November Income Report – $4,782.70

Hi Friends! It’s me, Bjork. I’m checking in for our monthly income report.

So why do we put these posts out every month? Well, our hope is that these monthly income and traffic reports are inspirational and educational.

Inspirational in that you can see that’s it’s possible to create an income from a food blog and educational in that you can see where the income we’re earning is coming from.

In each report I include any thoughts or ideas we’ve had in the past month regarding ways to grow a food blog. Our hope is that these posts have helped you grow your own blog. Lindsay and I both believe that there is “enough for everyone,” so we do our best to not hold anything back in sharing the ways that we are making money and growing traffic on Pinch of Yum.

The Breakdown:

• Tasty Food Photography – $1,673.76
• BlogHer – $1,026.19
• Bluehost – $975
• Google AdSense – $938.21
• Thesis Theme – $82.83
• Amazon – $54.71
• VigLink – $32

Grand Total: $4,782.70

Income As Percentages

Income Notes:

$1,673.76 is the most we’ve earned from Tasty Food Photography. A lot of that comes from a popular photography website that signed up as an affiliate.

This month we officially turned off VigLink’s automatic link insertion function, as we noticed more and more irrelevant links showing up. Case in point: There was one link that pointed to an eBay listing for a used sweater. The seller of this used sweater included a note that he owns cats so it might have cat hair on it. Wha?!? For real? It was at this point that we decided to turn off VigLink automatic link insertion. If you have VigLink installed on your blog be sure to keep an eye on the products that it’s linking to. If you notice irrelevant links you might want to consider turning it off.

Traffic

Here are the traffic screenshots for the month of November.

Food Blogger Pro

On November 8th we announced the launch of a new site called Food Blogger Pro. Lindsay and I are really excited that 120 people signed up for Food Blogger Pro in November. We are so excited to build this community of food bloggers from all around the world.

So why did we not include this amount in our income total for November? Simply put, we want these posts to contain information about realistic ways to make money from a food blog. It’s not realistic to assume that every food blogger would have the time or interest to put together a membership site, so we kept the income from Food Blogger Pro out of the monthly total.

If you want to learn more about Food Blogger Pro you can read the original post here.

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about some of the ways that you can monetize a food blog, we encourage you to download this free ebook, “16 Ways to Monetize Your Food Blog.”

Tips and Takeaways

Let’s talk about videos

Have you ever recorded a recipe video for your blog?

If you haven’t, you should give it a shot. I know, I know… It’s an entirely different ball game when you’re pressing the record video button instead of the take picture button. But food bloggers that use video will have a huge advantage in growing their blog, especially as video becomes more and more the norm for consuming content on the web. Videos help engage readers in a different way, give your site an SEO boost, and offer another way that people can discover your blog.

We’ve been experimenting with video on Pinch of Yum the past few months. Our biggest takeaway so far is this: content is king.

Here’s what I mean – most of the people who watch a recipe video will be watching for the recipe. Go figure! So the most important part of a recipe video isn’t Hollywood like production value. It’s clearly communicating how to make the recipe.

We had a lot of fun making some DSLR videos for Pinch of Yum in the last few months. The bad part: they seriously took a lot of time. Lindsay had to “get ready” (hair, makeup, etc.), think about what she was going to say, and carefully plan out each step of the recipe so we could get a good shot of what she was doing. I had to setup the video and audio equipment, and then after shooting the video I’d have to import and edit the footage. We felt really good about how those first few videos looked, but we put a ton of work into them.

If you combine the time that both Lindsay and I put into that video it would probably come close to 8 hours. It feels crazy to even type that out, but it’s true.

Now check out this video:

Total time to make this video? 45 minutes.

It’s not the same quality, but it does an equally (if not better) job of fulfilling the main purpose of a recipe video – to show people how to make the recipe. The best part? Lindsay edited the entire thing from the couch in her pajamas! I think she liked that.

There is definitely a time and place for high production videos. But in the daily grind of posting to a food blog, content is king.

I’ll Leave with You a Challenge

Here’s a challenge for you – record a video sometime in the next month and post it to your blog.

After you do that, come back here and leave a comment with a link to the blog post that contains the video. Then, in next month’s income report, I’ll include a list of all the different people that took up the challenge.

Have you already recorded a video before? Let us know by leaving a link to it post in the comments below.

Here’s are some apps you can use to create your video:

For your phone:

• iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad – Use the iMovie app
• Android – Use the Magisto app

For your computer:

• Mac – Use the iMovie desktop version
• Windows – Use Movie Maker

Thanks!

As always, thanks for stopping by to read our monthly report. I’m looking forward to seeing some of those videos!

Update from Lindsay: Several of you asked for more details about the Foodgawker traffic, so I added a screen shot of the referral traffic from Foodgawker that might be able to shed more light on where that traffic specifically comes from. The item numbers with the word “post” are specific posts that were popular, like Chicken Enchilada Casserole or Healthy Fettuccine Alfredo.