Bjork here, back in the saddle for my monthly income report. I’ll actually be posting again tomorrow, as Lindsay and I have some food blog related news that we’re excited to share. It’ll be my first back-to-back appearance on Pinch of Yum!
Our hope is that these monthly income and traffic reports are inspirational and educational.
Inspirational in that you can see that’s it’s possible to create an income from a food blog and educational in that you can see where the income we’re earning is coming from.
Here is the breakdown for October’s income.
The Breakdown:
- Bluehost – $1,560
- Tasty Food Photography – $990.35
- BlogHer – $829.85
- Google AdSense – $605.28
- Elegant Themes – $97.50
- Thesis Theme – $93.72
- Amazon – $44.75
- VigLink – $16
Grand Total: $4,237.45
Income As Percentages
Income Notes:
It’s been fun to see sales of Tasty Food Photography hold steady over the past few months. To date the affiliate program has paid out over $1,400. Thanks to those of you that are Tasty Food Photography affiliates! Bluehost earnings are up compared to previous months. I’ll talk more about this in the tips and takeaways section below. BlogHer earnings are down compared to previous months. As with any advertising network, there will be times when advertisers aren’t paying as much to have their ads shown. October appears to be one of those months for BlogHer.
Traffic
Here are the screenshots of the Pinch of Yum Google Analytics for the month of October.
Traffic Notes:
The organic search traffic continues to grow each month, which is fun to see. When you crunch the numbers from previous months it averages out to around 100 additional visitors (compared to the previous day) that are arriving at the blog thanks to organic search traffic. It’s a good reminder to be intentional about writing posts that are search engine friendly.
Tips and Takeaways
The Teacher, The Landlord, and The Inventor
There have been a handful of people that have asked about how we create an income from affiliate programs with like companies like Bluehost, DIY Themes (creators of the Thesis Theme), or Elegant Themes. The question got me thinking about all the different ways to create an income with a food blog, and how there are distinct differences between each type of income.
It’s easiest to explain the different types of income by comparing them to three types of jobs: a teacher, a landlord, and an inventor. The information below provides an overview of how we create income from affiliate programs and also offers additional insight into the other two types of income streams.
The Teacher
The role of a teacher is, simply put, to teach. 🙂 If you have signed up to be an affiliate for an affiliate program then you need to think of yourself as a teacher. At the very least, a teacher needs three things in order to be successful:
- A subject they have an expertise in
- A class that wants to learn about that subject
- Time to help the students if they run into trouble
The same is true if you’re an affiliate for a product. As an affiliate marketer, you should have:
- An expertise or experience using a certain product
- Readers that want to learn about that product
- Time to help your readers if they run into trouble
That’s what we are doing with the how to start a food blog page. We’ve used all of the products that we promote on that page and oftentimes help people troubleshoot issues they run into when they’re going through the process of setting up their blog.
If you’re not playing the role of teacher on your blog then you’re probably missing out on potential income. Take some time to browser the different affiliate networks listed below and see if you can find some products that you can teach your readers about.
The Landlord
The role of a landlord is to rent their real estate to the highest paying and friendliest tenants. As a food blogger, you need to think of your blog as real estate. We’ll call it screen real estate.
There are hundreds of companies that are interested in renting your screen real estate for advertising. The thing is, not all of these renters are equal. Some will have really annoying or offensive ads that pay a lot of money (for example, online casinos). Some renters have really great ads but will pay little to no money (for example, not-profits).
Your job as the landlord is to find renters that (1) pay an appropriate amount and (2) don’t make a mess of the place.
For Pinch of Yum, we’ve found the best renters to be Blogher and Google AdSense.
The Inventor
The role of an inventor is to create a product that helps others solve a problem. With Pinch of Yum, we’ve done this by creating an eBook called Tasty Food Photography. The inventor income is one of the most important types of income to create. It can also be one of the hardest types of income to create.
There is a lot that goes into creating a product. With a book, you have to write the content, take the pictures, edit the content, figure out digital media formatting, figure out distribution and setup payment processing, to name a few.
However, the hardest thing about creating a product is the internal struggle.
It’s that little voice inside our head that says “Me? What do I have to offer. No one would be interested in buying something I created…”
But that’s almost always not true. If I were a betting man I’d bet a serious chunk of change that you know the answer to a problem that someone else has. You just have to figure out what it is. Once you figure out what that is you can put on your inventor hat and get to work.
One of the most affordable ways to start creating an income as an inventor is to write an eBook. It’ll take a lot of hard work, but the good news is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get started. I don’t have room in this post to show the step-by-step process for creating an eBook, but I will provide the three essential pieces that we used create and distribute the eBook we sell on Pinch of Yum.
- A word processor (we used Apple’s Pages and converted it to a PDF)
- A distributor (we use E-junkie)
- A payment processor (use use PayPal Payments Pro and Google Checkout)
Your Food Blog Resume
The majority of food bloggers are only playing the role of landlord. They’re renting their screen real estate to companies that pay them a certain fee to show ads.
Far fewer people are playing the role of teacher and inventor. If you’re looking for ways to increase the income from your blog I’d encourage you to add the “jobs” of teacher or inventor to your to your food blog resume.
I’ll Be Back
To quote the great Arnold — “I’ll be back.”
Lindsay and I will be back tomorrow to fill you in with what’s been going on behind the scenes here at Pinch of Yum. Talk to you soon!
P.S. 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!
