A couple of years ago I started a food blog with my mom (www.theyummylife.com). She does all the writing, and I do programming, design, and monetization. I spent a lot of time setting it up originally, but now it only takes a few hours each week of my time. Right now we're making $5000-6000/month after expenses, and I get 40% of that.
My main business (a bootstrapped SaaS startup) generates more than that, but the profits are mostly being reinvested back into the company, so I don't think it qualifies as passive income.
The site looks awesome and appears to have great monetization with links to amazon and ads from the BlogHer network. I recommend you experiment with "Add To Cart" links and buttons instead of "View On Amazon" because the cookie with a link to Amazon only lasts 24 hours and if they come back later and then buy the item you will not receive credit. But if you use the "Add To Cart" button, the cookie lasts 90 days!
It gets added to the cart and it doesn't matter if they checkout then or not, as long as they don't remove it from the cart. If they come back within the next 89 days and end up purchasing it, you will get credit...
No, you don't get credit for additional items between when your item is added and checkout. However, if they come back to Amazon from someone else's affiliate link, and your item was already in the cart, you retain the credit.
Thanks! Yes, she takes all the pictures herself. It's incredibly time consuming, but pictures are such an important part of any food blog that it's definitely worth it.
One of her friends is a professional photographer and gave her some pointers when she first started which helped a lot. Even still, if you look at her older posts, you can tell that the photos weren't nearly as good back then as they are now. Practice makes perfect I guess.
Hey the_bear, I really like The Yummy Life. Just wanted to let you know I added it as a default subscription to the NewsBlur iPad app. This just means that if new users subscribe to the Food category, they'll get TYL. There's only 8 categories, so I'm sure this will net some new readers.
I definitely think the SaaS startup is relevant here. I just used the same title as the last thread, but personally I'd like to hear about any sort of recurring revenue. And as someone who's developing their own SaaS product right now, I need all the motivation I can get from others' success stories.
I don't wish to pressure you about your metrics, but how long did it take you to get your SaaS startup to where it is now? And are you working on it solo?
There's an internal debate right now about whether or not it makes sense to release specific numbers, but if I have my way, there will be a post on HackerNews in the future explaining exactly how much money we're making, and how we got where we are.
For now, here are some things you might find interesting/motivational:
-My brother and I started the company about three years ago. We launched an MVP in January 2010.
-After 6 months we had about 10 paying users (at $10/user/month). After 12 we had 50, after 18 we had 200. Since then things have picked up and we're adding >100 paying users each month now. Both my mom's blog, and the SaaS business took a long time to ramp up, but both had their tipping points after about 1.5 years.
-About a year ago we hired our first employee to help out with customer service and other random things. We plan on adding four more over the next couple of years, two of whom have already started working part-time.
I hope that helps. There's nothing better than seeing thousands of people passionately using a product you created, so stick with it!
This is the exact kind of thing I need to read right now. Thank you.
Over 100 new paying customers per month is incredible in my opinion. Especially for what I would guess is one of the most competitive SaaS markets out there. If I can reach that many total customers on my cheapest plan I will be ecstatic.
If you don't mind me asking, what user acquisition channels have you found most effective for selling to small businesses?
Honestly, we're not doing a great job of user acquisition right now, which is exciting because it means that 100 users/month is just the tip of the iceberg.
When we started we spent ~$3,000/month on AdWords to get our initial customer base. Once we had enough users, we stopped advertising and word of mouth took over. We basically don't do any marketing right now, but that we're going to change that soon.
The blog is entirely custom. Several years ago I made my own blogging software just as a fun side-project, and I decided to use that code as the base for The Yummy Life. It sucks missing out on all the great WordPress plugins, but it's really nice having absolute control over the entire experience. I know you technically have control with WordPress, but it's much harder to edit someone else's code than your own (for me, anyway).
Until recently, Amazon made up almost all of our revenue. Now that we're doing slightly better with advertising, Amazon makes up about 60-70%. We also sell a $1 eBook, but we only sell about one per day, so that revenue isn't significant. This information isn't up-to-date, but you can read a blog post about our monetization: http://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/articles/259/How_I_monetized_...
Visitor information:
-65% new, 35% returning
-1.7 pages per visit
-1.2 million page views last month
-Most traffic comes from Pinterest or direct. We get ~3000 visitors from search each day. My mom (understandably) hates link building, so we don't have many inbound links meaning there's not much referral traffic, and we also have weak SEO relative to other blogs our size.
Wow, that's a really great site. May I suggest working location into your amazon affiliate links. I'm sitting here in the UK looking at the refrigerator oatmeal recipe. If the links had said amazon.co.uk there's a much higher chance I would have bought the ingredients.
What are you doing to generate a profit? Your e-book only sells for $0.99; I imagine you're not selling 6K+ books per month. I imagine the links on the sidebar are some sort of affiliate program, so you probably earn some money there.
Also, I'm curious about the platform your site is built on, the affiliate links are cool because they seem to all be related to the recipe; I'm curious how you handle the organization.
Thanks! Yes, I handle everything except writing the actual content. That includes PPC, SEO, and making it easy for my mom to promote posts via Pinterest and Facebook (Pinterest is responsible for our success by the way).
Most of the revenue comes from the Amazon Affiliate program, but recently we've been making a decent amount off of display ads from the BlogHer ad network. Google AdSense contributes a little bit as well.
As for SEO, I wrote the blogging software from scratch (I don't like Wordpress) so the SEO is entirely under my control. I'm no SEO expert though, so I'm sure there are many things I could be doing better.
My main business (a bootstrapped SaaS startup) generates more than that, but the profits are mostly being reinvested back into the company, so I don't think it qualifies as passive income.