Food Blog Income Report 2018: How I made over $5000 monthly in one year of full-time blogging?

Piping Pot Curry's food blog Income Report at one year of full-time blogging in August 2018. This report shows what money we made, where it came from, the expenses to run the site and some learnings we had along the way.

I know a lot of people wonder about if they can make money blogging and how long will it take them to make a decent income? Hence I am sharing the details of my blog. Last few months have been very successful for Piping Pot Curry and I want to thank all my readers for their continued support.

I also want to thank other bloggers who have shared a ton of information online from which I learnt a lot. Attending the Everything Food Conference was very beneficial and a tipping point where I decided to continue blogging. Another helpful resource has been Food Blogger Pro to help me improve my skills (even though I joined them just 5 months back).

If you are completely new to blogging and decide to start a blog, check out my how to start a blog post for a step-by-step guide to do it. If you are wondering whether you can succeed. This is really why I am writing this post and hope that this can inspire you. There is room for everyone to grow and succeed here.

Note:

• This is an income report after 1 year of full time + 7 months of weekend blogging (while I worked full-time).
• I know some bloggers have made more money, while some have made less blogging. It very much depends on the niche you are in and how much time/effort you are able to put in. I am just sharing one example, which might hopefully inspire some.

Why I am writing this income report?

Before I delve into the details, I want to share why I am sharing this income report. It is definitely very unusual for me to share these numbers, and I discussed with my husband countless times whether I should do this. We talked about this from the very start, but I was too shy, terrified, embarrassed to share the numbers. I was still in two minds, but writing down the reasons helped me decide to go for it.

• I am learning everyday as you all are. This gives me a perspective of what all I have learned and achieved in this one year. It will give me a chance to look back after a few years to see where I started.
• I want people to know that you can make an income from an online business. But also know that this is not a get rich quick or easy kind of business. It is a lot of hard work.
• I want to inspire people to do what they enjoy. I loved my job when I was working, but still needed something more...something that makes me feel it is my own...something that I am passionate about...something that does not feel like work!

Income from Food Blog

Last Month (August 2018) - $5110.36

• Adthrive - $4784 (This is the ad network I use)
• Amazon Associates - $326.36 (This is what I make when anyone purchases something using a link from my site. It doesn’t cost the buyer anything else, but gives me a small portion of the sale as a referral fee for the purchase)

Last year

As I am sharing this report after an year plus of blogging. I wanted to share the month-by-month growth so you can see where I started and how it grew.

• February 2017 - $11.59
• March 2017 - $78.11
• April 2017 - $37.58
• May 2017 - $90.13
• June 2017 - $52.23
• July 2017 - $100.03
• August 2017 - $150.76
• September 2017 - $188.32
• October 2017 - $371.61
• November 2017 - $762.86
• December 2017 - $1082
• January 2018 - $1139.52
• February 2018 - $848.11
• March 2018 - $800.41
• April 2018 - $771.39
• May 2018 - $2814.75
• June 2018 - $4930.94
• July 2018 - $5263.75
• August 2018 - $5110.36

Notable Trends in the Food Blogging Income

Monetizing the blog from Day 1: 

• Yes, I put ads on my blog from day 1! I started the blog on Feb 5, 2017 and hence you see the income from that month itself. I just added basic Google Adsense ads on the blog (I believe I got approved after 10 posts on the blog).

Food blogging Holiday Trend:

• You will notice the income start increasing in October and then going up to $1000+ till January. October is also the month I crossed 100K monthly pageviews. This is the holiday season trend. After January, the traffic and the income dropped showing the start of low season for food blogs (not focused on health/fitness food).

Joining an ad network:

• There is significant upward trend starting in May this year. This is when I moved to the ad network Adthrive. This was the tipping point for me. Before this point I was still deciding if I wanted to continue blogging or should it just be a side hustle. (I actually did not leave my job to make blogging a full-time career. I took a break for other reasons, but continued blogging as I enjoyed it).
• You would think why did I not move to an ad network like Gourmet Ads or Mediavine earlier. Frankly, I was naive, I thought I was making what I could with Google Adsense and will not be a big gain compared to the loss of user experience with the amount of ads I see on websites which are with an ad network. Obviously I was wrong! That said, I am happy with the amount of ads on my blog now with Adthrive and not feel like they are worsening the user experience.

Expenses for August 2018 - $119.21

• Cloudways Hosting - $18.80
• Seasoned Pro Theme - $10.5
• Genesis Framework - $5
• WP Rocket (caching plugin) $3
• Shortpixel (image compression plugin) - $4.99
• Adobe Creative Cloud (for photo editing) - $9.99
• Food Blogger Pro (membership site for food bloggers) - $18.75
• WP Recipe Maker (recipe plugin) - $7.30
• Yoast (SEO plugin) - $5.75
• Social Warfare Pro (social media plugin) - $2
• Tailwind (pinterest scheduler) - $19.98
• Planoly (instagram scheduler) - $9
• Dropbox - $9.99

For expenses that are yearly such as for the membership, plugins, I have divided them to show a monthly spend. There were other expenses such as buying a new laptop, attending conferences, buying food for recipe testing, props for food photography, etc and future expenses such as buying a camera, tripod which I have not included above.

Total Profit for August = $4991.15

Traffic Totals for August 2018

The traffic for the month of August was 266,696 pageviews.

The top traffic sources was Organic Search, followed by Social (Facebook, Pinterest).

Community & Social Media

I have focused on not only increasing my blog traffic from organic search, but also grow the community on various platforms. The numbers below are as of Sept 6, 2018.

• Facebook - 11,442 followers
• Pinterest - 2023 followers (564K monthly viewers)
• Instagram - 1859 followers
• Youtube - 834 subscribers & 37 videos

Do join me on your favorite platform to see latest posts and be updated on what's happening at Piping Pot Curry!

Takeaways

Whew, that was a lot. I hope you get that running a blog is a lot of hard work. It is not just writing a few posts, taking photos from your iPhone and putting it out there.

I am going to share a few takeaways I had -

• Finding a niche is important. Thank you Nagi for this lesson!  I was already posting recipes in the niche of instant pot recipes, although that niche is already starting to seem broad. My plan it to concentrate and maybe niche down even more!
• Content is king. Keep publishing good quality content and readers will come. Yes, this is the advice that everyone gives, but it is so true. I am still learning the ins and outs of keyword research, SEO and publicizing content, but these are extremely important for success in this competitive area.
• Monetizing from day 1 is important. It makes you feel like you are getting something for the countless hours you are putting in and motivates to do more.

Looking forward

I wanted to share some things I want to focus on in this upcoming year.

Diversifying Income: I really need to work on diversifying my income. I want to do more sponsored posts and learn that art. The key will be to find sponsored content that my readers would be interested in.

Planning & Consistency: I want to plan my content more and be more consistent in sharing posts. Till now I have be mostly consistent with posting almost weekly, however I have not been planning out for the upcoming months/seasons.

Thanks to you all!

I am able to do this and make Piping Pot Curry my full-time job because of you all. Thank you for reading, sharing, pinning, commenting, liking or silently following Piping Pot Curry. I am grateful to have you touch my blog in any way. Thank you!

Finally, I would love to hear any feedback you have for me. I do read, respond and take seriously each and every comment. So please do not hesitate to share your feedback.

Disclaimer: This post includes affiliate links, and I will earn a commission if you purchase through these links at no additional cost to you. Please note that I’ve linked to these products purely because I recommend them and they are from companies I trust.