Show Me the Yummy

Income Reports

Why Publish Income Reports?

The goal of our income reports is to show anyone interested in starting a blog or an online business, things that are working for us and also the mistakes that we make along the way.

Our hope is that they will help to motivate anyone interested in pursuing a business online whether it’s for a little additional spending money, a second income or even your full-time job!

If that sounds like something you’re interested in, be sure to head over to The Blog Village where we teach you how to create, grow and monetize your own blog.

The Reports

Click on any of the months below for the detailed reports.
(note: Nov. 2014 through Oct. 2015 are contained in our year 1 income report)















Comments

  1. Hey Trevor–

    I don’t have a food blog, but I do use Foodie Pro as my theme. It looks like you do too? I’ve figured out how to left-justify my header logo in my CSS, but I’m wondering if you can point me in the direction of a tutorial or something on how to move a menu up to the right of the header? I’m considering either putting a secondary menu there or using it as ad space, but I can’t figure out how to do it. Shay Bocks, the maker of Foodie Pro, seems to have made some of her helpful tutorials subscription-based now.

    Thanks in advance for any help. I’m thrilled to see how much progress you achieved again in Nov. I hope Dec was good to you too!

    Jess

    Reply

  2. Hello guys,

    First, congrats on your income growth even for being in the online business just over a year! Second, I was wondering about your first two weeks starting the blog and how you received over 1K users. You’ve mentioned then that you let your friends know about the blog, but did you do anything else to drive traffic?

    Finally, I’m interested on how BuzzFeed was able to take notice of your blog/recipes. Did you do anything prior to get their attention? This seemed to be the transition point to your increase in page views/traffic.

    Thank you guys and keep up the good work!
    Warren

    Reply

    • Hi Warren,

      Thanks for the kind words! I pulled the acquisition source report and here are some more details:

      The first two weeks of the blog, we also posted a few photos on Food Gawker. This was back when they approved photos in batches each day, so if you were at the top of the approved photos you sat there for hours which helped to drive traffic. They now approve photos constantly for the day and our traffic has definitely reduced since then. Those Food Gawker photos drove 44% of that traffic in Oct.

      The rest of the breakdown was:
      Direct/None (people typing the site in directly a.k.a. friends, or that google didn’t track) – 25%
      Facebook – 6%
      The remaining 25% was split across 65 other referrers which were made up mostly of other blogs that Jennifer had commented on and visitors to their site clicked through to ours.

      As for BuzzFeed, we don’t know how they found us. Most likely they saw something on Food Gawker (we weren’t posting many other places at the time), came to the site and looked around. Could have also been Pinterest, not sure. BuzzFeed has definitely resulted in some nice bumps in traffic, but I’d say that overall Google has been a bigger part of our growth story. Keeping SEO in mind with every post, ensuring compliance with rich snippets so that our images appear in search results and a consistent schedule all helping to build traffic over time.

      Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions!

      -Trevor

      Reply

  3. You deserve it bae! Just love all the recipes! I also run a food blog Delight My Tummy but hardly get 300 or 400 page views! 😟 It would be really great if you could provide any tips and tricks about getting more views! Thanks a ton! ☺😊

    Reply

    • Hi Reena, thank you so much! It can be an overwhelming task when you look at those two massive categories. What I like to do is break those down into smaller pieces and then slowly work through those. For a food blog, the most important one would be photography. Now that’s big too, so I’d break that down.

      Photography: Improving food styling, lighting, composition, post-processing. A great way to start working through these can be finding some food photography that you love and recreate the dish. Try and photograph it from the same angles, with the same styling and you’ll have a much clearer picture of what went into creating that photograph.

      That’s a brief example of what I’d do with each section of the site. Look at your writing, the site layout, social media strategy and break each of those out into small areas or tasks you can focus on.

      If you’re interested in a much deeper dive on everything to improve your blog then that will take a lot more time and I’d suggest signing up for The Blog Village newsletter to get blogging tips and more!

      Hope that helps a little! Let me know if you have other questions.

      Reply

  7. I have been following you on social media for quite a while, congrats on all of your success! I just started a new blog, Aly’s Elegant Eats and I’m so excited to get it up and running since I’ve been thinking about doing it for a long time. I signed up to get your newsletter, what is your biggest tip to growing page views and ultimately gaining an audience in a sea of food blogs? My culinary point of view is elevating everyday recipes and I’m also planning to incorporate wine pairings as a way to make myself stand out. Thanks for the inspiration!

    Reply

    • Hi Aly! Thank you so much 🙂 Congratulations on your new blog! Let the journey begin!!

      If I had to point to one thing above all else, it’s the content. As it relates specifically to food blogs, that means great photography. Before you spend time on all of the other million things you can spend time doing, be sure that your photos look great. We talked about that a lot on the Chopped Podcast recently if you want to give a listen.

      Good luck!

      Reply

    • Hi Katherine!! Glad you’re liking the income reports! We’ll keep them going, we’ve just been so busy lately!!!

      Reply

Talk to us

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *