November 16, 2021

Food Blog Income Report October 2021

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We’re excited to have our first profitable month and continue our Google Search progress with 28% growth!

Welcome to Cooking with Carbs’ monthly Food Blog Income Reports. Today’s post will be the Food Blog Income and Blog Traffic Report for October 2021. All of the food related posts on this site are written by Cooking with Carbs chef/recipe creator Anneke Silva, but the posts in the blogging section are be written by me: her husband Isuru.

If you would like to find our previous income and traffic reports or start from the beginning of our journey, please find the links below:

Month 7: September 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 1950 / Profit -$24.95

Month 6: August 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 1621 / Profit -$24.95

Month 5: July 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 2067 / Profit -$23.24

Month 4: June 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 2489 / Profit -$73.30

Month 3: May 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 1708 / Profit -$859

Month 2: April 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 1138 / Profit -$1,077

Month 1: March 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 474 / Profit -$2,236 (Q1)

Keep reading to see how we turned in our first profitable month 9 months after starting our food blog!

Blog Traffic Report – Google Analytics Data Analysis

This section will be will contain a deep dive deeper into Google Analytics. In this post we will focus on the October Audience Overview, Traffic Source/Medium and Users sections.

For more information on where to find the relevant information in Google Analytics and definitions of relevant terms, refer to our First Food Blog Income Report.

It is important figure to note the number of blog posts on our site, as all of our upcoming traffic figures are tied to the amount of content on the site. This month we once again wrote only 5 posts and finished the month with a total of 92 blog posts. The hope is we can get the monthly blog count up to around 8-9 in the coming months and maintain that long term.

Users Overview for October 2021

The top channel breakdown for October 2021 is similar to the breakdown from September, but with stronger emphasis on Organic. Organic traffic has gone from low 70% to now near 80% of all user channels and direct traffic once again being the second biggest channel.

The image below compares our previous months User Overview numbers. October saw continued growth in Organic users, up 18%, while the other traffic sources saw big declines. Referral in particular experienced a 17% decline which is likely due to a drop in foodgawker traffic.

Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for October 2021

October sees the continuation of several trends, including a continued trend of the number of pages per session declining to 1.17. This is likely due to continued growth of users coming from google searches who may have one particular food/query of interest. The average session duration remained at 39 seconds and bounce rate continues to hover around 89%.

The overall sessions for the month are up 10% to 2152 and Page views are up 5% to 2517. This is the first time we’re breaking the 2000 Sessions mark since July and hopefully will be continuing to trend up.

New users and new visitors has remained consistent at 98% and 91% respectively, with mobile users slightly increasing up to 70%.

Food Blog Traffic Report: All Traffic Source/Medium for October 2021

The table above shows the source/medium breakdown of all our traffic for October 2021. Google organic traffic once again leads the way at 1615 sessions for the month. Google organic traffic experienced strong growth at 18% month over month into October.

Bing organic traffic experienced strong growth at 100% gains month to month, but the total sessions remains low (26 sessions). This month, however, we actively try to gain more bing organic traffic as we submitted all of our older posts to bing for crawling and also began submitting the URL to bing after each new post. We’ll see if that makes a difference!

Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for October 2021

In this section we will explore the Google Search Console Search Results and Google Discover results for October 2021.

Google Search Console – Search Results

The above graph is a glimpse of our Google Search results (not including Discover) since the start of our blogging in Q1 of 2021. From this graph we can see that we’re now averaging about 50 clicks per day.

The above graph is a closer look at just October for Google Search results. Throughout the month we were steadily getting around 50-60 clicks per day, up from 40 at the start of September.

While all other traffic streams seem to be dropping, we continue to see good growth in organic traffic and especially from Google.

Google Search Console – Google Discover Results

Google Discover results were still strong this month despite a slight drop from September.

June Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 5/14, 5/24,5/26, 6/7, 6/11, 6/16, 6/18, 6/25, 6/30

July Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 6/11, 6/18, 6/27, 6/30, 7/3, 7/5

September Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 9/5, 9/16

October Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 9/5, 9/16, 9/27, 10/27

Adding October dates to the dates above we can see the Google Discover results for any given blog post continue to persist from as early as the first week of the prior month.

