Blog Income Report March 2023

Blog Income Report March 2023: Find out how I made $7028.29 through my blog with various strategies such as Ad income and affiliate marketing.

Back on the bandwagon with posting, but still not feeling like I’m out of this strange blog fog!

📜 6 Years of Blog Income Reports

💭What Happened In March 2023

March Work Flow

This month I started to crawl out of the funk I’ve been in over the last 6 months at this point but something still feels a bit off to me. There is still a lot to think about when it comes to the future and I haven’t quite nailed down what I really want to do about it.

So in the meantime I’ve just decided to do the bare minimum of what it takes to keep things afloat. For me, that means getting my clients work done first and foremost. Then, my priority was getting 4 posts up per week which I accomplished!

I had plans for making an affiliate strategy for my VA, FINALLY starting the next site and doing some updates around here, but I just didn’t get to them. That’s ok though. I’ve realized over the years that I don’t have to be in this “climb the ladder” mode all the time. Sometimes its just best to know that you can coast along doing JUST what needs to be done while things figure themself out.

Google Update

My traffic has continued to fluctuate throughout the month. Honestly, its been so hard to tell what has been doing well and what hasn’t because you can’t just rely on rankings alone. There are so many SERP features out now that have their own ranking system so it’s probably best to go for those as not many people scroll past them when it comes to recipes at this point.

Even with the fluctuations, I was able to make it over 240k page views which I count as an accomplishment! It seems that no matter how much content I add, I add a baseline of 50k visits per month each year. And. while I wish that was more, it’s better than going down!

Pivoting

With AI being a prominent topic for this career, its hard not to get caught up in the noise. Amidst FB groups and other forums, its clear that people *think* they know the future but do we really?

A lot of people are saying that branding and monetizing in other ways is important. And don’t get me wrong, it is! But I’ve thought long and hard about how I want to lean into branding and I just . . . don’t. At least for right now.

When I think about what I’m passionate about, it has changed SO much since starting this blog where food was the focus. While I love food and it will always be my lifeline, I feel more fulfillment about the STRATEGY and PLANNING and BUSINESS of blogging itself.

My current thought about AI is that yes, it will help a lot more sites go up quickly with a lot better content to compete with. More competition plus more SERP features = harder to rank = less traffic over time. BUT this doesn’t mean NO traffic.

There are still niches that are very personal that need that human element more than others. I believe I have a few ideas for sites that could grow to be good money makers. Maybe they’re not getting millions of pageviews, but they’re getting enough to fuel a comfortable lifestyle and that’s enough for me right now.

So, before the already saturated market becomes even more stuffed as people learn how to get better with these tools, my plan is to have some foundational sites in the door that I can improve on over time, just like I have done with this one.

My main block with this is writing. Obviously I do this for a living but I would need someone else on board to accomplish my goals because I just can’t write that many posts by myself.

I’m still churning out these thoughts, but ultimately I’ve decided to do what I like and what I’m good at until it doesn’t work anymore and/or another path opens up.

SEO Tools

Because of the influx of SERP features, the SEO tools are kind of wacky right now. For instance, I’ve been using SEMrush for years at this point and I’m really not liking how they do things anymore.

I understand its hard to keep up with and report changes, but tracking rankings is becoming a joke. I’ve heard this is happening on a lot of SEO tool platforms.

I’ve also found that queries don’t mean much. In fact, some of my top performing posts had little to no search volume compared to the statistics shown. Thinking outside the box for what to rank for is a passion of mine and traditional SEO tools just aren’t working like they used to. Or maybe I’m getting smarter about it? … hmm