December 22, 2021

Food Blog Income Report November 2021

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We continue to have strong organic growth with nearly 30% google organic growth and over 60% yahoo organic 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 November 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 8: October 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 2152 / Profit +$55.71

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)

Continue reading to find out if we continued our trend of profitable months after our first profitable month in October!

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 well off our momentum a little more with only 4 posts and finished the month with a total of 96 blog posts. The hope is we can get the monthly blog count up to around 8-9 in the coming new year and maintain that long term.

Users Overview for November 2021

The top channel breakdown for November is similar to the breakdown from October, but with slightly stronger emphasis on Organic. Organic and Direct traffic continue to be the two biggest channels.

The image below compares our previous months User Overview numbers. November saw continued growth in Organic users, up 24%, while Direct traffic saw the biggest increase at 39%. Referral traffic went down 27% since October. The total number of users saw strong growth as well, up 23% to 2357 users.

Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for November 2021

November sees the stabilization of some trends that had been previously moving in a downward direction. The number of sessions/user remained constant at 1.12 since October, as did the average session duration of 39 seconds. The pages/session was down slightly from 1.17 and bounce rate up slightly from 89% last month.

The overall sessions for the month are up a fair bit at 23%, up to 2640. The page views are also up 22% to over 3k, at 3075 page views for November.

New users and new visitors have also remained mostly consistent at 98% and visitors up slightly to 92%. Mobile users increased a fair bit up to 75% from 70% in October.

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

The table above shows the source/medium breakdown of all our traffic for November 2021. Google organic traffic once again leads the way at 1850 sessions for the month. Google organic traffic experienced strong growth at 26% month over month into November. Yahoo organic growth was the fastest growing source of traffic at 62% month over month, but on much smaller volume at only 20 sessions.

Bing organic traffic was down significantly from 25 sessions in October to 11 in November. We had been hoping for continued growth with Bing traffic since we started submitting URLs to bing. We should likely also submit them to yahoo given the growth we’re seeing in yahoo organic.

Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for November 2021

In this section we will explore the Google Search Console Search Results and Google Discover results for November 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 70 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 60-70 clicks per day, up from 55 at the start of October.

While many 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

November Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 10/20, 11/1

Adding November 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.

November Google Search clicks experienced great growth at 28% up to 1930, which we’re very happy about. Total impressions were also up 31%, at about 76,500. Google Discover was fairly stable from October at only 3% growth up to 229 clicks.

Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for November 2021

Our social media growth has been very slow the last number of months. Our Pinterest usage is now down to a single pin for each blog post, which for this month was 4. IG followers were up 3 this month and Pinterest up 2 followers.

Food Blog Income Report for November 2021 – Expenses and Revenues

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.

After having our first profitable month in October, we went back to our previous trends this month with $0 total revenue. In addition to no revenue we also had a significantly increase in one time expenses at $687.81, due to the purchase of a new camera lens the sigma f2.8 105mm macro lens.

One-Time Expenses: $687.81

As listed above, we purchased a macro lens to use with our food photography which contributed significantly to our one-time expenses.

Recurring Expenses: $44.95 but we got rid of a few! Goodbye Tailwind!

This month we paid an extra $20 than usual for our annual renewal of squarespace, on top of our final month of masterclass ($15) and our monthly Jetpack backup fee of $9.95.

Revenue from November 2021

TOTAL REVENUES: $0

Unfortunately after having profit with both amazon sales and other affiliate sales last month, we had no such sales this month. We’re still working on posting more affiliated related content, but have yet to find the time.

Lessons Learned Regarding Revenues/Expenses

Lesson for the month: Affiliate sales are highly variable from month to month.

Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals

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

Another month where we missed our goals. It’s interesting writing some of these blog posts because we write them halfway into the subsequent and so we often know that we already won’t be meeting the next month’s goals either. In this case we’re being realistic and aren’t hoping for any big changes in December, but hopefully the new year brings some good progress.

While we don’t feel too strongly about all of the goals we do strongly want to get into a repeatable blog posting routine that will yield us at least 8 posts per month.

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. We are also questioning whether we should Ezoic as the frequency of comments about it slowing down people’s sites seems to be growing.