Traffic and Income Report A Sweet Pea Chef

Hey, Dustin here!

Welcome to our February 2017 Traffic and Income Report!

As you probably noticed we have moved our site to a new domain Food Blog Engine we think it better shows what we are teaching and resonates with our audience more. While most of the content and advice here isn’t specific to food blogs it definitely slants this way and has tons of examples.

Last month I covered our January revenue and traffic numbers.

This month we will dive into how February 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 3 years we have converted it into a business that fully employs both of us.

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 February

February was another one of those get back on track and in the swing of things months.

With our January taken up by our vacation and our kids going back to school. February was really our first month getting back on track.

Like I mentioned last month we felt the need to get out of our apartment so we rented out an office space at the WeWork downtown.

This was a really good decision.

It really reinvigorated us and got our creative and entrepreneur juices flowing.

We weren’t doing as much contract work for a few months so it really worked out nicely to get out and enjoy Austin and feed off the energy of the city.

I am always a big fan of downtowns 🙂 they just have so much culture and excitement.

There is something so energizing about them to me. I would love to travel around and visit a bunch of big cities and explore 🙂 Consider it on my bucket list.

In February we tried to focus a little more on planning things and fixing stuff that we had neglected for too long.

The main things that went down this month:

Improving and Automating Systems

We have been trying to figure out the best way to improve our automated systems. Awhile back I wrote a post on our sales funnel and how well it was working for us.

Since then we have been trying to improve it. Our main goal was to increase revenue enough to warrant having continuous Facebook ads running to it.

While we haven’t been able to figure that out yet. We have realized that we convert with this offer much better on warm traffic ( I know shocker) than on cold.

And when I say much better I mean cold converts pretty close to 0.

So, in February we started to work on coming up with ideas for new read magnets and lead magnets that could sell into an intro offer at a better rate and allow us to start generating more sales quicker.

I’ll keep you posted on how this goes.

Switching Hosting Companies

Another big issue we wanted to fix in February was dealing with hosting and site speed. Lately we haven’t been as happy with our hosting as we were for the first two years we used it.

I’ll dive into a post later on more of this but the main goal was being able to improve site speed.

There are a bunch of pieces that go into this but a big one was our host didn’t always give us the flexibility we needed and it was getting more and more expensive for our size.

While we have had good experiences with the hosting companies we used in the past and would still recommend them in a lot of situations so far we are really enjoying cloudways.

After the first month it was such a good experience that we switched all of our regular hosted sites to it and we are considering moving our course over as well.

The Big Uh-Oh Around the Corner

As you can see in the income and expense report when we got the office it really skewed our numbers in the wrong direction. Especially, with February not having much contract work it made it hard to balance that budget.

We were okay with this decision at first since we really wanted to have a better work environment and we were trying to jumpstart our energy levels.

Obviously it wasn’t maintainable in the long term and we had to reassess priorities a few months down the road.

We were hoping the new found energy and excitement would really allow us to focus on a few outstanding issues we had around the site and our funnels and that would help offset the additional expense.

AdThrive Update

February is very similar to January for us ad revenue wise we normally a dip for us every year. Considering there are less days in the month in February than in January its pretty good that the numbers stayed relatively flat.

February 2017 Traffic Report

When compared to last February which was 239k visitors, we saw a -3.27% drop. This is our second month in a long time where there wasn’t growth. Obviously this isn’t ideal but it isn’t too drastic. If it goes on much longer we will have to dive a little more into why and start to brainstorm solutions.

Traffic Month vs Month Comparison

Top Traffic Sources

Top Pages for February 2017

February 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: $2,016.18 ( This isn’t broken up as easy anymore into the sections we want yet)
AdThrive: $6,738.46
Other Affiliates: $75.00
Amazon Affiliate: $112.93 (this mostly comes from a post on the best kitchen tools Lacey recommends)
Video Ads (AOL/Youtube) : $41.50
Contract Work (i.e. freelance videos, sponsored content, recipe creation, licensing etc..): $1,800

Gross Total February 2017: $10,709.07
- Last Month January 2016: $16,353.79
- Difference: -$5,644.72
- Last Year February 2016: $7,243.37
- Difference: +$3,465.70

February 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: $213.42 (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
Baremetrics: $42.50
Scribe: $47.00
VidIQ: $10.00
Github: $7.00
Marketing (Fb Ads etc…): $400.01
Kraken: $9.00
Crashplan (Backup Software): $14.72
ClickFunnels: $97.00
Canva: $12.95
Gusto: $51.00 (payroll software)
SumoMe: $50.00
Box: $63.96
Google Drive: $1.99
Groceries: $243.64
AWS: $41.56
Kitchen Props: $614.15
Production Snacks/Drinks/Lunches: $175.35
Merchant Processing Fees: $74.87
Pinterest Help: $375.00
Domains: $12.00
Business Coaching: $24.50
Jarvis: $29.95
Buffer: $10.00
Kajabi: $129.00
Rent: $3,461.82
Contractor/VA Work: $1,472.78 (this includes transcripts and other VA work)
Bank Fees: $10.00
Consulting & Accounting: $989.00 (Mostly our port to Xero)

Total Expenses: $9,068.75

Net Total: $10,709.07 – $9,068.75 = $1,640.32

Takeaways From February

February had too many expenses. This was the core key takeaway. I touched on this when talking about our big issues that were on our horizon back in February. We really need to get expenses under better control and focus back on growth, marketing and promotion.

Sometimes we have to take a step somewhat blindly and going out and getting an office was that.

We really need that space and time out in the city to refocus and regroup which helped a ton for the future but the expense of it was more than we should have taken on in such a short timeframe.

Goals For March

March was a little bit of transition month for us. It was very similar to February in practice and we started to lay a lot of the ground work we needed to in order to turn things around in April and May.

Our main goal was still to figure out automation better. This had always been something we have struggled with and definitely need to figure out in order to take our business to the next level.

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.