Greetings! Bjork here. I’m checking in for the monthly traffic and income report.
In this month’s report I’m going to talk about the numbers (as usual) and then discuss what will possibly be a new income stream on Pinch of Yum. It’s actually a type of income we’ve never had before, so we’ll be starting from scratch and updating you along the way. More on the details of this later in the post. First, the breakdown.
The Income Breakdown:
- BlogHer – $2,126.22
- Tasty Food Photography – $1,458.50
- Bluehost – $1,365.00
- Google AdSense – $851.70
- BuySellAds – $776.24
- Thesis Theme – $208.56
- Elegant Themes – $97.50
- Amazon – $91.58
Grand Total: $6,975.30
Income As Percentages
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!
The Traffic Breakdown
You can click on the screenshot to view an enlarged version.
Traffic Overview
Top Ten Traffic Sources
Top Ten Landing Pages
Thoughts On Income and Traffic
February was a record month for Pinch of Yum, as we earned $1,288.40 more than the previous high last month. The extra income came from an ad being purchased on BuySellAds in addition to an above normal month with BlogHer. Other than that there wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary.
A New Form Of Income
We want to do our best to keep you in the loop with what we’re doing behind the scenes with Pinch of Yum in hopes that you can learn something from us and apply it your blog. And the next frontier we’re going to try and tackle with Pinch of Yum in regards to generating income will be establishing long-term partnerships with reputable brands.
This will be a new thing for us! But we’re hoping that starting from scratch and talking about the process as it happens will be helpful.
Why are we pursuing these brand partnerships? The online advertising industry can really fluctuate. This can be a bit unnerving, especially if your blog is your primary source of income. For example, advertising income from BlogHer in February was $2,126.22, whereas in January it was $754.40. That’s a swing of $1,371.82 in one month!
The reality is that this type of fluctuation is normal and expected. That being said, it’s hard to budget your income when you know that your next payment from a certain advertiser could be half of what the last one was. In short, it would be nice to build a consistent stream of income as opposed to one that fluctuates from month-to-month.
Two True Statements
- Companies like Google AdSense and BlogHer offer a great way to generate advertising income from your blog.
- Companies like Google AdSense and BlogHer are not the only way to generate advertising income from your blog.
With that in mind, let’s talk about how you can go about setting up a system to partner with brands and remove the advertising middle man.
How We’ll Go About Doing It
DoubleClick for Publishers
DoubleClick for Publishers is a Google company that allows publishers (i.e. food bloggers) to serve and track their own ads. It works the same way as other ad networks in the sense that you get HTML code and drop it into your website where you want the ads to appear. The only difference is that it won’t automatically start showing ads. The ad images and settings are set by you.
You’ll need a Google AdSense account in order to sign up, but otherwise it’s free
Here’s an example of what’s possible with DoubleClick: Let’s say, for instance, we find a maple syrup company in St. Paul, MN called Bob’s Organic Syrup. After meeting with Bob he decides that advertising on Pinch of Yum might be a good way for him to increase sales at the Minneapolis Farmer’s Market as well as his online store. We agree that for $200 dollars a month he gets a 125×125 permanent ad on pinchofyum.com and 50,000 impressions of a 300×250 ad. The 125×125 ad shows to every single visitor while the 300×250 ad only shows to people from Minnesota. Also, Pinch of Yum would link to their website whenever we use maple syrup as an ingredient in a post. Lastly, we would agree to provide them with statistics about the ad impressions and click-through rate at the end of every month. We can do all of this using DoubleClick.
Pretty sweet, huh?
If you want to learn more about DoubleClick for Publishers you can check out their website: http://www.google.com/doubleclick/publishers/
PayPal Recurring Billing
Remember, we’re attempt to create long-term relationships with brands, so that means we want to build a billing system that allows us to use recurring billing. This frees us up from having to send out invoices every month, and it frees the brand up from having to enter in their payment information every month. The easiest way I’ve found so far is by combining two services from Paypal: Website Payments Pro and the Recurring Payments add on.
Let’s go back to the example we were using before. Bob’s Organic Syrup agreed to pay Pinch of Yum $200 per month. Using PayPal and Recurring Billing we enter in Bob’s billing information and set the billing date to the 1st of every month. Once the 1st of the month comes around Bob’s credit card is automatically charged.
