Hey everybody! Welcome to the February 2019 Business Report and, wow, wasn’t February was a very short month.

For those of you who have been following these reports, you’ll know from the January report that I was worried that February would be very low for traffic and revenue, especially when compared to the mighty £8.86 from January.

Well, due to a mixture of reasons including some travel away, plus a short stint in a hospital, the posting rate was a lot less in February compared to January. To put this into context, in January The Yum Yum Club managed to post 25 recipes compared on only 14 in February.

But what were the numbers…

1. The financials

We’ll discuss traffic below but even with a short month, and a very low post rate revenue still totalled £13.48!! With January the previous best month at £8.86 this 52% gain is very positive. I’ll discuss why I think this occurred below but to close off on the full number the income and expenditure account for February looks like the following:

Income

• Google Adsense – £12.75
• Media.net – $0.83 (£0.63)
• Affiliate Programs $0.00
• Amazon £0.00
• TOTAL £13.48

Expenditure

• Ingredients – £118.28
• Utensils – £10.80
• TOTAL – £129.08

Putting this all together you’ll remember that at the end of January the cumulative loss since the start of the project was £2407.73. With the net loss of £115.60, this means the accumulated loss to the end of February is £2,523.33

2. What drove the increased revenue

It’s not only the increase in actual £ that is interesting but the fact that it has come with a large decrease in traffic (see below).

For those of you who are unaware, there is a key performance indicator (KPI) in website management called revenue per 1000 impressions, or RPM for short. This simply measures the amount of money earned per 1000 page views. Basically, this is a rate of return. Obviously the higher the number the more financially optimised the site. I’m still not quite sure what the industry norm is for food blogs but you can see for The Yum Yum Club RPM increased as we went through January to February.

You can see that overall the RPM for February was higher than January. That actual monthly number was £1.77 for January and £3.20 for February.

This is actually really positive as it shows that my move to manual add placements compared to auto ads with Google Adsense has started to pay off. The only thing I am mindful of is that the high February number is driven by 3-4 good days (see the spikes), which, in turn, are driven by quality and active blogging.

As always, it’s the quality of the content and photographs that sine through.

3. February overall traffic

Overall traffic for February was down considerably compared the January. The loss of 3 days in the short month of February didn’t help but the main driver, in my view, is the lower number of posts as described above.

Overall traffic for February is shown below…

You will see in the January report users was 3,495 with 3,996 sessions and page views 5,968.

Nevertheless, let’s have a look at the breakdown of the traffic sources.

4. February traffic sources

The overall view of traffic sources for February is illustrated below.

The points to note here when comparing to January are, firstly that Social and Referral have swapped place. In January Social had 33% of the share with Referral 55%. This is actually quite understandable as referral relates to food submission sites and with fewer posts, there are less submissioSimultaneouslyulsy, I increased my focus on Pinterest and Facebook which gave Social a boost.

The more interesting point here is that Organic Search has gone from 3% share and 96 visits in January to 8% and 216 visits in February. This is where I want to see real long term growth. Organic search is where someone has found the site by searching a keyword in google and The Yum Yum Club pops up. This is passive traffic as it requires no effort of posting on social sites or referral sites.

I’m not going to go through any more traffic details for February but will have a quick look at the Feb / Mar goals and where I am at this time.

5. The February and March goals

As a refresher, I listed these goals to be complete by the end of March when I posted the January report.

• Increase the momentum of posting from the slower early February rate. At least 5 per week.
• Improve the quality of the photographs. I have bought a light box so hopefully, this will help.
• Get to 50 Pinterest groups and tribes respectively.
• Achieve 100 Facebook recipes pages.
• Make at least 20 smoothies in total and try and complete the ebook.

Taking these 1 by 1…

• Due to the unforeseen hospital trip at the end of February and not returning home until 2nd March I have not posted anything new at the time of writing (5th March). Better get my skates on.
• This is complete and hopefully improved photograph quality will drive more traffic.
• To date, I am a member of 40 tribes and 25 groups so progress is good but a little work still to be done.
• Regards to Facebook I am a member of 47 FB food groups so a little more work due here too.
• Regards the smoothies, there are 14 on the site and 6 more this month should be fine. However, it will be difficult to complete the ebook this month.

Before I go I just wanted to return to the RPM point above. To point this into context, if I wanted to, say, generate £100 per day from The Yum Yum Club from advertising alone then with an RPM of £3.20, as was the February run rate, this means I need to get monthly traffic (page views) of over 31k per day. In February The Yum Yum Club averaged 152!  Food for thought eh…

OK, that’s it for the February 2019 Business Report. It was a busy but short month and The Yum Yum Club did generate £13.48 in revenue. Let’s see what the short month of March brings…

As always, thanks for reading and until next time…Steve.