March 2019 Business Report

Hey everybody! Welcome to the March 2019 Business Report. The clocks have finally gone forward and the sun is shining. Hooray!! But are there clouds looming over The Yum yum Club 🌨?

In fact, not so much 😃. Traffic and revenue are up but what has changed? Quite a bit actually. The Yum Yum Club launched is first ever video. It also launched it’s own standalone Facebook Page. We also tried out paying for some advertising. I’ll run through all of this in due course but first, the financials…

1. The financials

So, I still won’t be retiring quite yet but total revenue for March 2019 was £23.13. These beat the previous best month of February’s £13.48 by £9.65 or 71.5%!! No bad right? This progress looks even better when viewed graphically…

As said, no retiring quite yet but, being a financial nerd, it’s interesting to take the last 3-month average growth rate as a percentage, that being 63%, knock it down to around 50% and then projected 12 months out… for a little interest and fun…

 

For those of you who read the February report, you will know that the initial Financial target for The Yum Yum Club was £100 per day or £3,000 per month. Well, looking at this projection…

I’m not convinced any growth will be as linear as this but an interesting viewpoint. Maybe I’ll keep tracking this just out of interest.

Anyway, what about the income and expenditure breakdown for March 2019?

Income

• Google Adsense – £21.43
• Media.net – $2.23 (£1.70)
• Affiliate Programs $0.00
• Amazon £0.00
• TOTAL £23.13

Expenditure

• Ingredients – £296.24
• Utensils – £21.61
• Photography Equipment – £296.91
• Advertising – £115.94
• TOTAL – £730.70

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 £707.57, this means the accumulated loss to the end of February is £3,230.90

This is an ever growing loss position. However, I do feel that most of the equipment and subscription required to operate for the rest of the financial year, 30th October 2019, is covered. There will just be the cost of ingredients and advertising. Hopefully, with growing revenue.

Let’s now focus on the traffic numbers.

2. March overall traffic

Overall traffic for March was up a great deal compared to February. Total March traffic is shown below…

 

It was shown in the February report that total users were 2,685 with 3,215 sessions and page views 4,265. This shows a substantial increase in traffic for March. For the number of sessions, which is a key measure, this is a 65% increase! 😃

What’s also interesting is the increase hump in and around the 20th March to the 27th March.

Before this is looked at, however, let’s have a look at the breakdown of the traffic sources.

3. March traffic sources

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

 

As can be seen Social as a source is 73% of the total traffic. This makes sense as Pinterest and, specifically, Facebook has been focused on throughout March. Referrals are the food submission sites and I continue to submit to these as usual. Further, Direct and Organic continue to grow in real numbers which are great trends.

It’s the Social category that is of interest though so let’s break this down…

4. March Social traffic

From the Social traffic source, it is clear that Facebook and Pinterest are the key contributors.

So let’s have a look at these two critical sources one by one.

a) Facebook traffic

Facebook was the largest single source of traffic in March. What’s interesting, however, is the profile of the traffic.

i) Facebook groups

I’ll come to the traffic “hump” from 2oth – 27th March in a moment but if this is ignored, for now, it’s clear the traffic level is actually quite flat and repeatable. This comes from the 50 or so Facebook groups that The Yum Yum Club belongs to and posts to with each new recipe. This is a constant since late January and the aim is to increase the number that are posted to. One thing to note though is that due to a quirk in the Facebook rules, and myself accidentally posting something twice to the same group, I was blocked from posting to any group for the last week of March. The final week’s traffic number, therefore, could have been higher. I will now post the last week of March’s recipes in April.

ii) The Yum Yum Club Facebook page

In addition to the various Facebook groups that are posted to The Yum Yum Club has also set up its own dedicated Facebook Page. This can be found by clicking here  ▶. Please, click, like and share 😃.

This page means that The Yum Yum Club is seen as a specific food page and not my own personal page. I have extended invites for my own network to like and follow this page. In addition, I have paid Facebook to promote the page. The logic behind this is that if I can get a reasonably large number of followers then they will also automatically see my new recipes as posted and will potentially click, like and share these and thus generate more traffic. Paying to promote and get this following will hopefully be a good investment for the future. At the time of writing The Yum yum Club’s Facebook page has 430 followers. This is in only one week!!

iii) Advertising and promotion

One final action I took was to pay for some actual posts to be promoted with an attempt to drive actual traffic to theyumyumclub.com, and not necessarily drive follows on Facebook. It is this that caused the large increase in traffic from 20th March and, specifically, the Chinese Chicken Thighs post below. This alone had 1,350 post views in the week from 29th March. From a traffic standpoint, this shows a good return but I’ll discuss how this reflects in revenue in the next main section, RPM.

b) Pinterest traffic

Pinterest traffic was steady throughout March and showed a slight upward trend as the month drew to an end.

 

I did try one promotion at the end of the month with Pinterest but I’m not convinced that this has driven much traffic at all. The Pinterest statistics certainly don’t suggest this. However, what I have done is purposely followed a large number of more relevant Pinterest contributors. I have also joined more groups and tribes. This, in the last week of March, increased the number of people following my Pinterest boards from just over 200 in the first 4 months to over 600 now. I’m hoping this will continue and start to drive a lot more traffic through Pinterest. Let’s see through April…

5. RPM

For those of you who read the February Business Report, you will remember the discussion on RPM or Revenue Per 1,000 Impressions. Without repeating what has already been written RPM is a good measure of how effective a website is at generating revenue from advertising. The higher the number the more revenue it is generating per visitor.

For The Yum Yum Club, the month on month RPM is as follows…

This shows growth in the RPM rate, which is good news. However, reading about other Food sites and their RPM I understand that an RPM over $10 or £7.50 should be easily attainable. Increasing the RPM, therefore, is something I need to focus on in April.

Finally, and in relation to RPM and ad revenue, remember what I stated in February. If I wanted to generate £100 per day from The Yum Yum Club from advertising alone then with an RPM of £3.20, as was the February / March run rate, this means I need to get monthly traffic (page views) of over 31k per day. In February The Yum Yum Club averaged 218!  Food for thought eh…

To this end, other revenue streams like affiliates, products to services also need to be considered.

6. Goals for April

I’ve mentioned a couple above but in summary, I feel the following should be focused on through April.

• Keep the Facebook follower numbers increasing. This should drive more traffic.
• Keep the Pinterest follower count increasing for the same reason.
• Focus on ways to increase RPM.
• Produce a plan for other revenue streams.
• Keep regularly posting quality recipes. The target should be at least 4 per week

OK, that’s it for the March 2019 Business Report. It was a busy month and The Yum Yum Club did generate £23.13 in revenue. Let’s see what the month of April brings…

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