We had already signed up for Website Payments Pro because we use it on the Tasty Food Photography sales page to process credit cards. So that meant we only needed to sign up for the Recurring Payments add on. After signing up for Recurring Payments we get an option under the tools area of PayPal called “Recurring Payments.”
Setting up a recurring payment is now as easy as logging into PayPal, clicking on “Recurring Payments”, and then entering in the customer’s billing information.
Once again – pretty sweet, huh? 🙂
Connect with people
This is the hard part – connecting with real people. It’s important to be the one to pick up the phone (or press the compose button) and start the conversation with the brands you want to work with, because they might not necessarily be knocking on your door and asking to advertise on your site. And reaching out to connect with people is exactly what we plan to do as we attempt to develop some of these brand partnerships.
In the coming month’s income reports I’ll be sure to include an update on how this new experiment is going and the things we’re learning along the way.
How About You?
Do you have any experience or thoughts on working with brands? Have you done it before? Has it been too much work? Has it been rewarding? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
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Thanks for posting this. The first time I saw something similar to this was on Pat Flynn’s blog at smart passive income. Do you follow him?
Yes, he was a huge source of inspiration for us when we started these!
Thank you so much for setting up these posts, it helps so much! I’m trying to figure out how to use Double Click, but I’m just lost! Do I have to register? It only seems like that’s for businesses? Hmm. Anyways, I’m a teacher too, so thank you for educating! And thanks for all of the advice!
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Hi Bjork,
You get a huge lot of visitors from foodgawker and pinterest. How many images do you submit each day/ week to get that many from foodgawker? and also for pinterest?
Thanks Ingrid
Hi Ingrid! I submit photos to Foodgawker for almost all of my food posts, which usually ends up being, at most, 2-3 photos per week. Pinterest isn’t a submission based website so that number is based on other people “pinning” and “repinning” my recipes to their boards. Let me know if you have other questions. 🙂
Thanks Lindsay. Do you think your pinterest traffic has come about from people pinning from your blog or from you pinning to pinterest and people pinning to their boards (if that makes sense!)
Have you pin pointed what content started increasing your traffic – was it recipe + photos or do you think it was more your helpful and informative blogging info?
Cheers Ingrid
I’ve actually never even pinned anything, so all of that traffic would have to be from other people’s pins. 🙂
We get a lot more traffic to the food pages on Pinch of Yum because that is primarily what the site emphasizes. But I think sometimes people come initially for the food, and then spend more time checking out the blogging related content. The only thing we can “pinpoint” in terms of traffic growth is that about two years ago, one of my posts (Healthy Sweet Potato Skins) was repinned by a person who was, at the time, one of the most followed Pinterest users, Jane Wang. That is the only tangible point in time where we can see a spike in traffic that had lasting effects – otherwise it’s a gradual growth of traffic over the last few years.
Hope that helps! 🙂
Thanks Lindsay. I’ve spent the evening checking out your blog and I learnt a lot – we have recently relaunched our blog from a blogspot domain to its own doamin and become a bit more serious about blogging – we use to blog (when we could find time – we have 2 kids each, so that’s like never!) now we are posting 4 times a week, we have a creative plan to work to, and we just need to have a better plan to build our traffic up. It’s inspiring to see your progress, and it’s wonderful that you share it with the world. Thanks Ingrid
Wow! Great job! I’m going to check out your site now – keep up the good work Ingrid!
BTW, how do you make your pie charts? What program do you use?
Numbers: https://www.apple.com/numbers/
Thanks!
I’ve been researching how I can market ad space on my website and found that most people have a media kit with advertising rates. They’ve done a marvelous job at designing a one or two page PDF that has their information about subscribers, age of visitors, visitors countries, what’s trending, social media and the such. It’s a great tool to give to a brand who may want to sponsor your blog.
I’m no where near being able to offer advertising, but I wanted to let you know about it because I didn’t see that you talked about this option in your business plan.
Here’s an example of a pin with a media kit; http://pinterest.com/pin/169236898469320917/
If you advertise ad slots on your website, you never know, a name-brand company may come to you looking for a media kit. 🙂
Autumn! Thanks so much for passing that along. The link didn’t work. Do you have it saved somewhere else? I’d love to see it.
Bummer!
