Food Blog Income Report June 2021

Food Blog Income Report and Food Blog Traffic Report numbers for June 2021. Learn how we reached nearly 3000 sessions in our fourth month!

Welcome to Cooking with Carbs’ monthly Food Blog Income Reports. Today’s post will be the Food Blog Income and Blog Traffic Report for June 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 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)

Continue reading to learn how we achieved 300% growth in Google Organic Results!

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 June Audience Overview, Users Overview, and Traffic Source/Medium 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 wrote 12 posts and finished the month with a total of 67 blog posts.

Users Overview for June 2021

The top channel breakdown for June 2021 is a very big shift from May. Instead of Social being the largest traffic driver, it is now Direct and Organic Search leading the way.

The image below compares our previous months User Overview numbers. June experienced significant gains in both Direct users (up 200%) and Organic users (up 171%). Referral also had a large 151% increase.


The one area I need to delve into is the source of direct users. A LARGE percentage of all of this month’s direct users went to one particular blog post. I’m unclear what causes this result to fall under direct versus a referral or google search console result. If anyone has an idea why this may be, please leave a comment!

Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for June 2021

Many bloggers experienced an issue on June 7th of this month, when hundreds of bots caused a spike in traffic across the board. This one day anomaly is an annoyance for someone like me that’s trying to keep good data. I’ve tried to remove these 300 or so sessions in my spreadsheet tracker so that my numbers aren’t skewed by such events. A deeper dive into the June 7th spike showed that these ~ 300 sessions were categorized as direct and organic results, so I’ve removed their impact in those results as well.

Once the impact of the bot is removed our traffic still falls around 2800 sessions, which we’re very happy with. One area that took a significant downturn is avg session duration from about 1 min 45 seconds last month to only 49 seconds this month. I’m unclear how much the bot traffic would impact this stat.

Our bounce rate continues to hover around the 70% mark which I gather is pretty good from seeing comments from other bloggers.

As previously mentioned our sessions and page views experienced a significant growth this month at around 70% once the bot traffic was removed. The % of new users and visitors continues to go up as the total traffic from organic continues to grow.

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

The table above does include about 300 users and sessions from bot traffic, but still gives a good representation of the distribution of our traffic. This month we started to see more growth in some of the smaller search engines such as yahoo and bing.

The biggest traffic source for June was Direct traffic, compared to Facebook last month. Google/Organic is now second, also ahead of Facebook. Both Direct and Google/Organic experienced significant growth, at 126% and 95% respectively.

Foodgawker – Out of the sandbox

I’ve heard many people refer to the Google sandbox and even the Pinterest sandbox lately, and that you have to wait 6-8 months before you see true progress. Prior to this month Foodgawker had been allowing a maximum of 2 submissions at a time and each would normally take 2 weeks for approval. So this amounted to about 4 posts approved per month.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had all of my first 18 submissions approved. I’m not sure if my high rate of acceptance caused a change or just my continuous submissions, but it appears that my submissions are being approved at a faster rate now and my maximum submissions at a time seems to be at least 4-5 now.

I don’t think Foodgawker will ever be at the level of Direct or Organic traffic, but this latest change at least allows me to post one Foodgawker submission for each of my 12 blog posts per month. As a result of this change our Foodgawker traffic grew by about 99% in June.

Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for June 2021

In this section we will explore the Google Search Console Search Results and starting this month we will also look at the Google Discover results.

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 February. We can see from this graph that we’re currently averaging about 15 or so clicks per month.

The above graph is a closer look at the last month only for google search results. One encouraging sign is that the data seems to be getting less variable and achieving at least ~10 clicks per day seems to be the norm. One aspect helping reduce the variance is that our clicks are not strongly dependent on any one post and instead 82 different search queries achieved at least one click in June.

Google Search Console – Google Discover Results

In the May Income Report we tried to shed a bit of light into what Google Discover was.

The above graph is our google discover results for June and they are HUGE. At least on a relative scale, 1200 clicks when our whole site is getting around 2800 or so sessions seems huge to me.

Doing a deeper dive into the numbers it appears that over a third of these Google Discover clicks are from one post alone, which means we need to buckle up in the future for high variance in our Google Search Console results.

Some data that supports this day to day variability is that one day mid month we had as high as 2,656 impressions and 96 clicks and then only two weeks later we were down to a day with 289 impressions and 7 clicks.

This month we continue to track our numbers by different buckets including by impressions and clicks. The number of google search results getting at least 5 clicks grew significantly by 700%, and the number of posts with over 50 impressions also grew by over 200%.

