You need to start somewhere.

Hey guys! Welcome to my first website income report! If you do not know, this was our first month up and running. You might think to yourself “This website is about food, not making money” right? Yes, and no. By day, I am a software engineer. By night, I like to cook. I find it very useful to see “behind the scenes” at just about anything. Especially web and tech stuff. So I want to give you all some insight into what is involved into running one of these websites. Not only that – understanding your audience, building your audience and giving them more of what they are looking for.

That being said, lets break down our expenses and income also dipping into some traffic and Facebook stats for the month of January.

As you might have guessed, the first month, was well, a loss financially. I had to do quite a few things to get up an running.

Expenses

  • $212.00 – Purchase my hosting plan – 36 months, one time charge.
  • $4.99 – Domain name – arepasdelgringo.com
  • $60.00 – Ingredients for various arepas
  • $100.00 – Facebook ads
  • NEGATIVE: $376.00

Income

  • $0.38 – Google Adsense revenue
  • POSITIVE: $0.38

As you can see from this website income report, not surprising. I need two things. A large engaging audience and great original content. Without either of those things, or just one, things will not succeed.

Right now, in the first few months. I am not focused on monetization. I am completely focused on rich original content, to build an audience. Once I have gained those things, I will shift into monetization. The first 2 weeks of January, were essentially building ArepasDelGringo.com and scrambling to make arepas, photograph them and post at least the barebones on the website.

What I am doing retro actively is going back in and flushing out the content, working on my targeted keywords and make it rich for the user.

Once I had enough content not to disappoint a user, I pasted a link to it on the official ArepasDelGringo Facebook page.

It was important for me to get content out as soon as possible. The longer I wait, the longer I am not building an audience and thus not making any money off of it. The minute I posted, I started getting engagement. It was fantastic!

Comments, likes, shares and more. I knew I was on to something. It drove me to make more content and get going as fast as humanly possible being a team of only one.

My audience is demanding. I have hit the 18-34 market with eager Spanish speaking individuals looking for Spanish versions of my content. Hmm, thats a problem. I need to please them by translating all my content, how to’s guides and recipes. But my plan is to do this over time. I knew this would happen, and I don’t want to lose them as a fan, so i need to work and work fast.

Let’s jump away from that a bit and talk about my engagement on Facebook for a second. I had no Idea what to expect this first month. I have created Facebook pages many times for various personal projects an nothing stuck. This is the first time where I have hit my audience and they have been responding.

Top of the line: Users are engaged. In a language I do not fully know. So many Facebook comments and threads on photos I have posted. I need to ask my Colombian wife, what does this mean? Is it good? bad? Either way, I welcome it all. That being said, i’m also taking Spanish classes on Tuesday nights because yeah. But that is another story.

On to the website income report stats.

Growth and Facebook Insights For January 2015

  • 10k Facebook Followers (WOW!)
  • 14k Unique Facebook users engaged (SUPER WOW)
  • 28k Facebook User Engagement (WOW!)
  • 2k Google analytics unique visitors to arepasdelgringo.com (MEH, but I wasn’t focusing on that)

Right now it’s building my audience, creating super amazing content, … ??? … profit. Actually, those questions marks are not just question marks. I have a plan and I will fill you in – in a later post.

So overall, there were some expected expenses, income was down, because I was not focusing on it this month. Engagement is up and so is my audience (because I had nothing to compare it to in a previous month).

This post format will grow slightly once I get more data from ArepasDelGringo and play around with layout on my site from audience behavior – i’ll keep you posted.

If you have any questions with this website income report, thoughts or insights into my post, please open up a discussion int he comment box! Come back next month for the next website income report.