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 just moved to the Philippines from Germany 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 October:

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 - $167.91
• BlogHer  (SheKnows) - $1,065.00
• Youtube - $79.71
• Amazon Associates- $9.61
• ShareASale - $5.20
• Hostgator - $0 -->  this is from affiliate links on the page: How to create a blog

Total Income:  $1,327.43

EXPENSES:

• Hostgator - $11.84
• Boardbooster - $20.00
• Monthly Giveaway - $40
• Food Blogger Pro - $23.25
• Mailchimp - $50.00

Total Expenses: $145.09

NET INCOME:  $1,182.34

TRAFFIC:

These are actual screenshots from Google Analytics:

TRAFFIC SOURCES:

RPM FOR THE MONTH:

 $5.74

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.

RPM FOR THE PAST 12 MONTHS:

FACEBOOK : 3,695(up by 344)

INSTAGRAM : 5,848 (down by 247)

PINTEREST : 5,239 (up by 135)

TWITTER : 3,177 (up by 160)

YOUTUBE : 3,175 (up by 505)

EMAIL : 3,345 (up by 342)

• October's page views increased by 7.57% from 215,028 to 231,302. We are happy and a little surprised about the increase in PV and I wanted to know what caused it. A little digging showed that aside from the (usual) increase in organic (Google search) traffic we also got some unexpected boost from a platform called Fridgg. It is a food photo submission site similar to Foodgawker and Tastespotting and we joined and started submitting our photos in end of August. Only goes to show that you can never say where additional traffic may suddenly come from so my advice, try them all.
• We had a total of 7 posts for October! Again, below our monthly target of 10-12 posts! I know this is the third month in a row that we are not meeting our target and it actually gets worse...yikes!
• Not much of a change in terms of income this month compared to the last despite the increase in PV, thus, the decrease in RPM. A bit disappointing as we are trying to increase PV in the hopes that it will also increase the earnings. But it seems that sometimes it does not directly happen that way. It has to do with locations it seems. US traffic pays higher than the traffic from other countries. It makes sense of course as we are with BlogHer (ShewKnows) and their clients (advertisers) are mostly from US whose target is US audience.
• What's new: We decided to change something about our RPM computation. In the past (including October) we include the revenue from our affiliates (Amazon, Hostgator, ShareaSale) in computing RPM which we think should be separated as those earnings does not directly relate to Pageviews like the ads does rather they are the commission from sales by referrals thru links. So starting next month's reporting, this new computation shall be implemented.

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.