Building Traffic and Growing Your Audience Articles

How we increased our blog’s monthly income by over $1,500 without increasing traffic

Bjork
by Bjork on Mar 12, 2014 in ,

Traffic represents tangible numbers that allow you to easily see how your blog is performing, but it’s only half the battle when it comes to monetizing your blog.

Yes, you need to be smart about ways to increase traffic to your blog. You also need to be smart about ways to increase your effectiveness at monetizing the traffic that is already coming to your blog.

The good news is that this doesn’t require you to squeeze every last penny from your blog readers by showing more ads or pitching more products. Quite the opposite, actually. You want to be squeezing every last penny from the advertisers and affiliates you work with so you don’t have to show more ads and pitch more products to your readers.

In this post I’m going to share an example of a change we made with Pinch of Yum to increase our monthly income by over $1,500. I'll also share how this information impacted the way we structure payments for Food Blogger Pro affiliate program.

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Don’t Track Yourself: How to Block Yourself from Google Analytics

Bjork
by Bjork on Feb 12, 2014 in

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Google Analytics is an awesome tool for bloggers. Here are three reasons why:

  1. It’s free.
  2. It’s packed with a ton of useful information.
  3. It’s fun to look at (especially if you ♥ data).

Here’s the thing though: Google Analytics isn’t so awesome if the data it provides is inaccurate. If your Google Analytics data is inaccurate it’s usually because (1) something is off with the tracking code, as FBP member Rachel recently shared on the community forum, or because (2) you haven’t taken measures to make sure that you’re not tracking yourself.

We’re going to talk about that second issue in today’s blog post.

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A Huge SEO Tip That Most Food Bloggers Miss

Bjork
by Bjork on Feb 5, 2014 in ,

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important concept to understand as you grow your food blog. Many people understand the basic concept of SEO and are applying those basic ideas to their blog, so the challenge for bloggers is finding tips and tricks that are specific to their niche that other people aren't already doing. These niche specific SEO tips are what help give one blog an edge over another blog when it comes to ranking high in search engines.

Today I'd like to share one of those niche specific, high impact SEO tips with you. The content that I'm writing about today will be specific to food blogs, but the general process could be used by other types of blogs.

The screenshot below shows the point where we started using this SEO tip with Pinch of Yum (August 15th, 2013) and the growth of organic search traffic that has happened since that date.

The direct effect from one SEO change is hard to track, but I’m confident that the tip I’ll share today will positively impact the overall SEO of your food blog.

Before I share the tip I want to talk about a general business concept. In order to do so we’ll need to reflect back to the music scene in the year 2000.

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