Hey, Dustin here!
Welcome to our April 2017 Traffic and Income Report!
While most of the content and advice here isn’t only for food blogs it definitely slants this way and has tons of examples.
Last month (technically it was months ago since man am I behind) I covered our March revenue and traffic numbers.
This month we will dive into how April did and some of the stuff that went down during that month.
If you’re new to the ASPC income reports, you’ll usually find me over on twitter helping other bloggers create, grow and monetize their blogs or talking about the latest Rangers or Cowboys game.
FYI, we are an affiliate for some of the below links. All these suggestions are based on our experience and extensive research.
The History
If it’s your first time seeing one of these let me walk you through real quick. Lacey and I run a healthy food blog called A Sweet Pea Chef. It use to be more of a hobby and we almost walked away twice before making a pivot a few years ago. Now, over the last 4 years we have converted it into a business that fully employs both of us and generates over six figures of revenue.
Basically, the idea is to give you an inside look into how to create a blog that also functions as a business. Income Reports helped show us that it was possible and guided us in the areas that were a little trickier to figure out.
The point of these posts is to dive into the lessons we learned while growing ASPC and turned it from a hobby side project into a business that supports our family. My hope is that you will learn from our trials and tribulations and be able to figure out something that works for you too.
Our goal is to inspire you to create your own online business or side hustle and provide you with insight into what we find is working and in some embarrassing cases not working lol.
So, with that said …
FYI, we are an affiliate for some of the below links. All these suggestions are based on our experience and extensive research.
Important Things In April
April was a big disappointment for us. Like I mentioned in February we started to see the beginnings of things slipping traffic wise but we weren’t sure.
March showed us that it was for sure happening. April was when we felt the financial ramifications of that.
We had expanded recently as well after the great Q4 and everything kind of took its toll.
We needed to react fast. Reduce expenses and pick revenue back up again.
The main things that went down this month:
Cost Cutting and Revenue Fixes in April
****SPOILER ALERT*****
We did make it although April was super stressful. I’ll give you a recap of where we are since this post is coming out so late.
We had to generate revenue quickly as well as cut costs. So, we started doing some contract a work again which helped immediately. Contract work is always a great way to generate some fast revenue if you need it. You can bid on places like upwork, or if you can reach out to brands or companies that you know need your type of work and offer them your services. If you need to make a pitch like this make sure to include your best samples and offer them something they need. This could be a reduction in cost, maybe reach to your audience if your an influencer or bulk content if they are a publisher. Try to put yourself in their shoes and figure out what will make their lives easier. Remember, they have the money but you have the flexibility.
We also hunted for some sponsorships that aligned with our brand. We had been taking more of a laid back approach to this as we had grown but the pipeline, excuse the sales term 🙂 had grown a little dry. So, we started this back up and focused on adding one more sponsor per month. This type of work takes a little longer to see the fruits of the labor especially if the payment terms are longer, but having a few of these always in the works helps supplement a bloggers income nicely.
With the dive in ad revenue we new we needed a few improvements here. We took the steps of getting an SEO audit and making some SEO improvements. We hadn’t done any of these in a long time and even if you know a decent amount of SEO an audit can help find issues you didn’t realize were broken as well as bring you up to date on changes in the industry.
We also reached out to our ad network adThrive and had them audit our ads. It had been awhile since we had done this and they had a handful of improvements that had to do with placements and performance.
On the expenses side we had to get rid of our office it wasn’t functional enough for us. As much as we loved going to downtown Austin the fact that the more we booked work meant the more we couldn’t go caused a massive conflict of interest. If we had more videos to make and more content to create/improve then we weren’t downtown.
Most of our business isn’t built on the email/product side its on the content/contract side this means that if we want more work we had to be back at home more. So our fix was to improve our work stations were we were living. This meant no office and moving out of the apartment and renting a house with a room we could dedicate to the production of videos.
Overall, the process of losing that much revenue was really stressful but the fixes we took helped position us for our best Q4 ever.
April 2017 Traffic Report
When compared to last April which was 247k visitors, we saw a -34% drop. This shows that trend down I was talking about.
Traffic Month vs Month Comparison
Top Traffic Sources
Top Pages for April 2017
April 2017 Income Report
Finally, onto the income report.
*Special note the values being reflected are actual revenue received now not revenue billed. So take note when comparing to previous months.
