coming up, but here’s a sneak peak behind the scenes…

It was amazing, filled with an incredible group of bloggers and we can’t wait until our next sold out workshop next week!

Video is arguably the most important skill to have in blogging moving into the future. We’re excited to be at the forefront of that movement with a workshop that gives people a skill they can immediately monetize and the confidence that they can make amazing videos.

The icing on the cake is that it’s another way to diversify and create stability, which in the online business world (especially blogging) is important to do however you can.

For you, this may not be a workshop, it may be:

• Adding video to your brand offerings
• Affiliate sales
• eBook
• eCourse
• Meal planning service
• Freelance work
• Coaching
• Speaking
• The list goes on…

The point is, not to put all of your eggs in one basket AND give yourself time to execute that additional income strategy. For us we always made sure we gave focus to each effort, Show Me the Yummy->The Blog Village->Workshops and didn’t move prematurely to the next project before the current one was in a good place. Diversification is good, but you don’t want to spread yourself too thin.

Holiday Prep

For a lot of bloggers Nov/Dec/Jan are the highest traffic months. It’s important to make sure that you’re maximizing this increase in traffic in every way possible. Here are the three key things we’re doing:

Affiliate Marketing

We’re taking time to go back through posts and ensure that we have affiliate links wherever appropriate to maximize our earnings during the busiest and most shopping intensive time of the year.

For those of you who are able to utilize the Amazon Affiliate program, don’t forget that you get a commission on nearly EVERYTHING that they order through Amazon for the next 24 hours. They take a look at that muffin tin and also purchase a TV… you get a commission on both.

Site Optimization

If you’re planning on making any major changes to your site, it’s a good idea to do these sooner than later. We won’t be making any major updates or changes between Nov. 15th and Jan. 1st. This ensures that we won’t break anything and be scrambling during a time that it will be more difficult to get support and put you at a higher risk of missing out on traffic.

One of these big updates we’re making is updating our recipe plugin from EasyRecipe to WP Ultimate Recipe (a huge process) which I’ll talk more about in next month’s report. Needless to say a major change like this isn’t something we want to go wrong right before traffic spikes.

Usability

Leading into the holidays we’ll be utilizing a ribbon type plugin at the top of each page (thrive leads, hello bar, etc.) driving people to our roundups for the appropriate holiday.

This helps us to introduce someone randomly finding us via a search engine to our other recipes that they may want to make. Our hope being that the more recipes they make, the more likely they are to return in the future.

Good luck with your holiday prep, here’s to a big end of the year!!!

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!