december 2015 – Julies Cafe Bakery

This is the income and traffic report for Julies Cafe Bakery December 2015. I have included all income and expenses along with traffic reports. Its been quite exciting to see the gradual growth of Juliescafebakery.com. There have been a few obstacles to overcome like the domain being banned from Pinterest for a few weeks which saw a massive drop in traffic. And then there was the malware hack on the site which took a month to fix. You can read about it here How to secure your food blog. So its been a rather interesting month all in all and I am sure you are going to like the results as much as we did. It shows that if you just keep on going despite the obstacles you will succeed! A quick note: Some of the links below are affiliate links. All of the services and products that are listed below are products and services we use. If you have any questions about the expenses or the income you can leave a comment and I will reply. Income Quinstreet - $282.35 BlueHost - $65 –> this income comes from a page where we show people how to start a food blog and make money step by step. Adsense - $11.61 Sovrn - $3.62 This makes a total income for the month of December of $362.58 most of which came from leads generated for the cooking, baking and hospitality courses found here. Expenses BlueHost VPS Hosting - $29 FoodBloggerPro - $29 TailwindApp - $9.99 Amazon S3 and Cloudfront - $1.16 Early on in the game expenses are relatively low. I did purchase a brand new canon camera but this was well before the month of December so never included it in the report. I use Amazon Cloudfront as its cheap and I believe helps with the sites speed. I also cant do without Food Blogger Pro membership as i have learnt so much from the forums and videos. As for Tailwindapp its a massive time saver for posting to Pinterest. Total expenses amount to $69.15 leaving a nice profit of $293.43 Traffic Here is where we delve into the traffic for the site. This is where really all of the work goes into producing a profitable blog. The beginning of December shows low traffic because we had been hit by Pinterest. Our domain was blocked and it took a good couple of weeks to get it unblocked. It goes to show just how much traffic is being sent by Pinterest - scary. I am thinking of writing up a post to show how we got it unblocked from Pinterest which might help others if ever in the same predicament. Let me know your thoughts by commenting below. I am pretty pleased with the average session duration being over a minute and a good bounce rate at 65%. My Pages/Sessions have been up over 2 but 1.65 is not too bad. By comparison PinchofYum has a bounce rate of over 80% . We have a little trick to get our bounce rate low and Page views higher which i might reveal in future Income reports - so stay tuned. Pinterest is our main source of traffic and Yummly is not too far behind. Myrecipemagic also sends a reasonable amount of traffic to our blog so I will be focusing on these three. We still dont get a lot of search traffic but its early days yet. Its still early days for our food blog so hoping to see the visitors rise and consequently the income. Traffic was down for December due to our domain being blocked for a few weeks in Pinterest. Once it was unblocked and it took a bit to get it unblocked - we will reveal how in future income reports - our traffic rose again. I am finding that our chicken recipes do alot better than our cupcake recipes, especially in Yummly so will try to focus on a good chicken recipe at least once per month. If you have any thoughts leave your comments below and i will reply.