- Products: $1,571.18 ( This isn’t broken up as easy anymore into the sections we want yet)
- AdThrive: $3,979.21
- Other Affiliates: $58.00
- Amazon Affiliate: $0 (this mostly comes from a post on the best kitchen tools Lacey recommends)
- Contract Work (i.e. freelance videos, sponsored content, recipe creation, licensing etc..): $1,000
- Gross Total April 2017: $4,386.71
- Last Month March 2017: $12,144.05
- Difference: -$7,757.34
- Last Year April 2016: $10,699.92
- Difference: -$6,313.21
April 2017 Expense Report
I started including expenses in these income reports in an effort to show profitability and specifically to help answer people’s questions about what we use behind the scenes and how much it costs.
I don’t recommend getting all of these right away when you get started. Instead just get what you need and work your way up. In fact I have noticed our expenses start to rack up and this is the first month we have been negative in a long time after accounting for salaries.
As the business has grown we have seen this grow for sure. I highly recommend reading a book like profit first before adding in expenses. Make sure you “need” something or can afford it we have been done the path of thinking this new thing will make the difference and it usually just doesn’t matter.
- Convertkit: $199.00 (I updated the post on why we switched)
- Food Blogger Pro: $0 (Lacey went to one of their workshops which came with a free year)
- Adobe Creative Cloud: $54.11
- Scribe: $47.00
- VidIQ: $10.00
- Github: $7.00
- Marketing (Fb Ads etc…): $0
- ClickFunnels: $97.00
- Gusto: $51.00 (payroll software)
- Simple Pin Media – Social: $375.00
- Screw9to5: $24.50
- SumoMe: $50.00
- Box: $63.96
- Cloudways: $28.83
- Google Drive: $1.99
- Code 42: $14.91
- Xero: $15.00
- Groceries: $403.29
- BareMetrics: $42.50
- AWS: $39.75
- Kitchen Props: $33.88
- Production Snacks/Drinks/Lunches: $92.07
- Merchant Processing Fees: $93.05
- Jarvis: $29.95
- Buffer: $10.00
- Kajabi: $129.00
- Office Expenses: $445.06
- Rent: $1,505.00
- Contractor/VA Work: $2,363.18 (this includes transcripts and other VA work)
- Bank Fees: $10.00
- Consulting & Accounting: $185.00
- Website Themes & Maintenance: $224.10
- Total Expenses: $6,615.17
Net Total: $4,386.71 – $6,645.13 = -$2,228.46
Takeaways From April
April was similar to March there were just too many expenses. We tried to expand too fast and then lost some revenue and this will be a consistent theme that took us a few months to fix. We also had the added “benefit” of making way less money in April than in March which made it super problematic.
After purging a lot of little expenses and getting rid of our office we were able to limit the expenses quite a bit. We also got smarter about what was providing value. The next time we add an office we will make sure we can take photos/videos in the space since thats such a crucial piece of what we do. It doesn’t make much sense to spend that much on rent if we can’t use it half the time.
The main thing is we needed to keep our eye on the ball in 2016 we were just way to helter skelter a lot of stuff was going on and we weren’t as prepared. We didn’t have a good book keeping solution like we do now and as we grew that meant not really understanding the business side as much as we use to. When the business was smaller I could keep track of it in my head with a small excel doc for support. This just isn’t the case anymore.
Goals For May
Going into May we wanted to stabilize our income and get back into the swing of things without an office and with a dedicated room in our house for video. This new focus and adding contract work back into our income portfolio will allow us to get back up to profitable and be able to have the headspace to move forward.
We also want to start to systematize everything, making it easier to outsource, automate and track. This process will lead to less stress and more batch work hopefully.
On the SEO front we want to get started with some of the ideas that Casey our SEO auditor recommended we do right away. Casey specializes in food blogging SEO so he knows his stuff. Before, he finishes his audit he had a couple of things we could dive right into so we wanted to get those done in May.
Thanks So Much
Hopefully, all these numbers will help you to improve your own revenue streams on your blog or even start one yourself. We know this wouldn’t exist without everyone supporting A Sweet Pea Chef. Thanks so much for sharing, commenting, and supporting us and this blog. We really appreciate everyone.
Also feel free to ask any questions you want I will do my best to answer them for you 🙂 I want to encourage as many people as I can to get started generating at least a little side income it can really help with your mindset just to get started.