October Google Search clicks experienced great growth at 28% up to 1510, which we’re very happy about. Total impressions were also up 39%, nearing in on 60,000. Google Discover declined somewhat from September, with a 16% decline.

Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for October 2021

Our social media growth has been very slow the last number of months. Our Pinterest usage has significantly declined and we are now only pinning one new pine for each post per month which at this point amounts to only 5 new pins. My wife handles the IG and similarly with less posts comes less content for IG. It is not a surprise that this drastic decline in IG usage has resulted in the loss of IG followers from month to month.

Food Blog Income Report for October 2021 – Expenses and Revenues

This month we are very happy to report that it was our FIRST month with a net profit since starting the blog. We didn’t do too much to make this happen but our sudden profit is more indicative of the variability in relying on affiliate sales. Nonetheless, we won’t complain!

One-Time Expenses: $20

This post contains affiliate links and which means we’ll receive a commission if you purchase through our links, at no extra cost to you. This helps keep the content free on this site.

As we approach the end of the year we will need a renew some of our annual subscriptions and memberships for the following year. This month we renewed our annual squarespace membership for $20.

Recurring Expenses: $24.95 but we got rid of a few! Goodbye Tailwind!

For October we made no new purchases and our only expenses are our running monthly expenses (MasterClass Education and Jetpack Backup). We have started trying to trim down future expenses and while the $15/month for MasterClass was a bargain given the content, we also didn’t have time to take advantage of it. So we decided to cancel it.

We also made a bigger decision to cancel our Tailwind subscription. From the traffic source table above we can see that Pinterest is inching it’s way off the table, contributing only 4 sessions this past month. Although I love using Tailwind, the fact that Pinterest traffic has been tanking has significantly limited its use moving forward. We’re at the point now where we only create 5 new pins a month and just pin them manually.

Revenue from October 2021

TOTAL REVENUES: $100.66 ($1.66 from Amazon and $99 from other affiliate sales)

Since we’ve yet to venture into the ad world, our revenue sources at this point are either amazon associate sales or or other affiliate sales which are more focused on blogging tools such as keyword search software, legal templates, WP Rocket, courses or other items bloggers may find useful. This month we only made $1.66 from amazon, so the remaining $99 was from other affiliate sales.

We are excited to see this kind of return from other affiliate sales to the point that we’re hoping to check off one of our “goal” items that’s been missed for the last several months, with regards to finally writing some better posts dedicated to the reasons we chose various services and tools for our blog. The nice part about writing affiliate posts for tools you use is that you can give unbiased and accurate opinions.

Lessons Learned Regarding Revenues/Expenses

Lesson for the month: Affiliate sales outside of Amazon can bring in good returns.

Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals

Short Term Goals – Better posting routine with better meal/SEO planning

We’re getting to the point where I should probably re-visit some of these short term goals as we’re consistently failing to meet them. That being said, our recent affiliate sales have renewed our interest to write some posts dedicated to that so we will try to accomplish that in November or December.

We’re also trying to be more organized on the meal planning front. We’ve put together a list of about 30-40 meal ideas that have good traffic potential and medium difficulty, so that should hopefully help us post at least 2x a week. Unfortunately that list will only get us through 3-4 months, so we’ll need to come up with more ideas. This is becoming a significant challenge. Finding meals that 1) have good monthly search volume 2) have low enough difficulty that we can rank well on google 3) foods that my wife has interest and/or ability in making. Finding ideas that accomplish all 3 points is proving tough!

Long Term Goals:

No progress on any long term goals at this point, but we may drop the idea to setup an online store. There isn’t much time to go around at this point and that is low priority.

Unfortunately we weren’t able to keep up with our profits from October into November. Take a look at how we did in November 2021 below.

Month 9: November 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 2640 / Profit -$732.76

You can find our earlier Income and Traffic Reports below: