Monthly Report

I've enjoyed reading Pinchofyum 's income reports, and that of other food blogs so I thought I would do something similar while not solely focusing on the income per se. Just a little post highlighting what did or didn't work, which sites got me traffic and which didn't. Lets start with the food photography/sharing sites. These have gotten me by far the most traffic to my blog.

As you can see in this slightly messy pie chart, Foodgawker is for me the absolute winner. A good percentage of my pictures get approved there. It took me a couple of tries to figure out they don't like it if you crop your photos too close. Now, I like a bit of a close up but I try to  get some other pictures that I can submit to Foodgawker. They are also very quick in reviewing your picture so if something is wrong you can consider making a new one.

Tastespotting is the other big player, but I have a lot less luck here. I only have one or two photos approved. They also take a lot longer getting them reviewed (I had a quie of 5 posts at one time) and this means I am less likely to resubmit another photo.

Tasteology and Liqurious are a good third and I just really like these sites. Liqurious is especially good if you  make a drink because it stays on the front page much longer than the food sites.


                                                                   Pinterest

Now I know this is potentially my biggest source of traffic, but it has been slow going this first month. I must say I do really enjoy using the site, it is extremely handy to collect whatever you find on the web there. And it is extremely exciting when someone pins something from your website but the traffic is not much yet.

Google searches

In a market as oversaturated as that of foodblogging it will be hard to get many visitors from google. But to my surpise there have been a few. Pickled beets, sweet potato garlic tart and basil chilli vodka are all searchwords that have been used to get to my site.

Alltop / Technorati

I also submitted my site to Alltop and got approved. Traffic from there is extremely minimal (2 hits) but maybe that will improve with time. I also put it up at Technorati if only to see whether my 'authority' will rise the coming months.

  Hall of Fame

Gin with glowing tonic jelly cubes

This has been my most successfull post to date. Which is good because it was also the most time intensive to make. It did well on Foodgawker and Liqurious and it got a good amount of Stumbleupon traffic. These two tweets also made me very happy even if they didn't drive a lot of traffic. 

Barkeep; there appears to be something glowing in my G&T: http://t.co/Kbz9ujalkG
— DrinkMelbourne (@DrinkMelbourne) September 16, 2013

Gin shots with glow in the dark ice cubes...Would you drink them? http://t.co/cCQIVpAphW
— Cole's New York (@ColesGV) September 12, 2013

No knead bread vs kneaded bread

This post also did very well, it almost overtook the gin and tonic jelly. This is one of the only posts accepted to Tastespotting which helped traffic a lot. I guess both the popularity of breadmaking and the experiment/contest format where attractive. On Pinterest however this performed quite poorly.

Perfectly Poached Egg

Rounding out the top three is the poached egg. I was really surprised by the success of this one to be honest. It seems simple techniques are good for clicks. This is the post where I actually went back and made another poached egg to photograph for Foodgawker and it paid off handsomely. 

Income report

With my Adsense income this month I could theoretically buy a dozen of eggs, a bread and some mayo, so it's a start.