$31,073.42 in June without paid traffic #foodblog #letsdiscuss (16)
$31,073.42 in June without paid traffic #foodblog #letsdiscuss
This blog lists all of its income and expenses - really detailed.
http://pinchofyum.com/june-income-report
1m visitors.
There are other blogs doing better. This "income report" thing seems to be becoming a more standard thing. Peeped another income report for a (way more shitty) blog with just 10,000 visitors in a month with $1,400 profit (terrible quality though, but its content was focused directly on making money).
I'll start a blog this year just to see what will happen whenever I write and produce original content 10-15 times a month for a few years. It's not a bad idea for the investment; I write a shit-load anyway. Treat it like a public personal diary? The main thing is: content needs to be on point. With quality content comes a stream of legit reddit love and traffic, and there is no shortage of ways to use PPC to attract high-value visitors to the blog if you ever need to jump-start the project. Content is #1 though.
As something on the side, as an experiment, it's not a bad idea if you have the literary/creative chops.
This guy is doing 3k a day, seems to be at the peak (this particular update was not 100k but still very good):
www.smartpassiveincome.com/my-september-2013-monthly-income-report/
He shows how his "example" sites are pulling in just a few grand combined, and that 90% of his earnings come from the main blog where he shows others how to make money-making blogs (which don't make much money).
So the formula would be: blog to use as an example (with quality posts) + overview/money-making blog that talks about the first blog's journey and everything else.
Ideas? Could be a good thing to hand down to your kids for example. Man I am so starting my kids off with a blog. I just need a great domain name, and kids. 
Interesting find!
We all know that high ranking blogs are making nice revenues but this is first time when I see all the details of income stream.
Don't know how easy is this days but a guy from my city hit it big with his blog: http://freshome.com/
Story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alisonco...-blogging-pay/
I'm thinking the same, to start a blog as a side long-term project, don't have people who can handle it atm.
If you have resources, why not...
Cool site he's got -- found my dream apartment bro! Haha. There is a common thread amongst SmartPassiveIncome and PinchOfYum: the majority of their money come from hosting company affiliate commissions.
PinchOfYum has a post showing how to start a food blog - this has made them probably 500k from Hostgator.
SPI has a post showing how to start a blog in 4 minutes - this has made them probably 2m from Bluehost - you see 30-50k commission just from this one aff programme... he may as well rent some space in a DC and start his own hosting company!
There's a guy on TV.bz who runs a celebrity blog making 60k a month -- that was an older post (1-2 years) but it certainly doesn't require a million visitors a day. 30k visits a day seems like a great target. And there are so many people, just have to get 30k addicted and make sharing easy and make them want to spread the word. Can't depend on Google.
I've done a lot of work in this field, sometimes with quite a bit of success, sometimes with not so much.
Key things:
1) It's a long-term play. Really long term. Think in terms of years to build an audience.
2) You need to spend a lot of time networking and promoting too. I'd usually recommend a 50/50 split between time spent writing and time spent promoting. Reddit, Twitter and any on-topic blogs are your friends.
3) Your niche is absolutely key. Some niches will get you loads of inbound links and praise comparatively quickly - others will be a nightmare to make any sort of dent in.
4) It's not what you know, it's who you know - particularly true in building a blog. Relationships with other bloggers in the same or similar niches are absolutely key.
5) Evergreen content is where it's at. You want to build guides that become the definitive reference in an area, and are still referenced multiple years later.
6) Monetisation methods are very, very high variance. That's where AM skills can really come into play.
7) This approach works very well alongside a powerful list - indeed, if you're not building an email list with your blog, you're mad.
It can definitely work, and it's an extremely stable play if it does. But it's veeeeery slow.
I'm a fan of this guy: http://www.timothysykes.com/
I don't know how much money he is making from trading but I think is making more from aff commissions and from selling his trading courses.
Yes, caurmen is perfectly right, it is a very slow process but it might end up really nice...
What about creating a product for ppc: How to make money from blogging?
Sell a cheap ebook, teach people how to create the blog, how they will make money, and get commission from hosting and whatever you want to sell them.
It might work...no?
This guy has done it very professional in the DIY niche http://www.askthebuilder.com/
He was pulling in over 100K a month with adsense alone.
Don't think of the task as just creating a blog. You should think of it as building a platform.
I can shed some light on the OP's find. We (significant other and I) run a food blog and everyone in that space knows "Pinch of Yum", several of our friends know the couple running the site personally.
The first thing to note is that this was technically posted in the wrong forum, the traffic they get is mostly coming from non-SEO sources. For food bloggers, Pinterest is where it's at. They had a few of their recipes in 2012 repinned by the Pinterest founder's mom who has a ridiculous amount of followers (like 5M+). The same happened to us earlier in the year and our traffic shot of 5x for about a full week, it was insane...
Regarding the niche, food blogging is unlike other blogs, it's a whole different niche with a very specific audience that typically can't be monetized too well with CPM/CPC ads. Success comes from building products (cookbooks), and in the VERY rare case of Pinch of Yum, from affiliate marketing a hosting provider like Bluehost. This only works for them b/c they branched out beyond just posting recipes and are also showing other wannabe food bloggers who to create successful blogs. Bluehost pays $60+ per signup I believe, but not many food blogs are able to pull that off.
The content itself - I would caution the OP there - is also unlike any other blog content. Key is to shoot the highest quality pictures of your food in order for it to be as pinnable as possible and get accepted to food picture aggregation sites like foodgawker, tastespotting and buzzfeed food. Producing this content is HARD work, it is a fulltime job if you want to post 4-5 times per week and get noticed.
Let me know if there are any other questions on this topic, I have a fair amount of experience in the space.
It's been ages since I did any SEO work , but the key is to build an entire platform. Twitter, reddit, pinterest,etc. You must become a brand and not rely on Google or Bing. Because one day, you are at the top of the search engines and the next you are not.
I used to run a niched adult blog and I was at the top of Google for my niche for around a year and a half. I was making $3k- $4k per month just posting new videos and galleries every other day while I was in college. Then one day google comes along and decides to wipe my sites. I was back down to zero in a matter of days.
It's much more difficult to build a brand around a porn site....
The top pinners have two problems- always looking for great stuff, and have tons of infulence but its hard to transfer it to money, so you can solve thier two problems at once..
So if you have good food blog, you can pay to pinners with tons of followers to pin your stuff on regular basis..
They can send you tons of traffic, so it will make the process much faster.
The key is to have supereb original content on regular basis.
If you're thinking of doing this, I'd strongly advise reading Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger, on his concept of the "Minimum Viable Audience": http://www.copyblogger.com/unfair-business-advantage/
Originally Posted by delash
Get on Jane Wang's radar, co-founder's mother 
http://pinchofyum.com/september-traffic-income-report
She's pinned our stuff and it did wonders. Also seeing great success in shared boards, find the biggest ones and ask to join and pin to those boards.
Originally Posted by ltdangle
Here is a good one for you http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/ He has monthly income reports http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/income-reports/
What do you recommend we use for the comment boxes? Should we use wp's built in comments or something like disqus?
Matthew Woodward writes great stuff on monetizing your blog.
I've been doing income reports for 2 years now, definitely a long term play! Income reports are my most viewed content, (apart from my Teespring tutorials).
Just mind dump your IM journey as posts and every month do an income report. you're almost guaranteed to get a loyal following eventually, it's just a matter of monetising it right from there.
Good luck!
- Mateen
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