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Presenting the super-late food blogger income report for June 2021, the 32nd month of my blog. If you’re late to the party, I’ve been doing these reports since the very beginning of my blog (November 2018).
This month was…not a successful month for me. Traffic continued to decline and hit a low level I haven’t seen since last year. It was pretty discouraging and led to me putting off writing my income reports for ages (no enjoys documenting a big failure).
Setbacks happen. Sit and sulk on it a while if you need to (I sure did!). Then pick yourself right back up, dust yourself off, and get back in the blogging saddle. I have a few reports to catch up on and a huge amount of content to do so I’ve shortened my food blog income reports a little to make it easier for me to get them out.
I’ve also decided to switch to quarterly reports, they’re just a whole lot less effort to get out and I think it’s nice to be able to compare snapshots of progress and income from the same fiscal quarter.
Use the jump links below to get to where you want to be or scroll on down to read all about June.
Traffic
June 2021 58,490 page views (compared to 74,544 page views last month and 69,893 in June 2020)
Traffic was absolute rubbish in April of this year due to getting smacked by some Google tweaks and Pinterest nose-diving for everyone, but numbers did seem to be trending up in May so I was unpleasantly surprised this month.
As you can see from the graph above my traffic started well and then trended steadily downwards. The bump at the start was due to having some nice Google Discover traffic that had pushed my May numbers up, but sadly what goes up must come down…
From reviewing all my stats the steady decline seems to me to be a combination of the summer slump hitting and restrictions loosening everywhere and people not wanting to be trapped in their houses cooking.
Last year was the first year of “real” traffic that my blog saw and traffic was all over the place because of the pandemic so it’s unfortunately not useful for me to compare this year’s traffic to when looking for an explanation for trends and traffic shifts.
When looking at traffic sources it was pretty much business as usual albeit with reductions in all sources across the board.
Social
Ah social, a place I advocate spending less and less time because it’s just not as good a return on investment as investing time in creating new content for SEO purposes.
Email subscribers 649
Facebook followers 5793
Pinterest followers 3172
Instagram followers 736
As usual, things were slowly bumbling along here. Email subscribers are valuable and I highly prize a well-engaged subscriber but I am just terrible at building a list. Facebook reach tanked this year, Pinterest tanked on all of us and Instagram is an area I have no interest in so I can sum up my current attitude to all three by saying that I only post there when I have new content.
Income
- June Mediavine Income: $1417 (compared to $1544.46 in May 2021 and $1118.41 in June 2020)
- Affiliate income: $29
- June Expenses: $156.04
- June Profit: $1231.96 (before tax and social security)
Although traffic dived this month, some healthy RPMs meant my income didn’t take as much of a hit as I feared it would, and I even started to make a little affiliate income!
RPMs for June 2021 with Mediavine, my fabulous ad management company, came in at $25.51 (per thousand page views). The average RPM the previous month (May 2021) was $21.69 and in June 2020 just $16.11!
Expenses
- $34.52 Accountant (based in Madrid, Spain). This is a monthly set fee I pay.
- $9.99 Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan (Lightroom and Photoshop).
- $34.95 BigScoots WPO Starter plan. Quality hosting makes all the difference. I was dithering and changing back and forth between Trellis and GeneratePress themes this month and BigScoots were very patient and transferred over new posts written since backing up prior to switching themes. I highly recommend them.
- $13.60 Keysearch. A solid affordable SEO tool, crucial for content planning. Check out the Keysearch review I did and see how I use it exactly.
- $28.98 props (bowls and cutting boards) which I totally needed for my vegetarian charcuterie board post.
- $34 to renew my Grow Social license (for those cute social buttons on my site and also to hide pins and pin descriptions).
I did actually spend about $90 setting up a new small affiliate style website (which I probably won’t touch until after the fourth quarter) but that doesn’t have anything to do with this website so I’m not including it in here.
Review and Goals
This month I didn’t really hit many of the goals that I set last month: I did get out at least three posts a week before going on holidays, but as the month went on I got really discouraged by the dropping traffic and just decided to not care and focus on holidays and relaxing and spending time with my kids as they had just started their summer holidays.
This became my approach to summer in general. With soaring temperatures here in Madrid Spain and the kids home from school full-time, I decided to relax a little about goals and content production and try and enjoy my time with them at home.
As I mentioned above, I also really took a good look at where I was getting a good return on investment and slashed the time I spent on social. Finally, I also decided to space these income reports out more and do them at the end of each fiscal quarter, rather than every month, to give me more time to focus on just content.
So that’s it from me, and I guess I’ll catch you at the other end of the third quarter (July to September) when hopefully I’ll have some more positive news to share!