FOOD BLOG INCOME REPORT – QUARTER 3 2024

In this third Food Blog Income Report, covering July through September 2024, I share my income and expenses for quarter 3 which hit new highs but (thanks to a full website theme update!), hit a bit of a slump in the final days of the quarter. I will also go into some of my experience updating my website’s theme as well as some other big moves I took this quarter.

Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links, which means if you decide to purchase any of the items linked in this post, I should earn a small commission. This creates no additional cost to you and helps support the work that goes into running The Fig Jar. Thank you! -Becky 

If you’re new here, please start with my first Food Blog Income Report (here) and second Food Blog Income Report (here) to see how my income has grown since then. As I mentioned in my About Me page, I’m currently working on this blog part-time (and I’m hoping to move to full-time soon!), and I think that’s important to keep in mind while reading this income report.

Someone recently shared some feedback about my income reports: “It’s nice to see someone share income reports that are more down to earth”. While I would love to say I’d be making more from this blog after almost 6 years of posting recipes, I’ve definitely made plenty of mistakes along the way. So, as with my other income reports, I hope you find these helpful, practical and will motivate you to keep working towards that dream income! I’m happy to say I’m getting closer all the time! And I’m happy to share all of my missteps, too, so you don’t have to go through them too haha. 🙂

One major high that I’d like to share right off the bat this time is the growth I’ve seen in my traffic since starting this blog. It never ceases to amaze me where I came from…literally zero traffic! For like two straight years! But as you can see in the chart below (I realize that Jetpack stats are not the “industry standard”), by steadily posting recipes (and learning SEO techniques slowly but surely), my traffic has nearly doubled every year! I’ll likely hit 1 million views this year alone, which is purrrrrty cool to think about.

This quarter alone had 229,366 sessions according to Google Analytics. I’ll explain below where that traffic came from!

TRAFFIC SOURCES

WHERE DID MY BLOG TRAFFIC COME FROM IN QUARTER 3?

Note: The first number next to each traffic source is the Q3 data. The numbers within parentheses are percentages from Q2 2024.

• Organic search – 77.1% (76.9%)
• Direct – 12.7% (13.9%)
• Social & other – 10.2% (9.2%)

As you can see in the above screenshot, I’m still getting a majority of my traffic from organic Google search (yay, SEO!). Some of this increased traffic may be due to the time of year but some of it is surely due to updating old posts and writing new posts according to the recommendations of RankIQ.

Updating Old Posts & Optimizing New Ones

During Q2, I really started using RankIQ to optimize each of my posts. This quarter I continued doing that – updating old posts and optimizing new ones – with mixed success. I’ll dig into one example below.

Here’s how many new posts I created as well as how many older posts I updated. If you’d like a more in-depth review of how I used RankIQ this quarter, I’ll be posting a review shortly, so keep an eye out for that!

• New Posts – 17
• Updated Old Posts – 17

One example of a post that really started gaining traffic after updating was my How to Make Herb Salt post (originally written November 2021), which went from ranking in spot 28.8 on Google in the same quarter of 2023 to ranking 1.7 this quarter! It went from getting 2,000 impressions in Q3 of 2023 to 37,000! This was all thanks to RankIQ! I followed their recommendations to add certain topics that Google likes to see for that specific search term. I’d definitely recommend you checking out my in-depth RankIQ Review to see how I use it as a food blogger.

Buckwheat Pumpkin Muffins (Gluten Free)

INCOME SOURCES

• Mediavine Ads – $7,534.41
• Amazon Affiliates – $134.17

Total income – $7,668.58

Mediavine Ads continue to be a major source of income on each food blog income report. Many other bloggers also report that Mediavine is where a majority of their income comes from as well, so I would recommend you checking them out if you haven’t already!

EXPENSES

QUARTER 3 EXPENSE BREAKDOWN

• Nerdpress – $507.00
• Web Hosting – $38.01
• Upgraded Bluehost Storage to Create Staging Site – $63.00
• Keysearch – $42.24
• Website Theme by Restored 316 + Installation – $521.10
• Rank IQ – $147.00
• Plug-ins and apps – $20.76
• Props – $249.72
• Groceries – $615.22

Total expenses – $2,204.05

QUARTER 3 2024 NET PROFIT

My total profit for Quarter 3 2024 was $5,464.53 (minus taxes!).

