October 17, 2021

Food Blog Income Report September 2021

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Traffic turned around in September with 26% more users and 33% organic growth from August.

Welcome to Cooking with Carbs’ monthly Food Blog Income Reports. Today’s post will be the Food Blog Income and Blog Traffic Report for September 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 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 if our Google Discover results rebounded from a down month in August!

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 September 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 87 blog posts.

Users Overview for September 2021

The top channel breakdown for September 2021 is similar to the breakdown from August. Organic traffic continues to be about 70% while Direct and Referral traffic swapped spots with Direct being the second biggest driver. The reason for the boost in Direct is likely due to Google Discover traffic rebounding.

The image below compares our previous months User Overview numbers. September saw a rebound in users with 26% growth over August. This growth can be attributed to the continued growth of organic traffic (33% growth) and a strong rebound of direct traffic which had been dropping significantly in prior months. Social users continue to drop and are now at the lowest levels since the blog started.

Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for September 2021

September sees the continuation of several trends, including a continued trend of the number of sessions per user declining down to 1.10 (from a peak of 1.66). This is likely due to fewer social users, as social users often visit the website multiple times a month. The average session duration is down to 39 seconds and bounce rate up to 88.8%.

The overall sessions for the month are up after a few down months with 20% growth up to 1950 sessions. Pageviews are also up over 19% at 2392 for the month.

Google Discover rebounding from 11 clicks last month definitely helped the return of growth this month, as well as google search growth which will be discussed later.

A similar trend from August continued in September, with more and more new users and new visitors (up to 98% and 91% respectively). The number of mobile users also increased from August which may also be attributed to the Google Discover traffic.

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

The table above shows the source/medium breakdown of all our traffic for September 2021. Google organic traffic once again leads the way at 1260 sessions for the month. Google organic traffic experienced strong growth at 32% month over month into September. Direct traffic also experienced significant growth with 55% growth leading to nearly 250 sessions.

Pinterest traffic continues to fall off a cliff. This is partly due to the changing landscape of Pinterest but also due to a near full decline in Pinterest effort and attention. Pinterest traffic is down 79% in September and only yielded a handful of clicks in the month.

Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for September 2021

In this section we will explore the Google Search Console Search Results and Google Discover results for September 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 40 clicks per day.

The above graph is a closer look at just September for Google Search results. We can see some decent progress where at the start of the month we were getting at most around 40 clicks per day and at the end of the month we had some days approaching 60 clicks.

We’re excited to see continued google search growth.

Google Search Console – Google Discover Mild Recovery

Google Discover results somewhat recovered this month after turning in only 11 clicks in August. This month we rebounded to 265 clicks which is not bad since only 2 blog posts contributed to the traffic.

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

Adding September dates to the dates above we can see the Google Discover results for any given blog post continue to last at most about 1-1.5 months. In this case none of our August posts contributed any Google Discover results.

September Google Search clicks experienced amazing 40% growth up to 1180, which we’re very happy about. Total impressions was also up significantly, passing the 40,000 mark in September. Google Discover not surprisingly had tremendous growth in September largely due to the very low volume in August.

Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for September 2021

Our Social Media involvement has been quite slow/low since July and our follower growth has slowed similarly. This is also tied to our rate of posting which has also slowed for the last several months, and so we have less content to post on IG and Pinterest as well.

Food Blog Income Report for September 2021 – Expenses and Revenues

This month was the same financial situation was August unfortunately. We managed to keep expenses down, with the only expenses we’ve incurred are the two monthly recurring expenses and no additional one time expenses. This means that our expenses are as low as they can be, at $24.95. Unfortunately our revenues were $0 this month for the second month in a row.

One-Time Expenses: $0

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.

Back to back months with no one time expenses. Hopefully that’s a sign that what we’ve got can sustain us moving forward for some time. That being said my birthday was recently and my friends got me a Henry’s gift card, so I suspect a new lens purchase is in the future.

Recurring Expenses: $24.95

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

Revenue from September 2021

TOTAL REVENUES: $0

Unfortunately it’s back to back months at $0. We’re ok with this for now, as amazon is really our only source of revenue at this point and we don’t expect much. We need to put more effort into other affiliate streams if we want revenue from there.

Lessons Learned Regarding Revenues/Expenses

Lesson for the month: The same lesson as last month. Amazon affiliate revenue will never be a game changer barring huge traffic.

Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals

Short Term Goals:

We were really hoping to get back into the posting routine in September, but it didn’t play out that way. We’ve compiled a list of good SEO options that are lower difficulty but the result of this list is a lot of meals that my wife isn’t too confident in making or just doesn’t believe they will taste good.

A couple ideas that seem promising but that we won’t be making are boli and laab gai. I’m not even sure we know what these are!

Sometimes all you need is a simple step to get re-motivated. We purchased a white board for our fridge to do some meal planning, so hopefully we can stay better organized that way. Our goal now is 2 new meals per week and I’ll continue doing an income report each month so 9 posts or so a month.

Long Term Goals:

No progress on any long term goals at this point.