How I Increased My Food Blog Revenue By 3x in Just A Month Time.
In my earlier story, I shared about how my blog started getting 150K visitors a month, and if you have missed that story; you can start here. For the late comers, My name is Surkhab, I am a food blogger at Evergreen Recipes and this is the second part of my post about my blogging journey. As I promised, here I’m sharing how I monetised my food recipe blog and also how I increased overall revenue from my blog by 3x.
My food blog income when using Google AdSense
Back in the days when I was getting only few visitors a month, I was using Adsense, like any other blogger who has just started out. But as the traffic wasn’t much, the Adsense revenue wasn’t good either. At least not what you call an earning, my focus was on generating more traffic to the blog as it would also increase the Adsense revenue.
I was wrong, even when I started getting 3000 page views a day, I was making $3/day ( or 99/month) on an average, which means I would get a monthly check of $100 (which is the minimum threshold of Google Adsense to gt a check) only if one day in that month my Adsense could do more than $3 in revenue.
I learned my lesson in the first month itself, and it was that the traffic is not the only factor to increase your earnings. Most of my traffic was coming from Social Media sites (as I mentioned that in my previous post), these people are blind to ads or let me put it like this, they were clever. The other reason I think was that there aren’t too many advertisers for food/cooking topic.
Suggested read:
Understand your readers need to select best blog monetization technique
I went back to my popular posts and read the comments, observed the behavior of my reads, when someone shared my post of Facebook, I stalked them to see what kind of content they are sharing and are interested in. I did all kind of crazy things just to find out how do I monetize these people, and I learned one lesson, that is, they won’t click on Adsense and I need to look for something else.
It was time I had to explore more opportunities and rethink about the monetizing model of my blog.
During my crazy research , I also found that my readers were asking me all kind of questions like How to I get started, what spices do I need to cook a particular food, which brand of an appliance I am using to prepare the recipes and many other questions. Initially I used to reply to their emails/comments and answer their queries straight away, but now I had got the solution to their as well as my problem.
This was the time I signed up for the Amazon Associate program, a service that pays you a commission every time someone buys something from Amazon via your link.
So, I am now putting links to the products I use in my recipes, which makes it easy for people to buy them online and I get a commission for it. I found that it actually converts better than Adsense. A $100 worth of product sold gives me a commission of over $3 to $4 which is not bad at all, considering most of the products range between $50- $100 and I just need one sale every day to compete with my Adsense revenue.
The other steep was to solve the other problem of my readers. I selected few easiest recipes from my own blog and put them in a pdf document and sold it for $1.99 to my list of 500 subscribers. I sold 4 eBooks on day one and it felt awesome, it was $7.97, which is almost 3 times than my Adsense revenue, that too for something which took no time to create, the content was already there on my blog, I just packed it into an eBook, making it easy for people to get started.
I stopped selling that eBook after a month and I am now experimenting with CPA, by offering a free download of my eBook after they fill up a survey. It is also working well, I am working on a new eBook which will be a lot better and not a rip off of my blog recipes.
Not a millionaire stuff here but I am making 3x the money I used to make with Adsense. I am still running the Adsense Ads though, but the other two methods I tried was enough to motivate me to keep blogging and keep doing that with passion.
That’s all from my side, I hope you take home a lesson or two from this post. Think how you can analyze your site and find best ways to monetize it. AdSense is not the only option and traffic is not the only factor.
If you are a food blogger, I would love to know; how you earning money from your blog. Let’s find out what are the best working methods for other bloggers to earn money from their blog.
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