Welcome to our October 2016 Traffic & Income Analysis of Tasteaholics.com! This is a monthly record of our blogging and marketing experiences for us to review and learn from. It’s a way to keep track of what we tested, learned, and how we’re faring in the world of blogging. We hope it can help you as much as it helps us!
Now, let’s get to the good stuff:
Income Total: $5994.47
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Traffic Overview
October vs. September (respectively)
Traffic by Top 10 Sources
Updates and Changes
New Theme!
Alright, so it doesn’t look so new. The design change was actually secondary in our decision to migrate to a new theme. The problem was our old theme (Unicon) was getting a bit… clunky and heavy and we needed something to move a bit quicker and have more capabilities.
The new theme is called the Avada theme and it comes with tons of features built in (removing the need for many plugins) and it’s also optimized for speed by its developers (something our old theme wasn’t optimized for). It’s a much more popular theme and has a big team of developers. They even built their own WYSIWYG Visual Composer-styled editor called Fusion Builder. It’s a super sleek and solid visual editor that’s much more responsive than JS Composer.
That said, we try to use any Composer as rarely as possible. When migrating, any pages that use a composer are broken due to broken shortcodes. This makes any migration a MASSIVE headache as you have to manually edit each and every post you’ve ever used Visual Composer or Fusion Builder with. Just keep that in mind for future yourself.
All in all, we’re happy with the theme and have seen some speed and functionality improvements throughout the site.
14-Day Keto Meal Plan
A much-needed upgrade to our 3-Day Keto Meal Plan! We’ve had the 3DKMP since November of 2015 and offered it free to visitors to increase subscriptions. The newsletter popup had a conversion rate of about 2%. This was the best we get the conversion rate to after testing about 10 different styles and variations over the months.
After creating the 14-Day Meal Plan, we created a shareable landing page for it in the same style as our TryLowCarb In Five landing pages (since those seem to be converting quite well). With a bit of Pinterest and Facebook sharing, the page is a success! It brings about 50 subscribers a day on its own now.
For the popup, we decided to make a new, simpler one which just advertised that the subscriber would get the 14-DKMP and an Ultimate Guide to Keto ebook. The conversion rate dropped to about 1.5%. After a few weeks, we brought back our 3DKMP popup with the 2% conversion rate and slightly modified it to fit the new 14-Day Keto Meal Plan – colors and info in the bullet points – and the conversion rate skyrocketed to a whopping 3.5%!
Abandoned Cart Recovery
I mentioned in the previous income report, that we were trying a service called GhostMonitor, a cart abandoner recovery service. So far so good! We’ve recovered about $90 in 2 months. The cost is only $10 a month so it’s definitely profitable. We haven’t optimized the emails with a coupon to increase conversion rates yet but we will try this in the new year to see how it affects sales.
Pinterest Traffic Growth
As we continue to grow, one of our main priorities is to increase Pinterest traffic. We’re a food blog so it’s only natural! Our Pinterest followers are starting to grow much faster than before. We’re over 23k now!
Tailwind is continuing to prove its worth and we’re really happy to have found it a few months ago.
If you haven’t used it yet, the features include:
- Schedule pins for times optimized by Tailwind based on audience engagement, virality, traffic and more.
- Schedule multiple pins at once.
- Schedule repins directly from Pinterest.
- Track repins, likes, comments, traffic and revenue on scheduled pins over time.
- Track growth in followers, boards, repins and likes.
It a great arsenal of features and is relatively inexpensive compared to other tools we’ve seen and tried. You can get a free trial to start off before putting down any money.
If you haven’t yet, give Tailwind a try!
Our “In Five” Affiliate Program
We have a partner’s program for TryLowCarb.com in which 60% of every sale is yours!
If you’re interested in working with us and promoting our Breakfast in Five and Dinner in Five ecookbooks (and other future cookbooks in the works now!), check out our Partners Page for more info.
If you have any questions about the program, check out the FAQ or contact us. We would love to work with you!
Conclusion
We spent a lot of time on our offline content (the 14-Day Keto Meal Plan and Ultimate Guide to Keto ebooks bundle for subscribers) but this was a critical piece we needed before the New Year to increase our conversion rates and total newsletter subscribers. We want to be sure we’re providing the most valuable content for users, new and old, to keto and this is one of the ways we believe is most important. Providing our users with super valuable, FREE content is one of the cornerstones (Westworld anyone?) of our blog.
Within the ebooks, we added some offers to drive more sales and affiliate referrals and due to the higher subscription rate, our sales have increased. The bigger and better free offer for subscribing is a win-win for our visitors and us as well!
Do you have eBooks or products/services that you provide for free? How do you market them to your visitors? Do you feel you can be doing better or be collecting more subscribers than you are now? Be sure to comment below and let us know!