It is time again for our monthly income and traffic report!

We are at the final month of the year and December is a very busy month indeed and there were some big changes at Foxy Folksy! It is becoming quite a roller-coaster ride, with some ups and downs and a few bumps along the way and I am glad that I am able to tell you about.

This is our fourth month reporting Foxy Folksy’s traffic and income report. Why do we publish this? Simply, to give you a glimpse on what is going on ‘behind the posts’ at Foxy Folksy and for us to keep track of the developments on our attempt in making Foxy Folksy an income-generating blog.  Hopefully, sharing this will also help others who are interested in creating their own blog or those who are also trying to find their way in making money from their existing blog by learning from our mistakes and successes.

Please note that Foxy Folksy has been up and running since January 2014 but only as a hobby blog. We only really started thinking of trying to make some bucks from it early this year. You can see how Foxy Folksy was doing on previous months from my previous report.

Below are the numbers for the month of December:

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and all of the products listed below are products and services I have personally used or still using.

INCOME:

• Adsense - $169.78
• Monumetric  - $655.11
• Sovrn - $57.88
• Swoop - $3.87

Total Income: $895.42

EXPENSES:

• Hostgator - $11.84
• Boardbooster - $5.00
• Monthly Giveaway - $27.55

Total Expenses: $44.39

NET INCOME: $851.03

TRAFFIC:

These are actual screenshots from Google Analytics:

 

TRAFFIC SOURCES:

RPM FOR THE MONTH:

 $8.15

What is RPM you say? Well simply put, it is how much you've earn per 1000 Pageviews and you calculate with this formula:

(revenue / pageviews) x 1000

Why is it important? Well it is a simple way of tracking how the blog is performing from month to month when it come to generating income. With this, you are also able to compare your own performance to other bloggers who are also publishing their income reports. The goal is, of course, to get this number to increase or in the least stable. Decrease in RPM means some improvement in your income strategy is needed.

RPM FOR THE PAST 12 MONTHS:

FACEBOOK : 1,146 (up by 24) 

INSTAGRAM : 186 (up by 74)

PINTEREST : 2,973 (up by 153)

TWITTER : 1,029 (up by 87)

• Our pageviews had actually dropped from last month's 125,805 to this month's 109,890 (*sad face*) which is a decrease by 12.65%. We got a spike on traffic last November from Facebook when our post for Pichi Pichi got so popular, but, unfortunately, it did not continue on December, well that happens, we are just happy that it did and hoping it would happen again.

• On the brighter note...our income has increased by 166%!!! Hurray!  If you've read our previous reports, you'd know that we recently joined an Ad Network called Monumetric (former- The Blogger Network) and from this month's results, I would say that it is indeed a good decision!

• We also learned that a contributing factor for the higher traffic and higher RPM is that, the Q4 (October, November and December) is the peak and most profitable period for bloggers. (Q1 being the opposite). Now I am feeling bad for not joining Monumetric sooner because of the lost opportunity to earn more. Not only that, working with an Ad network saves us not only time so we could focus on other important stuff but also from all the guesswork of managing your own ads.

• REPUBLISHING OLD POSTS . While December is one of the busiest month for bloggers, I had a vacation and flew home to the Philippines to attend my sister's wedding. But we were still able to have 10 articles posted for the month. OK, this is not entirely true. I knew before leaving that I would barely have the time to work on Foxy Folksy so what I did was, in November,  I re-did some of the recipes and took new (better) pictures from some of my old posts when I was just starting to blog (photos that makes me flinch when I look at them now...yikes) and just republished them on December. This is a good way to give old post a face-lift (that is so much needed), for example in one of the very first posts I did, Carrot Cake/ Cupcake Recipe. I changed all old pictures and the thumbnail or featured image so people who see the images in Google search would be more enticed to click on them.

Republishing an old post could also result in a boost in traffic to the post because they are re-exposed to your old and new audience. You have also the chance to resubmit the new and improved photos to food porn sites like Foodgawker, Tastespotting, Tasteologie and of course Pinterest and Instagram, so more traffic without having to write everything from scratch.

And (I think)  Google also likes it when posts are being updated because when I checked in Google Search Console for the period before and after I reposted  the  Carrot Cake/ Cupcake Recipe , I noticed an increase in the impressions of the said post after republishing!

• Since this is the last month of the year, let's have a glimpse of the income and traffic for 2016

YEAR END RECAP

That's it for now! Until the next reporting!

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Thinking of starting your own blog, you may want to visit my blog post on How To Start A Blog with a checklist of the things you should know before actually creating one and How to create a Blog for the step-by-step procedures on building your blog. You may also want to check out my Resource Page for the tools you need for your blog.