Oh, hello and thanks for the post! I will take your recommendations into consideration as I am promoting my blog and want to monetise it. I think I can already give up my advertisers and focus on my skills and promote my personal brand. I’ve been running my blog for a while now and lottery sites have been bringing me the income I needed, but it seems that too many ads have been appearing on my blog.
Do you mind if I quote a couple of your posts as long as I provide credit and sources back to your site?
My website is in the exact same area of interest as yours
and my users would definitely benefit from some of
the information you provide here. Please let me know if this okay with you.
Thanks!
What’s up to all, how is all, I think every one is getting
more from this website, and your views are pleasant designed
for new people.
Hello very nice website!! Guy .. Excellent .. Amazing ..
I will bookmark your blog and take the feeds also? I’m happy to search out so many useful information here in the put up, we want work out extra strategies on this regard, thanks
for sharing. . . . . .
How many pageviews did you get when you were starting out? I’m on my second month and averages 100pageviews a day. I can’t imagine how it can grow to 459,000 pageviews like yours. Am I on the right track.
Hey Bjork. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on web traffic tipping points. Looking back at your blog’s growth it seems like there was a serious snowballing effect. I’m curious if you think there were a few key moments (tipping points) that made a big difference….or, alternatively, if it has just been a steady incline the past year or two. That would make for a very interesting income report article methinks!!
Hey Eric. I was working on the Google Analytics course for Food Blogger Pro today and thought of your comment. I did some digging and found a definitive moment in the data that could be considered a tipping point.
March 8th, 2012.
Lindsay’s post on healthy sweet potato skins was pinned by Jane Wang. Sound familiar? It didn’t to me either.
Turns out she is the mother of the founder of Pinterest and at the time was in the top 10 most popular Pinterest users (maybe she still is, not sure). See Mashable article here. See her Pinterest page here.
After March 8th there was a noticeable and lasting increase in traffic.
Pinterest. I tell ya…
Hi,
Love your blog! I am wondering what advice you could give me about taking this course. http://momblogmoneyblog.com/. Is it a wise use of money? I have blogged for quite awhile now and would like to set it up to create a much needed income, but I do not want it plastered with unsightly ads. Any advice is much appreciated! Sue
my wife loves your recipes and showed this post to me a couple weeks ago. I have to say it is a great resource for myself, and one which I have shared with some friends and clients who run various websites. thanks for being open and honest about your process. all the best!
This post was extremely helpful! I really like the breakdowns and the analogies you used. I found the site through the ebook and am so happy I did! I will definitely be a frequent visitor.
Fascinating. Thanks so much for sharing. I am trying everything hard to learn everything to monetize my blog. I will be studying all of your wonderful information to see how to apply it to my own blog.
Thanks,
Laura
As a blogger/affiliate I’m very impressed by your progress from $21 to the $1000s p/m that your earning today. What’s most impressive is the diverse streams of income you’ve set up i.e. direct ads, affilaite marketing, your own products services, etc. This post stood out becuase you’ve categorised this work into a memorable parable (teacher, landlord, inventor) which I can easily remember for building my own online income
Thanks,
Lewis
I’m so thankful for your being so transparent about this. I was divorced last year, and four months ago I fell and broke both sides of my ankle and had to have surgery. I’m still learning to walk, and need desperately to make money from my blog. However, I’m not a food blogger, but a home and garden blogger. Hoping to learn from your teachings.
Brenda
You guys are doing amazing, so happy for you that you are making a decent income from your blog!! Thanks for the little tutorial in the comments about adding an image to your html code. So I looked mine up but my image html is different than yours
Where would I put the word photo in this? Thanks in advance for any help you can give!!
So I have no idea when I entered this html it did not show up in my comment above… let me try again.
Ha-ha weird? It doesn’t show up again?
I love these posts, but the comments are just as informative. Thanks for all the hard work!
I always look forward to your monthly reports, it’s just so inspiring! I still have a long way to go, and I appreciate learning from your tips. Thanks!
Someone mentioned the dreaded “T” word and so I have to ask…how do taxes work for this? Do the different revenue streams give you tax forms at the end of the year or is it completely up to you to keep track? Or, since it’s on the internet is it tax free (like how amazon doesn’t need to charge sales tax)? If it’s a long a boring answer you can email it to me 🙂
Miss you both more than you can imagine. Glad that even with all the changes in your lives while in Cebu you had the determination to not let this blog (and all the follow-ons) fall away. This is great stuff!
Google Adsense and many other places need your social security number before they will pay you. So I am sure they report that income to the IRS and you are responsible for paying taxes on it.
I’ve been trying to figure out ways to improve my organic search traffic. Any tips aside from SEO optimization? I only get about 200 hits from Google every day and I feel like I’m missing out big time.
i love these posts – so generous of you to share your knowledge with others!
Awesome job guys. We’re experimenting this month too. Just got out of our contract with FoodBuzz and are trying some non exclusive networks combined with some other ad sources including viglink. Thanks for opening up so much so we all can learn how to better monetize our websites. Cheers!
Yes another brilliant post Bjork. I love your monthly income posts. So great to see you guys doing so well! I’ve sold two of your eBooks so far and get sooo excited when I get the email. It’s such a brilliant little book.
Hey Claire. Thanks for the kind note. Thanks also for being an affiliate for the eBook!
Wow thanks Bjork…you truly are a teacher, this information is golden and I look forward to expanding on the info you provided here…please keep these post coming!
Thanks Ed. Your dog is awesome.
Its a very nice topic and good information shared by you. Thanks a lot for sharing this with us.