Hi All, and welcome to our income report for the month of May. We are really excited and happy to share this month's income report as it is the best one we had so far and it is not even the peak season yet. We also have a great plugin for you that may help with your social networking!  More about it below.

Why do we do this?

This is a way for us to keep a record on the growth and development of Foxy Folksy, a blog that has become a source of income. In these reports, we not only share the financial side of blogging but also the ins and outs of blogging itself. 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.

I started Foxy Folksy in January 2014 but only as a hobby blog.  Not until late in 2016 did we decide to do it full-time and see if we could make some earnings from it.

Another thing worth mentioning is that we are not in the United States. We moved to the Philippines from Germany in 2017 but most of our traffic is 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 sources 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 May :

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

INCOME:

• Adsense - We had to give up Adsense as part of our exclusive contract with Mediavine.
• Mediavine - $2,197.25
• Youtube - $64.14
• Amazon Associates- $28.82
• ShareASale - $5.80
• Hostgator -  $0 –>  this is from affiliate links on the page: How to create a blog

Income from Ads:               $2,272.94

Income from Affiliates:          $34.62

Total Income:                       $2,307.56

EXPENSES:

• Cloudways - $24.50 (Try their 3-day free trial.)
• Boardbooster - $20.00
• Social Warfare -$2.42 (Paid $29 for the whole year divided to 12 months)
• Monthly Giveaway - $30.00
• Food Blogger Pro - $23.25
• MailerLite- $35.00 (Click the link to get 20% credit when you sign-up)
• MS Office 365 Home subscription - $9.50

Total Expenses:                       $144.67

NET INCOME:                         $2,162.89

TRAFFIC:

These are actual screenshots from Google Analytics:

TRAFFIC SOURCES:

RPM FOR THE MONTH:

$8.54

What is RPM you say? Well simply put, it is how much you earn per 1000 Pageviews and you calculate it 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.

Our RPM computation only includes revenue from Ads as these are the income that is directly associated with the number of page views. Commissions from affiliates are excluded as these are earnings from a sale which has nothing to do with the increase or decrease in page views. 

RPM FOR THE PAST 12 MONTHS:

FACEBOOK : 5,193 (up by 169)

INSTAGRAM : 6,438 (down by 54)

PINTEREST : 5,830 (up by 38)

TWITTER : 3,910 (up by 69)

YOUTUBE : 6,804 (up by 522)

EMAIL : 5,633 (up by 19)

• The traffic decreased by 2.95% from 258,428 to 266,056. We still haven't got back to the high that we've seen last March but we are glad to see a gradual comeback.
• This month is another milestone for us as we reach and surpassed the $2000 income mark which has eluded us for some time! The highest income we've got so far, it even exceeded our income last December which is usually the highest earning month and with almost the same PV at that! Income went up by 44% and that is all thanks to Mediavine !!! It is our second month with them and I am truly happy that we made the switch!
• The total number of posts for May is only 11. Well within the target this time of 10-12 post per month.

What's new?

As you can see from all our income reports, Pinterest is our second main source of traffic next to organic search (Google). So it is only logical that we should give a lot of thoughts and efforts to the images we include in each post and make them Pinterest-ready so that when a visitor pins our images to their Pinterest boards, a description is already included.

We used to do this by adding the text in the Alt Text of the images, which was a common practice with a lot of food bloggers I know. But we were told that Alt Text should not be used as such as this method can do harm to a website’s usability and search engine optimization (SEO), instead, it should only be for the description of the image itself. The purpose of which is to aid visually impaired users so that they still have a good user experience when visiting your website, even if they are unable to see the photos.

Another problem I had was that when I was reviewing some of the pins from our site, I saw some people were pinning the wrong images for some recipes in Pinterest. Heck! I even saw my profile photo on Pinterest for certain recipes.

We found the solution to both these problems in Social Warfare Pro. 

In addition to the features from the free version, the Pro version (only $29 for the whole year) gives you the option to assign a specific image so that when someone clicks on the Pinterest icon, it will only show that specific image for them to pin.

It also provides a description box specifically for Pinterest so you do not have to use the Alt Text box for this and do it  

That is a $29 well spent if you ask me!

That is it for this now, will come back soon for the next income and traffic report!

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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.