food blog side hustle

Blog Income Report December 2018 : Find out how I made $919.76 through my blog with various strategies. 

Welcome to my 10th blog income report!  To be honest, when I added up the actual blog income for this month, I actually thought I maybe should stop doing reports.  Making over $900 this month was a BIG deal to me. 

It almost feels selfish.

I have this weird thing where I feel like I always need to be struggling in the trenches to be accepted by my peers and community.  I feel like if I start becoming successful or my dreams I work hard for start coming true that I will lose the respect of others.

Honestly, even though you all KNOW I work my ass off for this, that feeling still rings true. My dream is to make a decent income off of this blog and as success follows hard work, I know that I WILL lose some valuable people that were on my team.  I know I will make mistakes and I know I will open myself up to a lot more negativity along with the positivity.

That shit is SCARY

But my two choices are clear:

1. I can stay in the trenches, play small and keep working my ass off to inevitably never get anywhere
2. Or I can take the growing pains in stride and know that the people that are on my team will come and go with the seasons but the right ones will always be there. 

The blog as a whole this month had me questioning so many things.  In the beginning of the month, my traffic was so LOW that I almost gave up yet again. I kept plugging away regardless and I’m glad I did because by the end of the month I was in a much better place. 

• Check out: Blog Income Report | February & March 2018 | $18.34
  
• Check out: Blog Income Report | April 2018 | $203.17
• Check out: Blog Income Report | May 2018 | $50.93
• Check out: Blog Income Report | June 2018 | $213.50
• Check out: Blog Income Report | July 2018 | $213.50
• Check out: Blog Income Report | August 2018 | $174.52
• Check out: Blog Income Report | September 2018 | $177.52
• Check out: Blog Income Report | October 2018 | $563.78
• Check out: Blog Income Report | November 2018 | $345.42

Blog Income Report Decmber 2018

Here are some noteworthy things that happened in December:

• Everything (still) dropped DRAMATICALLY:  On the heels of Octobers Whole30 traffic and a decent week or two in November because of Thanksgiving, I expected December to be overall a higher traffic month for me.  I even made quite a few dessert recipes as people were asking for them, but the first 3 weeks of December were just depressing in blog land for me.  I even saw it on IG and FB as my follower count would go up and drop down even further. I seriously questioned it all. 
• I have more value than just recipes: One thing I was able to realize this month is that my How-To’s and demonstration and posts with information that weren’t recipes sometimes do even better than recipes themselves.  I often forget that as a chef, people look to me for cooking advice and not just recipes. Because of this, I have started to demonstrate more things in the kitchen and even started creating more resources along with recipes.  It makes total sense. 
• I hired a coach:  I’m not usually a fan of coaching programs but I have hired a personal chef coach and have done other courses in the past. This year, my December personal chef income was so low, I have a client gap in my schedule and I decided I need to make a decision.  I wondered if I should replace that weekly client or spend that time and really go for it with the blog, a risky financial decision.  If I were to do that, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t making any more mistakes or putting myself in a hole that I would need to dig myself out of 6 months later.  After much research and debate, I decided to invest money on a blogging coach.  I haven’t started yet because of the holidays, but I am excited to get a deeper look from an outside source of how I can be maximizing my time to reach my blog goals in 2019.  
• I have an amazing support group: I know quite a few women in the same boat as me that want to reach the same goals.  Instead of suffering alone, I reached out to them and created a little IG group where we vent, share and even collaborate on posts.  This group has helped me feel less alone in the process and has further solidified the fact that everyone is on different journeys and success is so different to everyone.  If you think you need support, reach out!  You never know what you all could help each other with. 
• I expanded my Keyword Research: Last month I had said that I was focusing on writing for search engines instead of social media.  This has continued to pay off this month.  I research my keywords and try to put as much valuable content in my posts as possible.  At first it didn’t seem like it was working, but it really does take some time for that compounding SEO juice to start paying off.  I continue to research all of my posts (with the exception of these) and I am excited to see my posts become more popular over time!
• I landed my first sponsored post: Valuing my work has always been difficult for me, so I never sought after any sponsored work because I was afraid my work and traffic weren’t good enough for any. I am SO wrong about this.  Companies need content and chances are, they can’t always make it themselves. The New Primal was the first company to hire me for recipe development and I am so grateful to them for the past 6 months of learning and growing. It was a shock to me when another company reached out to ME to develop a recipe and asked me for rates.  I learned so much through the process and because of them and The New Primal, I now have so much more confidence to go after what I want even though scary rejection is going to be a part of it all.
• I’ve Increased Recipe Development Projects: Speaking of The New Primal, we had a meeting in December and they are up to some AMAZING things in 2019 and have asked me to help create more content for them which I am super excited and grateful for!
• I Finished my first month with Mediavine: In November, I was in their ad network for about 10 days. This month was a full 31 days and I couldn’t be more happy with them. I know it is going to take a good chunk of time and solid work to get where I want to be income wise, but they are super helpful, responsive, they care so much about their publishers and are always creating content for us to learn how to succeed. Super happy! 

A note on the metrics below: All of this is income that was MADE in December.  I don’t actually see any payment for this money for about 2-3 months depending on how the schedule works. 

Blog Income Report December 2018 | Metrics

Blog posts that were created in Decmber: 22

Amazon Affiliate Income: $39.57

 Mediavine Income: $300.13

Recipe Development Projects Paid Out: $580

Hours spent working on the blog: 25-30 Hours Each Week

Blog Income Report December 2018 Total: $919.76

As far as I know, the downward trend of blog traffic starts NOW.  But, if you’re a health food blogger your traffic could actually increase even though your ad revenue may go down. After that is pretty steady until the end of June where everyone’s traffic plummets until the fall rolls around again. 

I still have so many lessons to learn and all of this information will help me plan my content and strategize my time better so that I can reach my short and long term income goals with the blog! I feel more motivated than ever! 

Valerie Skinner is a Whole30 approved personal chef & recipe developer that bridges the gap between healthy eating and busy lives by providing simple healthy meals and recipes for you and your family.

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