Hiya! Bjork here. I’m back for my monthly cameo on Pinch of Yum.
It’s 8:30PM on Sunday night here in Cebu City. Lindsay’s in the kitchen doing whatever she does, a couple dogs are having a barking match down the street, and I’m hunkered down at my desk getting this post put together.
If you’re new to Pinch of Yum, here’s a quick overview of what this post is all about. Every month I put together a post outlining the income we earned from Pinch of Yum, the type of traffic the blog is receiving, and any tips or tricks we’ve learned that might be helpful. Our hope is that these posts can help you with your blog in some way or another.
Here’s the breakdown of June’s income from Pinch of Yum:
The Breakdown:
Bluehost – $650.00
BlogHer – $590.08
Google Adsense – $565.30
Tasty Food Photography eBook – $480.90
VigLink – $273.00
The Thesis Theme – $197.67
Elegant Themes – $39.00
Amazon Affiliate Program – $1.07
Grand Total: $2,797.02
If you’re interested in learning more about some of the ways that you can monetize a food blog, we encourage you to download this free ebook, “16 Ways to Monetize Your Food Blog,” from our sister site, Food Blogger Pro!
We’ve had a couple questions in the past about what how exactly we earn this income. Here’s the quick explanation:
Bluehost – Bluehost is a hosting company. Pinch of Yum is a Bluehost affiliate, and we talk about using Bluehost on the how to start a food blog and resources for food bloggers pages.
BlogHer – BlogHer, as many of you know, is a blog advertising partner. We use BlogHer ads in the top right corner on Pinch of Yum. BlogHer pays on a CPM basis (cost per mille, or 1,000 views). In other words, the more visitors to your blog the better, regardless if someone clicks on the ad or not.
Google AdSense – AdSense is Google’s advertising network. We have three Google AdSense ads spaced along the right sidebar. AdSense is the opposite of BlogHer in that you’re only paid when someone clicks on an ad, regardless of how many times the ad is viewed.
Tasty Food Photography – This is an eBook that Lindsay wrote on food photography.
VigLink – VigLink is a company that automatically scans your blog and creates affiliate links wherever it finds linkable content.
The Thesis Theme – This is the WordPress theme that we use with Pinch of Yum. We’re part of the Thesis Theme affiliate program. We talk about using Thesis on the how to start a food blog and resources for food bloggers pages.
Elegant Themes – An alternative WordPress theme company that’s not quite as expense as the Thesis Theme. We talk about using Elegant Themes on the how to start a food blog page.
Amazon – We use the Amazon’s affiliate program on the resources for food bloggers page, where we have a couple photography products listed.
Traffic
Nothing out of the norm to report on Traffic in June. It’s fun to see the organic Google traffic continue to grow from month to month. I’ll say a bit more about this in the “Tips and Takeaways” section below.
Tips and Takeaways
Two tools I wanted to introduce you to this month. Both of these have been helpful as I’ve made small tweaks and improvements to Pinch of Yum this last month.
Google Webmasters
What is Google Webmaster? Good question. The folks from Google explain it best.
I’ve been using it to find broken links that point to Pinch of Yum. For instance, another blog or website might have linked to a Pinch of Yum post but accidentally used the wrong URL. Links back to your site are extremely valuable for Search Engine Optimization and you do not want those valuable links to land on an error page.
I use a plugin called Pretty Link to redirect these broken links to the correct URL. Google likes links that work, so it’s worth taking the time to find and redirect broken links.
There are tons of videos and tutorials for how to use Google Webmaster. I’d suggest starting with the tutorials that Google provides.
Rich Snippets
This is another helpful site from Google that shows you what your page will appear like in Google search results. This is especially important if you have a post with a recipe in it, as Google should be displaying these posts differently than a standard search result.
Here’s an example of what a post with a recipe in it should look like in Google:
The easiest way to make sure that your recipes are formatted correctly is to use a plugin (if you’re on WordPress). We use one called Tasty Recipes.
Thanks!
Lindsay and I feel totally lucky to have people like you stop by and check in here on Pinch of Yum. Please let us know if you have any questions about this stuff. Leave a comment, send us an email, or contact us. We’ll do our best to get back to you.
