Blog Income Report May 2018 | Food Blog Side Hustle

Blog Income Report May 2018 : Find out how I made $50.93 through my blog with various strategies. 

Welcome to my third blogging income report! I can officially say that this is the month where things started to feel like a “real job” to me. Starting something new with fresh motivation and goals gives you a huge energy spurt to get things done, especially when you’re seeing progress.

But then, it slows down and you feel like you could be doing work for no reason and reward. That’s what I felt like in the month of May for the most part. However, I do know that it’s truly the mundane tasks of life that bring the most growth and I also truly believe that I can make a decent stream of income one day from sharing my recipes so my inner entrepreneur is soldering on!

Past Blog Income Reports

• Check out: Food Blog Side Hustle | Square One Intro
  
• Check out: Blog Income Report | February & March 2018 | $18.34
  
• Check out: Blog Income Report | April 2018 | $203.17

Blog Income Report May 2018

Here are some noteworthy things that happened in May:

• My chef business kind of blew up a bit: I mean this in a good way!  For a while I was not getting any leads and it scared me. I remember summer being super slow last year so I was worried about this year. The good thing is I can only handle about 6 clients a week so I just needed one or two more to set me to my limit and I got one of them which honestly puts me at fully booked when you count everything else I am working on. The reason I may have felt a bit stressed is because my time is limited for blogging but as of right now, the business must come first!
• I had a mini panic attack about not having enough recipes: I didn’t actually have a panic attack but I was looking back at the content I had to share and it just wasn’t enough! When I take over the Whole30 recipes feed, I want to have a good bank of content to share and when I divided out how many recipes I could share until then, it kind of freaked me out. But then I realized that pressure has always been the key to my success and I know have the potential to knock it out of the park!
• I also got sad about my traffic not growing “enough”: This cycle is self perpetuating. My traffic isn’t growing enough simply because I don’t have a ton of things to share yet. At the end of the month I did realize that all of my growth was based on content building off each other and it made me feel better. Blogging is all compounding results and the first year or two of consistency are bound to be slow until your content becomes popular over time.
• I finished up my first month with GourmetAds: This is an ad network I just started with.  It’s pretty much the only one I can get into with my lower traffic besides Adsense. I actually ended up making LESS than I did with Adsense this month so I think I am going to give them one more month before probably removing them. It may be a smarter idea to wait until I can join a more lucrative network than get chump change and have my site be cluttered.
• Changing the look of my blog: That brings me to my next point. Currently, I do NOT like the look and layout of my website. I prefer something more clean with a lot of white space and better to navigate and I am working on this! It just takes a lot more work than one would think.
• Recipe Development Opportunities:  I was finally able to let the cat out of the bag about working with The New Primal on their latest sauce launch. I will be continuing to make recipes using their products and am so excited to continue to share. I did have some unpaid work or rather recipe work in exchange for other food companies which you will see in the near future. I’m hoping that this will lead to more paid development work but I am happy with this start!

Check out: The New Primal Recipes

Blog Income Report May 2018 | Metrics

Blog posts that went live in May: 24

May Adsense Income: $16.78

May Amazon Affiliate Income: $23.49

Gourmet Ads: $10.66

Recipe Development Project: $0**

Hours spent working on the blog: 30 Hours Each Week

Total May 2018 Blog Income: $50.93

**this report is for income RECEIVED in May. Payments made for May work will be reflected in June report

Some things I am surprised about are that I made $23 in affiliate income. When I signed up for the program I figured that wouldn’t bring me anything but I am happy to say it worked for me this month. It’s such an easy way to share things that is mutually beneficial. Also, I created TEN more posts than I did last month. A lot of them I haven’t promoted yet, so the time equity I put into them is likely to pay off in traffic once they are released later and I will also be able to promote them for years to come! Like I said in the beginning of this post, things are starting to feel like more of a job, but a really fucking cool job!

Until next month!