Hey, Dustin here!
Welcome to our March 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 I covered our February revenue and traffic numbers.
This month we will dive into how March 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 March
March was a crazy month 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.
Sometimes this has happened in the past for some reason. It could be seasonal or maybe one post lost traction for some reason.
We definitely needed to dive into it and see what was going on and how we could stop the bleeding. So in March we started talking about the problem and what we could do about it. Unfortunately, we were super busy and couldn’t give it our full attention.
Luckily, traffic isn’t the main source of our income although it is important. In hindsight we definitely put off addressing it to long, but that’s always easy to say once you start addressing an issue and at the time we felt like it could be a fluke.
The main things that went down this month:
- The Big Uh-Oh Is Finally Here
- AdThrive Update
- March 2017 Income Totals
- March 2017 Traffic Totals
- March 2017 Key Takeaways
The Big Uh-Oh Is Finally Here
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.
This definitely happened at first. Having the new office energized us a lot and allowed us to really get focused.
The bad news was revenue didn’t grow fast enough to keep the office long term and we realized we were better reinvesting that revenue in larger paychecks so we could have a better setup at home filming the videos.
Another factor that made this issue worse was the traffic that I mentioned. We started to see traffic patterns in the wrong direction. This caused us to lose some projected revenue and made us have to make decisions faster than we anticipated.
AdThrive Update
March saw similar ad revenue to February despite the smaller traffic numbers. This was obviously a positive but not something that could be maintained long term.
March 2017 Traffic Report
When compared to last March which was 260k visitors, we saw a -14.42% drop. This shows that trend down I was talking about. Sometimes this is seasonal or a result of a viral post that dropped so we have to keep an eye on this.
Traffic Month vs Month Comparison
Top Traffic Sources
Top Pages for March 2017
March 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: $1,905.00 ( This isn’t broken up as easy anymore into the sections we want yet)
- AdThrive: $4,324.54
- Other Affiliates: $158.00
- Amazon Affiliate: $68.34 (this mostly comes from a post on the best kitchen tools Lacey recommends)
- Video Ads (AOL/Youtube) : $45.12
- Contract Work (i.e. freelance videos, sponsored content, recipe creation, licensing etc..): $6,000
- Gross Total March 2017: $12,501.00
- Last Month February 2017: $10,709.07
- Difference: -$1,791.93
- Last Year March 2016: $8,105.32
- Difference: +$4,395.68
March 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…): $203.28
- 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
- Cloudways: $9.07
- Google Drive: $1.99
- Groceries: $969.48
- AWS: $37.38
- Kitchen Props: $536.03
- Production Snacks/Drinks/Lunches: $71.35
- Merchant Processing Fees: $30.12
- Pinterest Help: $375.00
- Domains: $24.00
- Business Coaching: $24.50
- Jarvis: $29.95
- Buffer: $10.00
- Kajabi: $129.00
- Rent: $1,506.62
- Contractor/VA Work: $1,622.33 (this includes transcripts and other VA work)
- Bank Fees: $10.00
- Consulting & Accounting: $2182.00 (Mostly our port to Xero)
- Website Themes & Maintenance: $355.50
- Total Expenses: $9,068.75
Net Total: $10,709.07 – $9,068.75 = $1,640.32
Takeaways From March
March was similar to February 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.
In March we started to address that by getting rid of certain expense that weren’t returning the value we needed them to return.
We also started paying more attention to the grocery budget which was getting up near $1,000 a month for us with all the different content we were creating.
We started making notes of which software we used and what it returned in time or value rather than just continuing to use it since we had it.
We also did things like purge our email list of address that weren’t engaging with us and lowering expenses by downgrading software plans where we could.
Goals For April
The main goal was to get back to profitable but April was going to be more of the same. In fact it is probably our worst month yet from a business perspective.
We knew what was coming after March and started to address it but April was a bit of a shocker for us.
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.
