Welcome once again to our monthly income and traffic 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.

Foxy Folksy has been up and running since January 2014 but only as a hobby blog. This means I was just posting articles whenever I was in the mood, like twice in a month or so. We only really started thinking that maybe we could make some earnings from it in early months of 2016. You can see how Foxy Folksy was doing in the months from my first income report.

Another thing worth mentioning, I guess, is that we are not in the United States. We are currently based in Germany but most of our traffic are coming from the US and then second from the Philippines. Why do I have to mention this? Simply because I am starting to learn that the opportunities for US-based bloggers are different for bloggers in my situation. I am also following some food bloggers who publish their monthly income reports but all I was able to find so far are US-based bloggers. It is a good way to get ideas where they get their income, sure, but some of their source or advice are not applicable to me, a Non-US-based blogger. So I am trying to share the things that are working for me and those that did not.

 

Below are the numbers for the month of March:

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 - $111.51
• Youtube - $19.38
• Monumetric  - $521.32
• Sovrn - $55.86
• Swoop - $5.36
• Amazon Associates- $13.22
• Hostgator - $0 -->  this is from affiliate links on the page: How to create a blog

Total Income: $726.65

EXPENSES:

• Hostgator - $11.84
• Boardbooster - $10.00
• Monthly Giveaway - $30.31
• Food Blogger Pro - $23.25

Total Expenses: $75.40

NET INCOME: $651.25

TRAFFIC:

These are actual screenshots from Google Analytics:

TRAFFIC SOURCES:

 

 

RPM FOR THE MONTH:

 $4.76

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 : 1,411(up by 59) 

INSTAGRAM : 1,206 (up by 602)

PINTEREST : 3,952 (up by 533)

TWITTER : 1,505 (up by 126)

YOUTUBE : 589 (up by 102)

EMAIL : 994 (up by 124)

• This month's page views are up by 30.61% from 116,831 last February to 152,596 this month. Yippeee!!! I know it is a big jump even if we look at last January's PV at 124,454 which also has 31 days, the month of March really did well.

• We had a total of 13 posts for March! The most I ever did for a month. Our target is at least 10 post per month. Good job!

• Income for the month has increased by 35% but the RPM is just a tiny bit higher than last month. Meaning, the increase is really attributed to the increase in traffic. We would also like to note that at the moment Ads are 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.

• We are focusing a bit more now on affiliate links with Amazon and it seems to be working as evidenced by the increase in our earnings from them. We do it by adding links in our recipe boxes and the native ads that you might notice at the bottom of some posts. We haven't done it on all the posts yet but are planning to. If you are interested to know what Affiliate Networks we've joined so far, you can read more from a previous report.

• We also noticed an increase in Youtube Earnings this month as we try to add more video on our Youtube channel. 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:

• For those who miss last month's report (and because I love it so much I want to plug it again)....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!

• So, late last January we tried applying to Adthrive. We are happy with Monumetric but we also want to check what other options we have so we could weigh them in the future, so we gave it a go. Sad to say, we got their answer last month (March) and we got rejected. The reason they gave us is that their ad partners declined our site because our percentage of non-US traffic was too high for what they offer. After a follow-up question, they told us to try again when 60% of our traffic comes from US.  So, maybe we could try it again in the future. Although I am not sure if our percentage of Non-US traffic would decline since most of our post are about Filipino/Asian food. We also applied to Mediavine this month and we will update you on the outcome from that when we know more.

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.