Blog Income Report December 2022

Blog Income Report December 2022: Find out how I made $7893.75 through my blog with various strategies such as Ad income and affiliate marketing.

The holidays are over and that wraps up another calendar year of blogging! This December though higher income than last year seemed average for what’s going on in the world.

📜 5 Years of Blog Income Reports

💭What Happened In December 2022

December Work Flow

Most of my work in December happened in November. At one point in time I was scheduled out for an entire month ahead which I don’t think has ever happened in the history of Thyme and Joy. I worked really hard at the end of November and beginning of December so I could take at least 12 days off from the blog for the holidays, and that’s what I did! I let the traffic do what it was going to do and it was pretty average for what I thought it would be.

Also, since I’ve hit my 750 post goal, my new goal is to post 4-5x per week. Even though this is still a lot of posting, it is much more manageable to have 2 days a week where I don’t have to worry about getting something up. This started in the last 2 weeks of December.

Return To Social Media?

Taking the break allowed me to step back and look at the big picture of what was happening. I spent an entire year just focusing on posting and although I am reaping the benefits of that, I feel like there is a huge human element missing.

It has officially been over 2 years since I’ve been on Instagram. By the time I was ready to move on, I was so burnt out and enraged by the app that it left me with a negative taste in my mouth.

I had lots of emails from people reaching out to me and I SO appreciated that I was missed among a sea of people. At this point I have changed a lot. I have confidence in what I’m doing. I know that I don’t *need* social media to make an income, and my life is completely different.

I realized that I miss social media in how it felt like a small community to me. I loved helping others with cooking questions and recommendations. I loved that I also got that in return. Looking ahead, it weirdly feels like the path forward is getting back on the apps but in a different way.

There has been a huge boom of platforms that push short form video. So many of them that it would nearly be impossible to just fixate on one. Its kind of like my blog posting strategy. I no longer focus on the metrics of one post because I have so many in the pipeline.

My thought is to start posting on social media again in terms of short form video and add it to any platform that allows it. I also think I’m going to be a lot more mature about it. I have said that the comparison trap is always what makes being on social media difficult, but is it anymore? Because I’ve seen so much growth without being on it, I’m less likely to feel like I *need* to be in front of people all the time. I can choose when I want to do it and not be a slave to it.

I still don’t know what this looks like, especially with plans for another site, but its all in the works.

Goals for Thyme and Joy In 2023

Because its the new year, I feel like I have to have a concrete set of goals and I just don’t! The current downturn of RPM’s plus AI and third party cookies leaving is clouding any concrete decisions or pivots I want to make. What I do know is that I want to continue to post here as much as possible. I’m going to train my VA to add more affiliate links to posts as well as make pins for popular posts.

I may change the way the blog looks slightly in terms of the color scheme and change around some of the blocks so it looks cleaner. I have to clean up some categories and add new ones.

And maybe, I’ll send an email out one day.

RPM Apocalypse

Blogging has been through a lot in the last few years. With the fall of Pinterest, rise of short form video, and you know… that whole world thing, there has been so many changes.

Most years you expect to grow if you put in the work and that still can be true. How many posts you put up in a year is a factor you can control. What’s going on in the world that is influencing advertising spending is certainly not.

My RPM’s are usually always lower than most because my main posts have alcohol in them but this year in general RPM’s were down pretty significantly. If you didn’t have traffic growth to back that up, then you probably lost money!

I DID have traffic growth thankfully, but not enough to have a mind-blowing December where I had a 5 figure month. This is because my RPM’s averaged $5-8 dollars lower per 1000 pageviews than years before, sometimes more!

Nobody knows the path forward on this but as long as I’m making enough then I will keep doing what I’m doing, even in the face of change until the ROI is gone.

The Other Sites

The site we started in July of 2021 finally hit 10k pageviews! I’m not surprised as we are very strategic about the keywords. The reason it hasn’t grown any more is because of consistency. These side sites although less pressure, they take up time in the week and they are unfortunately the first thing to let go of when you don’t have time or need to shove something off your plate.

We’re still thinking of a way to be more consistent with both of them but I also have another site in the works that I think has a shot at growing. I can talk about that more when I’ve figured out how to fit it into my work flow.

➕Blog Income Report December Metrics

Food/Recipe posts that were created in December: 27

Affiliate Income: $122.57

Ad Network Income: $7651

Secondary Ad Network Income: $120.18

❄️ Blog Plans For January 2023

January is a strange month for me. There’s the bustle of the holidays followed immediately by my birthday and everyone getting back to some semblance of life in the cold weather. Its kind of depressing!

This month is the first month in a long time where I have skipped a day or two of posting. Getting back into the groove has been a little difficult because I have not hit my stride yet. I want to handle all of the projects I have to do but I don’t want to place strict deadlines on them because that overwhelms me.

So instead, I am sitting back and doing what needs to be done while I think about it instead of jumping right in. So January looks like 4-5 posts per week plus keeping up with clients and having some white space to figure out how I want to plan the rest of the year.