May 2019 Business Report

Hi everybody! Welcome to the May 2019 Business Report. I’ll follow a similar format to normal by running through the financials and the traffic first. I’ll then finish with my thoughts on key tasks for June. First of all though, what about May overall.

Well, My has been another growing month. Traffic is up, revenue is up and expenses are flattish. Still not profit but 2 key milestones have been reached in that revenue is over £100 and we had our first over 1,000 traffic day. More on that in later.

1. The Financials

As usual, I won’t be retiring quite yet but total revenue for Match 2019 was £106.20. This beat the previous best month of April March’s £49.28 by £56.79 or 115%!! No bad right? This progress looks even better when viewed graphically…

As with last month, and just for fun, I took the original early stages growth rate and knocked it down to 50% and projected a potential growth path. I’ve continued this and kept the original profile as a baseline but also plot actual revenue growth.… for a little interest and fun…

 

For those of you who read the April Report, you will know that the initial Financial target for The Yum Yum Club was £100 per day or £3,000 per month. Still a long way to go but from acorns…

Regarding the income and expenditure breakdown for May 2019?

Income

• Google Adsense – £2.42
• Media.net – $0.13 (£0.10)
• Ezoic – $135.72 (£104.18)
• Affiliate Programs $0.00
• Amazon £0.00
• TOTAL £106.07

Expenditure

• Ingredients – £154.35
• Advertising – £397.67
• TOTAL – £553.02

Putting this all together you’ll remember that at the end of April the cumulative loss since the start of the project was £3,790.47. With the net loss of £446.95, this means the accumulated loss to the end of May is £4,237.42

As mentioned lasted month, this loss is increasing in value. However, I do feel that most of the equipment and subscription required to operate for the rest of the financial year, and beyond 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. May overall traffic

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

 

 

It was shown in the April Report that total users were 8,926 with 10,282 sessions and page view of 12,813. May shows a substantial increase in traffic Against April. For the number of sessions, which is a key measure, this is a 102% increase!

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

3. May traffic sources

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

As can be seen Social as a source is 76% of the total traffic which is similar to the 71% of April. This makes sense as Facebook has been focused on throughout May. Referrals are down from 8% to 4%. This is explained below. Further, Direct and Organic continue to grow in real numbers. This is a good trend.

Note the 1,000 plus day on 28th May!!

We’ll now look at each of these sources individually.

4. May Social Traffic

From the Social traffic source, it is clear that Facebook is the key contributor with Pinterest a reasonable 2nd. Note that Instagram Stories is related to Facebook so these 2 numbers can be added together.

 

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 May.

 

You’ll remember from the March Report that from late March Facebook had been focused on. Specifically in 3 areas.

i) Facebook groups

In March I joined around 40 or so Facebook recipe sharing groups where I can post new and old recipes and also repeat post after a reasonable period of time. These generate good traffic and also allow me to gain followers to my own Facebook Page, which, in itself, add to traffic too. At the time of writing, I am now a member of 88 Facebook Groups and aim to continue to grow this. Note, these are all free sources of traffic.

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 promoted the page. The aim is to have my own followers who will see, and click on, my food posts as and when posted. At the beginning of April, The Yum Yum Club’s Facebook page had 430 followers. At the end of April, it had over 1,000 and at the time of writing, it’s 1,884.

iii) Advertising and promotion

This is where all of the advertising money is spent. In April I mixed the expenditure with money spent driving clicks to The Yum Yum Club website and some to getting members to The Yum Yum Club Facebook page. In May it was spent on getting click to the website. I budgeted £10 a day split by £1 per day on 10 posts. I did spend a little more than this and had an overlap at the end of May with the June advertising set up. This is what drove the 1,000 plus on 29th May.

The bottom line here is that, at present, the advertising spend does not drive enough traffic to cover the costs. Facebook advertising is more focused on selling products which have higher revenue, and this cost coverage. However, at this early stage of The Yum Yum Club, this advertising does get the name out and I have some very engaged followers. Once other, free traffic, increases I may well reduce this expenditure.

One of the other things that helped with my Facebook traffic towards the end of May is that I added a translation function to the site. Facebook automatically translates its advertisements to the local language but when an individual in, say Brazil, clicks the link, they see the post in it’s native English. This causes high bounce and lost revenue. With the added translation app this should reduce this and increase traffic all around.

b) Pinterest traffic

Pinterest traffic in May is pretty flat…

This is frustrating because Pinterest should be a great source of traffic.

I spent quite a lot of time in May focusing on a dropshipping project and little on focusing on Pinterest. This will change in May. Other sources of traffic are increasing but Pinterest is a key part of my traffic strategy so this needs to be fixed. Watch this space…

5. Direct traffic

The direct traffic to The Yum Yum Club has slowly increased throughout the past few months.

 

The growth since January has been steady and mirrors the growth in the general traffic and the relatively stable % of total users who are returning users. This shows good health for the site and just needs to be continually tracked.

6. Organic traffic

Organic traffic is key to longer-term growth as it reflects how search engines, and particularly Google, see the site. If The Yum Yum Club is getting an increasing volume of users from search engines then it’s content is seen as good and of a sufficient quality to be liked by the big companies.

 

It’s clear from this January through May view that organic traffic is growing. I put this down to a solid focus on keywords. I make sure that all posts have a listed keyword that is relatively low in Google search. Ideally around 100k but certainly below 1m.

Organic traffic will continue to be monitored closely.

7. Ezoic

I mentioned Ezoic last month and highly recommend new and seasoned bloggers exploring their capabilities. My advertising revenue, especially with the low levels of traffic I still have, has been optimized well by Ezoic and I am earning over double what I would be earning if manually managing Google Adsense.

I aim to write a full and more detailed article on Ezoic in due course and will highlight it here when complete.

8. Next steps

May was a busy month. I’ve set up a dropshipping site (unsuccessfully at present) at the same time as managing The Yum Yum Club. I need to focus more on this but have to get Pinterest fixed first. I also need to get more recipe posts made. May saw only 12 new recipes, and, in truth, a couple of these were variations of the same. This is not enough and June must see at least 20. In addition, key activities are as follows:

• Pinterest needs to improve. I can’t say anything else about this as I don’t know why it’s not.
• I need to maximize the Facebook ads and make sure it is money well spent.
• Keep monitoring Ezoic and hopefully see continued growth in EPMV.
• Consider affiliates. Revenue is still advertisement based. This needs to change.

I hope you found this May Business Report useful. If you have questions or comments I’d love to hear them. You can also read the trials and tribulations of The Yum Yum Club’s first 6 months by clicking here… ▶. Otherwise, keep trying the recipes and the June report will be out early July.

Regards,

Steve.