Avocado BLT with Sriracha Mayo

WEBSITE REDESIGN – MAJOR UNDERTAKING #1

At the end of September, my husband and I embarked on a complete website design. After seeing in multiple places that your site’s SEO rankings can depend on a well-designed website, we decided that it was time to get rid of our outdated theme! We had the Foodie Pro Theme since the creation of our site and have since moved to a Kadence framework site. It’s fairly easy to use but there’s still more to learn!

Since redesigning a website is such a big undertaking, here are a few takeaways in case you’re considering doing the same:

DO’s:

1. Buy a theme. Why pay a crazy amount of money to have a beautiful website when there are tons of amazing themes out there? We found one on Restored316.com that was beautiful and fit our needs. $249 is not a bad price for what we got! While we didn’t use all of the features it came with, they really pack lots of value into their design, such as sales pages and some stock category search buttons.
2. Hire a company to install the theme for you. For a nominal fee, Restored 316 will install your theme for you! With so many other things to think about during the redesign, I wanted as little to do with the technical stuff as possible! Once my staging site was up and running, they installed the theme in an instant.
3. Create a staging site before a theme update. This is something I knew literally nothing about before our theme update! After some research, a failed plugin (The Bluehost Staging Plugin), and hours of chatting with our host provider, they were finally able to get a staging site up and running for us…which brings me to…

DON’T’s:

1. Don’t use Bluehost, if you can help it!!!! As a starter web host, they have been generally fine, but if you have the ability to use another web host, do it! Their customer service is miserable and they made creating our staging site an absolute nightmare. Avoid them at all costs. One of my next orders of business is to migrate my site over to a new web host. But in order to avoid any more lost traffic in the busiest quarter of the year (Q4), I’ll be waiting until Q1 of 2025. Stay tuned on that!
2. Don’t update your theme during a period of major traffic. We were debating waiting to update our theme until January 2025, but with the potential for higher traffic in Quarter 4, we thought we might help our SEO chances if our site was updated and more user-friendly right before Q4. In the end, we didn’t lose a ton of traffic, but for a few weeks at the end of September, we definitely saw a drop while Google was re-indexing our new site layout. It helps to have a Sitemap in place so Google can quickly get your site back up and running in their search engines.

MIGRATED EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDER TO KIT (FORMERLY CONVERTKIT) – MAJOR UNDERTAKING #2

I moved from MailChimp over to Kit this quarter. It was a huge undertaking! Lots of time spent manually redesigning my emails and re-linking all of my WebStories and landing pages (I have since stopped publishing WebStories after seeing next-to-zero traffic from both new and old WebStories I’ve published…and I’ve created over 300 in the past few years!).

I had been struggling with the steep learning curve of Mailchimp for years and was tired of paying what I thought was a ridiculous amount of money for having such a relatively small number of subscribers. Kit was offering 10,000 subscribers for free, and they offered to migrate all of my subscribers over for free too, so I jumped on that. Now, despite all of the effort to save some money, I’m currently considering upgrading to Kit’s lowest paid tier in order to try my hand at Automated/Evergreen Email series in order to offer products that are better tailored to our readers’ needs. (Oh, how quickly we change our minds as bloggers, right? Yay for shiny objects!!!) More on the results of that in the coming updates!

Ground Beef Taco Bowls with Creamy Cilantro Sauce

CONCLUSION

To wrap this all up, this quarter was a doozy! A big thanks to my husband for doing all of the behind-the-scenes tech-y stuff because I really do not enjoy it! My time is best spent on photography, nurturing social media and email, developing recipes, raising my little one, and keeping my family fed! But despite all of the rabbit trails, this still turned out to be my most profitable quarter yet and I hope that all of the work I’ve been doing will continue to pay off! My next steps are going to be to give even more value to my email subscribers and to create some digital products to diversify my income (since we never know how Google’s next algorithm update will drop our traffic). I hope you’ve found this Food Blog Income Report and my overall journey just exhilarating!!! I promise you I’m not as interesting as it sounds in this post, but if you’ve gotten this far, God bless you and thank you for reading!!

Toodles!!

-Becky <3

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