Blog Income and Traffic Report June 2017

Interested in knowing some of the behind the scenes stuff for Kitchen Sanctuary? Here’s the latest in our blog income and traffic report for June. Check out my previous reports and more info on how to make money from your blog here.

Chris (Nicky’s husband) here again for the monthly income report.

So, its been 5 weeks since I left my IT career behind, and what a whirlwind 5 weeks it has been!  I can hand-on-heart say that rolling out of bed and going down to our office to work is brilliant, especially when the weather has been good (ok, the weather is not good every day, this is the north of England after all)!

We’ve been having loads of fun creating more videos, attending Christmas events (yes you read that right….), and hitting 10k followers on Facebook! HUGE thank you to everyone who follows us on social media  🙂

Here is a list of our recipes and posts for June.

As promised, I have been having a look at our stats, comparing the first half of the year to this time last year.  Headlines: We grew over 90% on all key areas and hit over 1.5 million views in the first half of the year!  It’s amazing and we really appreciate everyone who comes to Kitchen Sanctuary to look for recipe inspiration (Nik would add kisses at this point, but I’ll give that a miss)!  More details on the stats below…..

We really hope the info in this post gives you some insight and ideas if you’re new to blogging and/or making money with your blog.  I recommend that you check out our How to Start a Food Blog post if you are thinking about giving this blogging thing a go too!

Income Breakdown

Note – there are some links in this post that are affiliate links – which means that if you click on them and then sign up to the service/product we get a small commission (at no extra cost to you of course). If you do click through then thanks!

Income

(fyi – this info is based on earning reports and invoices for work done in the month of June, it’s not based on money that has actually come in yet, so there may be some variations based on things like paypal fees or exchange rate fluctuations):

1. Freelance writing & video: £3222.23 ($4187.78)
2. MediaVine: £1621.57 ($2105.94)
3. Sponsored Work £669.89 ($870.86)
4. Amazon Affiliate sales £41.54 ($53.95)
5. FoodBloggerPro affiliate sales £4.47 ($5.80)
6. Tailwind Affiliate £0 ($0)
7. StudioPress Genesis Theme affiliate sales £0 ($0)
8. How I earned $40k in my first year of blogging affiliate sales £7.86 ($9.98)
9. Tasty Food Photography £0 ($0)
10. The Food Photography book affiliate sales £0 ($0)
11. You Tube Ads (just started my You Tube channel – check it out here) £0 ($0)
12. Stock Photography Sales: £0 ($0)
13. SiteGround Hosting Affiliate sales: £0 ($0)

Total = £5567.48 ($7234.31)

Expenses (currently this includes regular payments for tools, membership fees and advertising but not inconsistent things like courses, trips and props):

1. 1. FoodBloggerPro: £16.37 ($20.83)
   2. SiteGround Hosting and backups: £64.08 ($81.50)
   3. Tailwind: £8.02 ($9.99)
   4. Tailwind for Instagram: £8.02 ($9.99)
   5. MailChimp £60.21 ($75)
   6. Adobe creative cloud £47.76 ($60.79)
   7. Facebook Ads £28 ($36.40)
   8. OptinMonster £12.00 ($15.27)

Total = £244.46 ($309.77)

Net Profit = £5323.02 ($6924.54)

Traffic

As promised I am looking at the first half of the year, compared to the first half of 2016.  Let’s start with the big one,  Page Views.  We have increased from 762,001 to 1,515,375.  Jaw on floor… over 1.5m for the first half is really cool  🙂

Here’s a screenshot from Google Analytics for Page Views:

The green percentage shows the increase compared to the first half of 2016.

Here’s a breakdown of traffic sources based on the number of sessions.  Organic (google searches) has increased a lot in the last 12 months which show how important it is to focus some time and energy on SEO activities.  I am planning to write a post to help people with SEO and what we do to optimise our pages.   Social media – especially Pinterest – is having an increasing influence on the traffic to our site.

Here’s the info on the location of our readers.  We have had a large growth in UK based readers but a good growth in all of the top 5 countries.

Traffic Summary

My overall summary is that we have more people coming to see our recipes, are more likely come back, more likely to click more of our recipes and to stay longer.  It is truly amazing and want to extend our personal thanks to everyone who comes to read our blog.

June Happenings:

• Christmas events.  We have attended Christmas events for a number of the big supermarkets in the UK and had a great time.  Really fun going to events all dressed for Christmas to taste some of the amazing foods and products that brands are creating for Christmas this year.
• Facebook.  For those who follow us on FB you will have noticed we have been a lot more active and that has resulted in us hitting 10k follows.  That’s really cool  🙂
• Videos.  We have been shooting a lot more videos, some for ourselves and some for other brands.  Here is one we did for ourselves.  Many more videos to come in the next few months…
• Started freelance Christmas recipes for a couple of brands… That’s given us a timely reminder to get our Christmas, Halloween and Holiday content plan started..

July/August Plans:

Some of the big things happening late July and into early August

• More video work, including working out how to build our Youtube following and content specific for our Youtube channel.  I know that’s repeated from last month but we didn’t get round to it oops…
• Starting on our Halloween, Holiday and Christmas content plan
• Holiday!  It’s been a pretty crazy year so far.  We will be going on a well deserved family holiday – we’ll be sure to share plenty of pics  🙂

I think that’s all from me. I hope you found all of the info helpful. Please let me know if there’s anything you want me to talk about in a future report. Just drop me a note in the comments.