We also have 4 different posts getting over 1000 impressions on Google Discover which is FAR more than Google Search console (only 1 over 1000 impressions,and the next highest is at 520 impressions).

Total clicks across both Google Search and Google Discover experienced significant growth in June at 150% and 310% respectively. I hope to see continued growth on the google search side, but expect some up and down months for Google Discover due to the variability.

Google Organic Results – Why are we succeeding so far?

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Keyword Analysis / SEO Research

In our May Income and Traffic Report we discussed our use of the KWFinder keyword tool that is helping us achieve our Google results so far.

Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for June 2021

Instagram continues to be the social platform with the largest following, at 1634 followers at the end of June, though we did experience some growth setbacks. Our Pinterest account is much smaller but saw a nice 31% increase in followers up to 148 in June.

Previous months our Instagram had been growing well by at least 2 or so followers per day. This month saw our increase drop dramatically to only 4 followers total. Our major change this month was our inability to keep up with IG. We went from posting 30 times a month and engaging quickly and often with most posts to posting only 20 times and engaging much less. It appears that this interaction significantly reduced our reach, but I’ll need to do a deeper dive analysis soon.

Another thing that is becoming more clear is that having a static “subscribe” form on our pages/posts will NOT work. We are at the point now of having 1000’s of new visitors per month but we gained 0 email subscribers. We do have some freebies created (not yet offered) but we’re torn on the value of having a popup for the freebie vs. the downsides of having a slower site. I have seen some people time their popup to appear ‘on exit’ so that it doesn’t impact the loading time of the page, so that is one workaround.

Food Blog Income Report for June 2021 – Expenses and Revenues

Big Win Of the Month: Got our expenses way down!

I’m happy to report that for the first month so far we haven’t done some significantly large (possibly unnecessary) purchase. As a result our numbers look a lot better this month.

One-Time Expenses: $51.77

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.

No more big expenses this month. No monitors, wifi mesh systems, or pizza ovens. This month we only made a few small purchases at home sense and got a couple new boards for our pizzas.

Recurring Expenses: $24.95

Last month we purchased the WP Rocket plugin to help speed up our site in light of some Google Search Console errors. See our May Income and Traffic Report for more details.

This month we made no new purchases and our only expenses are our running monthly expenses (MasterClass Education and Jetpack Backup)

Lessons Learned Regarding Expenses/Spending

Lesson for the month: Sometimes the easiest way to improve your profit is by cutting costs!

This is a fairly obvious lesson, but expenses and costs are likely more in our control than revenues. So the easiest way to improve the bottom line is to minimize spending.

Revenue from June 2021 (How do food blogs make money?!)

TOTAL REVENUES: $3.43

There’s nothing too interesting to say about our revenues so far. Our entire $3 revenue is from amazon. We have many plans for other streams of revenue but at this point time is working against us. There’s no time to do all we want to do!

Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals

Short Term Goals:

In the previous section we mentioned time, and time is the issue again. My wife and I have two little kids, two busy jobs and are aggressively trying to post at least 12-13 posts per month. With those points in mind, we have NO extra time to tackle some of these other goals. As a result our goal status is easy. NONE of the outstanding goals were accomplished.

Despite the ongoing goal failure, I will try to write either a post about WP Rocket or Legal Templates in the next month or two, as those posts could bring in some additional revenue.

Due to our inability to meet our existing goals, I will not be adding any new goals this month.

Long Term Goals:

None of the long term goals were met, but looking at the list I believe I will remove the Infographics goal. I do like the look of infographics and I liked the idea of creating nice ones that could possibly generate backlinks, however I don’t think the time spent learning how to make them is time well spent at this point.

I also need to look more into Goal 4 regarding waiting to 10k for Ezoic. As of June 2021 Ezoic has announced that they have removed their pageview limits to apply. So at this point we could it is once again a tradeoff discussion between revenue (possibly $20-30/month right now) versus user experience and page speed. I don’t believe $20/month is enough to sacrifice user experience/page speed at this point so we likely won’t apply yet.

We will definitely continue posting these Food Blog Income Reports monthly around the middle of each month, to allow time for data analysis of the prior month’s results. While you’re here please visit some of our other blogging articles or delicious food recipes! Thank you for taking the time to join us on our blogging journey!

You can start at the beginning of our financial blogging journey from March 2021:

Month 1: March 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report

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

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

Did you find our June Monthly Food Blog Income Report and Food Blog Traffic Report informative and useful? Let us know in the comments below!