Welcome once again to our monthly income and traffic report!

This is our sixth month of reporting Foxy Folksy’s traffic and income report. We decided to do this to give you a glimpse into 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.

Below are the numbers for the month of February:

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 - $90.23
• Youtube - $10.75
• Monumetric  - $377.49
• Sovrn - $34.80
• Swoop - $3.89
• Amazon Associates- $4.63
• Hostgator - $0 -->  this is from affiliate links on the page: How to create a blog

Total Income: $537.52

EXPENSES:

• Hostgator - $11.84
• Boardbooster - $5.00
• Monthly Giveaway - $24.47
• Facebook Ads -  $10.00
• Food Blogger Pro - $23.25

Total Expenses: $74.56

NET INCOME: $462.96

TRAFFIC:

These are actual screenshots from Google Analytics:

TRAFFIC SOURCES:

RPM FOR THE MONTH:

 $4.60

What is RPM you say? Well simply put, it is how much you 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 comes 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. A decrease in RPM means some improvement in your income strategy is needed.

RPM FOR THE PAST 12 MONTHS:

FACEBOOK : 1,352 (up by 77) 

INSTAGRAM : 604 (up by 163)

PINTEREST : 3,419 (up by 198)

TWITTER : 1,379 (up by 117)

YOUTUBE : 487 (up by 76)

EMAIL : 870 (up by 92)

 

• This month's pageviews is down by 6.13% from 124,545 in January to 116,831 this month. But this does not bother me so much because this can be attributed to the fact that we had 3 days less compared to the previous month. But if we look at the average daily visits, February is actually slightly higher.

• We had a total of 12 posts for February! Hurray! Definitely back on track. Our target is at least 10 post per month. I got sidetracked last month because of my Philippine vacation hangover (that's what I call it). It took a while to get back to the normal routine.

• Income for the month has decreased by 7% but the RPM is almost the same. Like I mentioned in the last Income report, the first quarter of the year is usually the least performing quarter for blogs when it comes to Ads. And at the moment Ads are our mainly our source of income. Sponsorship is hard to get by, in our case at least, because we are not in the US but most of our audience are.

• As for Affiliate programs, we are still trying to work on that. To tell the truth, we didn't have so much time to look into it because we had some problem that we need to fix and it took much of our time and energy, more of that below. If you are interested to know what Affiliate Networks we've joined so far, you can read more from our last report.

• We also mentioned last time that we are trying to make more videos and so far we added 2 more to the list and they seems to do well. Youtube videos can also be a source of income thru Ads from Adsense. It could be time-consuming and needs a lot of work to make and edit a video, but the returns can be long term as it increases views and so is your earnings. Here are our latest videos:

•  As I mentioned before, we encountered some problem at the site. Well, it is not really so much of a problem (I think). I was just doing some checking in Google's Search Console (former Webmasters Tools) if everything is working fine with the site. If you have a blog, this tool is a must! It will help you understand what is going on at your site and how you can improve things to optimize your site for Google search engine. It also helps you to identify issues with your site. It's free and all you have to do is sign up for an account. So, while checking it out, I noticed a spike in the time it takes to load a page. To make a long story short, while investigating what could have caused the slow page load, I found myself also looking at our bandwidth usage and I was shocked to see a big jump since mid-November, like from 88 GB to  260 GB in over a month. We are still trying to investigate that but good thing I am hosted with Hostgator which means I have unlimited bandwidth usage so no extra charge. One possible reason we see is that some sites are 'hotlinking' to some of our images. It means they are using our image/s on their site by using the exact URL from our site! In this case, when someone opens that page, they would see our photo which resides on our server, thus, using OUR bandwidth! The nerve of this people, right! Well, Armin and I spend days trying to track them down and we found a LOT and so much more! We also found some of our photos were actually stolen! Used in websites without any link (or permission) and the watermarks removed. Some were used on restaurant menus and commercial ads! Yup, it is possible to find them out even if there is nothing linking the photo to your site but the work is tedious. We are planning to try and play nice by sending them emails to ask them to stop hotlinking and to at least give Foxy Folksy the credit for the photo and recipe. There is also a way to block hotlinking to your site by adding some codes in your .htaccess file. Hostgator made that easier because they have this feature in the Cpanel but I am still reviewing this options to see which one works best.

• One of the highlights of the month is....we joined FOOD BLOGGER PRO!!! This is a membership site for food bloggers (and others) created by Bjork and Lindsay from Pinch of Yum. This is where they share their secret to their successful website. It is great for those who are just starting to blog or thinking of having one. They have video tutorials on how to create your own blog/website, driving traffic to it, SEO, food photography and everything in between!  They also have a great team who are very friendly and helpful and the community is just great! So even for those who have been already blogging for awhile, you can still learn a lot and be up-to-date with what's new in the world of blogging and get answers to your questions from the tips and advice of the experts in the community forum. They also have this monthly live Q& A where you can ask Bjork and Lindsay questions and get your answers live. Read here to know more about Food Blogger Pro!

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

---

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.