It’s Here; http://www.studiobomba.com.au/2010/frankie-media-kit/
I also did a google search on “Blog Media Kit.” Lots of different samples out there;
https://www.google.com/search?q=blog+media+kit&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=mW5&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=m_BlUb6vHcm1ygGvsoCQDA&ved=0CFQQsAQ&biw=1760&bih=746
Hey guys, thank you so much for providing these transparent income reports. I check them out every month. I’ve been wanting to take advantage of DFP, but every time I login I get terribly confused. Have you considered adding DFP tutorials to Food Blogger Pro? I know it’d be kinda advanced stuff, but I would LOVE IT.
We have. Once I’m able to really wrap my head around it (so I can teach it) we’ll put a course together. Thanks Kate!
Very insightful article. I’m sure many will appreciate the tip on partnering with brands.
Wow, it is nice to see your income reports. I am a food blogger and this will inspire me to work hard and monetize my food blog..thanks again
It’s nice to see that you guys are earning good money by doing what you love.
I have one question though. I can’t seem to find any adverts from “blogher” on this blog.
How exactly do you make money with them?
Hey Rahat. They’re the 160×600 ads in the top right corner and the 300×250 ad below the post.
This si soooo helpful! I am so glad I found your blog!!! PS I love pugs too!
Hello! I found your website when I was googling “starting a food blog”. I just started blogging two weeks ago…still a newbie. I found the post to be insightful and inspiring. I know I am probably making all the rookie mistakes in the book. I’ll learn as I go. And sites such as yours are helpful guides through my process.
Thanks for sharing this! I was referred to this post by a friend and find it really helpful. I’m curious to your bounce rate when looking at your stats, It’s really high! I was always told to keep it as low as possible. What do you think. Thanks again!
Great observation Amy. You’re spot on. We’d love to lower that %. We recently redesigned the site which should help. Also, PoY has quite a bit of traffic from Pinterest, which tends to be higher bounce rate traffic.
It’s incredibly great of you guys to share your monetization efforts. Really love these reports. Thank you! …Susan
I’ve been on the DFP server about a month and have empty ad space 50-75% of the time. I had someone set it up for me and I’m thinking something is wrong; however, I don’t know what to do. I haven’t seen an increase in revenue either, which is bizarre, considering I’m working with six ad networks. Any advice?? 🙁
Are you backfilling the DFP code with your AdSense code? If you are you shouldn’t see that much empty space.
Love these posts, you guys are so helpful! I’ve been totally intimidated to work with brands, and I’m trying to make myself branch out a bit. I’ll be interested to see how things go for you!
Once again, THANK YOU for doing these reports, Bjork! I really enjoy seeing the behind-the-scene details.
I’m interested in the nearly 19,000 visitor discrepancy between visitors coming from FoodGawker vs. TasteSpotting… Have you decided to focus more on FG, or did TS get fussy about pictures? Is there any strategy here, or just merely a fluke?
Thanks!!
Hi Mary! I submit the same photos to both Tastespotting and Foodgawker and I’ve found the acceptance rate to be about the same for both. One thing that seems to make a difference, though, is the popular or most gawked pages on Foodgawker. There isn’t really anything that’s updated frequently like that on Tastespotting. I looked at my FG referral traffic numbers and there are a lot of posts from far back popular pages (i.e. most gawked page 13) that will send a few hundred people a month, and I think even obscure traffic like that really starts to add up. My referral traffic from the FG home page is only about 8,000 per month, so obviously the rest of it is coming from other FG pages like those popular or most gawked pages. That’s one huge advantage that FG has over TS. Hopefully that helps! 🙂
Aha! Thanks, Lindsay!
i would like to know more about food photography and how to start up a food blog
Here’s a link to my ebook on food photography, a page with basic info on starting a food blog, and our membership website for teaching people how to get set up with their own food blogs. Good luck! 🙂
https://pinchofyum.com/tasty-food-photography
https://pinchofyum.com/how-to-start-a-food-blog
https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/
I decided to go down the brand partnership route because the income was guaranteed, rather than dependent on clicks or purchases.
I’m interested in your thoughts on whether your links in these ads will be follow or no follow. It’s a pretty hot topic at the moment.
Great question. We’d probably use dofollow links. What do you use?
No follow – and the ad income has dried up. However, I believe it’s the ethical way and the recent Interflora Google penalization serves as a warning to us all.
In the longer term I believe the ads agencies will realise brand and trust is more important and I’m willing to wait for that to happen.
Ah. Yeah. For the paid links they would be nofollow links. Great point.