May 2013 Traffic And Income Report

Hello All – D here.

Income report here! Sorry we’ve been a bit late this month but we’ve been traveling. Technically that’s an excuse for every month, but this month in particular we’ve been traveling more strenuously than ever since we are now in Europe and had some visitors i.e Vicky’s mom.

Traffic:

Traffic this month is around where it’s been for the last 8 or so months, marking a long streak of very little progress on this front.

However, this month we finally found the culprit – search traffic. It was very easy to identify as we simply looked at our Google Analytics overtime and well, see for yourself.

In general search traffic should be the one dependable thing that goes up overtime. This is because as you post more recipes, more of your work gets indexed, and you get more traffic. Declining traffic is a sign that your blog is losing authority in the search engines and that your work is ranking lower than it previously did, as a result, less people see your stuff. You can definitely see on the graph that it was trending upwards and is now trending downwards to an all time low. We’re not 100% sure why this is. Most likely it has to do with the direct advertising we’ve been doing for the last few months. This might be because Google has suspected some nefarious links being put on the blog and, since it doesn’t like that very  much, is lowering the search engine ranking of all the recipes.

This makes a lot of sense BUT, the one strange thing is that the travel blog, on which we do significantly more direct advertising (maybe 2-3 times as much), is showing an increase in search traffic and is now at an all time high – so that’s pretty contradictory to that hypothesis.

One other thing I was thinking is that perhaps the site is running slower than usual (we have added a lot of ads) and as a result Google may be dinging it (since Google likes fast websites).

But Google works in mysterious ways and doesn’t really inform you of what’s going on – so really, who knows?

In other news, Vicky did her first French cooking class the other day and has five new desserts to bring to you shortly. We thought this would be nice since desserts aren’t usually a large part of her recipes and who better to learn from than the French (seriously there are patisseries all over the place)!

Also, Vicky got a new camera and it will be interesting to see how well it performs with food photography. Maybe you’ll see a difference in these recent recipes.

Other than that, there isn’t much to report on. We still haven’t made any progress on affiliate sales and while I hoped that overtime the pages would get more attention as they aged and grew more authority with Google – that doesn’t seem to be the case.

BlogHer – $61
Google Adsense – $80
The Thesis Theme – $0
Hostgator – $0
Direct Advertising – $1,345

Grand Total: $1,486

If you have any questions, write them in the comments!

Previous Income Updates (Food Blog)

• July 2012 – $47
• August 2012 – $117
• September 2012 – $128
• October 2012 – $825
• November 2012 – $1019
• December 2012 – $837
• January 2013 – $1260
• February 2013 – $1094
• March 2013 – $1721
• April 2013 – $669

Previous Income Updates (Travel Blog)

• August 2012 – $55
• September 2012 – $490
• October 2012 – $1345
• November 2012 – $2031
• December 2012 – $2170
• January 2013 – $2925
• February 2013 – $3132
• March 2013 – $4390
• April 2013 – $4906
• May 2013 – $9036