Traffic and income report of an Indian food blog for April 2020 including tips, best practices and take aways.
Why am I writing this income and traffic report?
specially at this time, when everything around is just going wrong...
Honestly, I thought so much about it and even spoke to a couple of fellow bloggers to know their thoughts, we all agreed that yes, things are bad and we acknowledge that, but we do this out of consistency, but more than that, out of our hope, that this could help a fellow aspiring food blogger who is exploring ways on how to make money on a food blog, exactly in the manner how it helped us in the early days of blogging. I remember reading hundreds of income reports when I submitted my application for mediavine. Not only do these traffic and income reports motivate aspiring bloggers, but it also builds up a lot of confidence in those (like me) who could never believe that it is possible to turn your blog into an online business.
Anyway, straight to the point this time. This is our second month with Mediavine but also officially our first full month with this ad network. Click here to read about our first income report (March 2020) and also the entire application process for mediavine.
Income report for Indian food blog April 2020
Earnings
-
Advertising (Mediavine) = $682 with RPM $6.70
Expenditure
- Tasty Recipes (one time purchase) = $82
- Tailwind= $15
- Sitelock
- Food Blogger Pro membership = $23
- Bluehost= $15
- Lightroom= $11
- Jetpack = $11
Total expenses = $277
*This income report does not include taxes & payments to support staff helping us with this blog. The expenditure does not include site lock & also no grocery costs are added because it is varied & also consumed within family as meals.
**This income report does not include earnings for sponsored content (income that we received this month for these yummy recipes for samosas, apple pie springs and these easy pizza parathas) This we plan to keep confidential, however we are more than happy to help you - do write us an email on [email protected] if you have any specific questions for sponsored content 🙂
Traffic report for Indian food blog April 2020
April 2020 witnessed the highest traffic on my Indian food blog. (I know I said that in March too!) This is has been the case for all food bloggers I guess, since people are spending more time in the kitchen and are cooking a lot! In March, we witnessed 42,000 page views but April gave us an extra 1,00,000 page views. Unbelievable. I am shocked, but also very happy, that kitchen is "happy place" for so many people around the globe right now.
A few things that *I think* may have caused this spike...
- The current "Situation"
The number one obvious reason this may have happened, is that almost the entire world is under lockdown and really, people ARE actually spending more time in the kitchen. For very obvious reasons, dalgona coffee was one of our most visited blog posts (everyone waned to follow the trend, we did that too) - the number one blog post was this amazing recipe for 10-minute peanut sauce noodles. Here is a screenshot of the top 10 visited pages for April 2020.
2. We did some serious investment in TAILWIND
I regret to have discovered Tailwind so late! I still can not believe how easy Pinterest is, when you have Tailwind. What exactly is Tailwind? In simple words, it is your personal assistant for Pinterest - a very cool dashboard that lets you schedule pins at the best suggested time slots (which is great for us, since we are in a completely different time zone for our target and most visited audience: US). After raving about it in our March income report, I knew there was more to it. This month, I not only invested in more time for Tailwind but also money wise - invested a bit more and learned more about TRIBES in a course I attended at Food Blogger Pro. Tailwind offers you great opportunity to have your content shared through other bloggers (through their feature known as TRIBES), and by other bloggers I mean bigger, more successful bloggers. As of today, 02.05.2020, (I pinch my self when I write this..) we finally hit 1 million monthly unique views on Pinterest!!
I have read on several platforms, that this number does not really have a big meaning, but I remember looking at so many bloggers and wondering how many views they get with 10million+ unique views, also wondering if our blog would ever hit the 500k mark? It did, in April 2020 and end of April, something really REALLY crazy happened.....
Do you see that spike at the end of the month? On 28th April, I witnessed my first ever viral pin! I had heard so much until this day, how a miracle pin gets viral on Pinterest and then is followed by snowball effect and you get thousands of views.. that is exactly what happened with this recipe for MUSHROOM VOL AU VENT - which by they way has been on the blog for 11 months now, so how did it go viral now? It is still a mystery to me, but obviously it has something to do with some very popular blogger who pinned it to her profile that resulted in this tremendous spike. 99% sure this happened in one of the tailwind tribes - still struggling to find this out and thank this blogger.
3. We switched from WP recipe maker to WP Tasty Recipes.
In our income and traffic report for March 2020, I mentioned how I was super happy with WP recipe maker plugin and how the recipe card perfectly matched layout of the website. However, in mid April, upon reading so many excellent reviews for Tasty Recipes, I gave it a try and have been loving it so far!! Its great for SEO, excellent neat layout, has so many designs and the customer support it simply amazing. The recipes look more organised and I also activated the "Jump to recipe" button on top of my blog posts, for those who want to skip my blog stories and advertisement (in blog post) resulting in better user experience.
So there you go, hopefully helpful and direct income and traffic report for our food blog (in India) currently as a publisher with mediavine. To read more about how we started, or how we applied for Mediavine, click here.
Feel free to post your questions in comments and we will be more than happy to help you.
Similar blog posts that might help you
- traffic and income report March 2020
- beyond recipes @ TTCP Feb 2020
- beyond recipes @ TTCP Jan 2020
- a day in the life of a part time blogger
- food photography tips for beginners
- eight ways to grow traffic on your food blog
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