I’m off to eat a rambutan.
The four statisticians conducted their information only with the support of
hand calculator.
All of the information that you guys give out is amazing. Thank you so much for all the time and effort that you put in. I had a question about finding a resource for your branding graphics. Do you guys do that yourself or hire someone to build this for you?
Nice figures. thanks so much for all of the information you are providing. its such a great help to new food bloggers like myself.
I noticed that feedburner sends alot of visits to your site. How do you achieve this. I have a feedburner url and RSS feed on my site but how do you promote it?
This. Is. Amazing. First of all, thank you so much for this post. Second of all, how are you able to use google adsense while still using wordpress.com (indicated by you saying that you use the Thesis theme)? Please, please, please find it in your heart to let me know how!
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Hi there, this weekend is good designed for me, for
the reason that this time i am reading this wonderful informative piece of
writing here at my home.
Congrats to your earning and traffic. Especially, your traffic is awesome. 130K UV what a great traffic you have!
Excellent article! We will be linking to this great article on our site. Keep up the good writing.
Thank you for sharing this data! It’s always helpful to see how others are managing their blog.
I also just discovered you guys via your skinny veggie lasagna. Pinch of yum, indeed!
So…I followed a recipe here from Pinterest and I’m so glad I did!!! I just started a food blog a few months ago, and I’ve been told repeatedly that blogging will not make me any money. Thank you so much for giving me hope!! I love your site and your posts are so much fun to read. HRX (Healthy Recipe Ecstasy) hearts POY (Pinch of Yum)!
Hi Bjork! I love these reports. They’ve been very helpful! 🙂
I installed BlogHer about two weeks ago and they just updated the Pubmatic amount for July. Wow. That’s ridiculous. I know you said you’d update us on the whole backfilling thing, but I was wondering, have you found out anything? And I see that you only have the one BlogHer ad, but do you suppose that the different sizes pay the same? I have the tower ad but was thinking about adding a box ad, but not if it’s going to only pay a fraction of what I get from the tower ad. Thanks again for all the advice you’ve been giving. 🙂
This is great! You doing absolutely well, hope to read your july income report.:-)
Your income and traffic is very inspirational 🙂 I wish someday I could be at the same level as yours. Maybe I have to work harder from now on 😀
Thanks for all the great information. I am researching to find out what it takes to start a blog but to also see where the money is at! Any other advice to a greenewbie is helpful!
J
This is a great blog! Amazing the amount of traffic you guys are getting. Would think the income would be higher for you guys though. Are most of your organic search traffic coming from the images? I ask only because your bounce rates are a little high. Was thinking people maybe searching recipes on Google images to see what they look like.
Great job though! I found this site a few weeks ago called Fohboh.com for the food service industry. I’m sure you can write some articles over there and drive some of that traffic back over to your blog.
This is very motivating! Keep up the good work!
Hey Samuel – Thanks for saying hi!
Most of the organic traffic comes from people searching for recipes on Google (just text I’m assuming, not images).
So true with the bounce rates. I’ve been trying to think of ways to lower this number. I think part of the reason for this is due to the fact that a lot of the traffic is people visit the site in a browsing state of mind: searching for recipes, looking through Pinterest, etc…
Thanks for the site recommendation. I’ll check it out.
Bjork,
One suggestion you and Lindsay could consider is doing a video slide show presentation with your voice over. Then upload to YouTube and embed at the beginning of your blog post. So you will have a video version and the written. Video will keep them on there just a little bit longer. Plus the YouTube traffic would be like gravy. Just some thoughts.
Great thought Samuel. We had dinner last week with Chris Ducker – https://www.chrisducker.com/ – here in Cebu and he said the same thing.
Smart minds think alike. 🙂
We’ll be getting to the video stuff for sure. Not sure on when it will be, but’s it’s for sure on the horizon.
Thanks for the thoughtful and helpful feedback.
Just wanted to say thank you for all of the great tips. Just started our blog about 2 months ago and your advice and tips have helped. I still have a lot to learn though. Best of luck to you and your husband.
Thanks for the really interesting breakdowns each month. It is really beneficial to see the growth from a few months back to now. Lots of useful advice.
Can’t wait to hear what has worked for you in July. You guys are awesome for all the info you share. I wanted to let you know that I signed up for VigLink from your site. If you have any tips on how you have found this works best for you I truly value your input!
We use the automatic link insertion. That’s the one tip I have. 🙂
Oh that’s awesome, I wasn’t sure if the link insertion would be too random or off-putting, but I have never felt like that on your site so I am going to go for it. Thanks for the tip!! 🙂
Nice Numbers…. Thanks for sharing!
What an adventure you are on right now. Enjoy your time with the kids; I’m sure they are overjoyed to have you helping them this year.
I love that you are sharing your insights into monetizing a food blog and am so impressed with the significant jump in income this year. I’m curious, how long has you blog been around? How long did it take to gain the exposure and get the traffic you are sustaining now?
Beth! Thanks for the kind words.
Lindsay’s first post was on April 11th, 2010 – http://pinchofyum.tumblr.com/post/513080763/saturday-morning-chocolate-chip-muffins
Pinch of Yum started as a Tumblr blog (as you can tell by the link above). We switched over to WordPress in September of 2011.
More than anything Lindsay has leveraged pictures to grow traffic, posting to sites like Foodgawker and Tastespotting. We’ve also seen a lot of traffic from Pinterest.
Thanks to all of your “getting started” type of help, I’m working at getting my recipe blog going as well. I’m using Thesis as well (signed up through you guys even though I knew about it already – just wanted to support you guys!)
I like your 2 column layout better than the 3 column one many use. I was wondering if you could tell me the width of your columns?
Hey Michelle. Super sorry about the delayed response on this. Thanks for buying through our link. Email me and I’ll send you PDFs of exactly how we have everything setup with Thesis. bjork (at) pinchofyum (dot) com.
These are awesome numbers, very inspiring! And great tips too, I’m looking at your affiliate programs for inclusion in my blog, hopefully I can generate some income as well. Enjoy your rambutan, but don’t forget the mangoes, chicharon and lechon while in Cebu!
Food Dude! Thanks for considering the affiliate program. Let us know if you have any questions.
I’m embarrassed to say I’ve yet to try lechon. It’s on my long list of “foods I need to eat in the Philippines”. 🙂
i just want to say thank u thank u thank u!
i always wondered how can i make money from something i love like food, and ive been trying to figure out how do food blogger do it.
this is the only site that is upfront about it, the others would not say anything directly about it.
i know most blogs would say its hard ( and it is) and it takes a lot of dedication ( ofcourse it does !)
but most of them would not even say a number or an estimate, or they might actually put down the idea of making money from a food blog.
i know sometimes the money isnt much, but to get a figure is very honest and sincere and could help pple move in the right direction
you guys are great for such honesty
and i just have one question if i may ask
i have a hard time getting traffic, how did you build traffic? i dont know the first thing about building a readership, so how did you do that?
take care and have a great day
Hi Rima – You’re right on about the blog stuff being tough work. Tough work, but rewarding work if you stick with it!
Traffic and a following has mostly been built through consistent posting and using food pictures to drive traffic back to the site (through sites like Foodgawker and Pinterest).
There are lots of other small things you can do as well, like make sure your site loads fast and use social media plugins to encourage sharing.
I’ve just discovered your website and absolutely love it. It’s great that you share all this valuable information as a lot of bloggers really need to know how to blog and grow their audiences too.
I also use Blue Host which have been excellent so far. I recently added some adverts on my my website too. Have you ever tried adding them within the post itself? Google say’s this is much more effective but I don’t want to risk putting people off by doing that.
I love your photos too and will bear your book in mind as I’ve recently started learning how to use a better camera on my blog.
Many thanks
Katherine
Hey Katherine!
We’ve been hesitant to put ads within the content itself. The ads will probably make more per view, but I wouldn’t be surprised if viewership were to go down if ads become too prevalent in the content.
That’s just an opinion though. 🙂
Since I’m pretty sure only about 3 people read my food blog I must say I’m IN AWE of your traffic, income, talent & generosity. Thank you for sharing! 🙂