Behind the Scenes Peak at this food blogger’s income and 2023 goals

If you’re interested in what it takes to be a successful food blogger, then this article is for you! You’ll get an exclusive look at the income of one popular food blogger, and some stats to compare it to. We’ll discuss her strategies for monetizing and how she is planning for the future. You’ll also get some insight into preparing your own content goals for 2023.

“Jane” is a real blogger and runs a successful food blog. She gets over 100,000 pageviews per month. We are going to make her anonymous so we can share the personal details of her income, thus the blogger for this article, is ‘Jane’. Bless her heart.

Since content marketing is one of the main strategies for bloggers, we will use this free downloadable Content Strategy Planner to organize her goals and plans.

I hope you can use Jane’s story to inspire your goals and strategies in 2023.

Goals vs. Strategy

Some background on Jane – she has a food blog, and has been blogging since 2010. Her pageviews, since we started recording in 2012, look like this:

Jane’s goal is to help other home cooks with a variety of recipes that are fun, delicious and ready in 30 minutes or less. To do that, she needs to fund the blog, and let everyone know about her delicious recipes.

Jane was kind enough to share her real income with us. When she started, about a year into blogging, she started with a few adsense ads, which made under $200/mo. She was posting 3x per week. Now, in 2023, she is posting 4x per week and is making around $3500/month from ads. The graphic above shows her traffic over time.

To monetize her blog, she uses Ads and the occasional sponsor/ affiliate.

In order to make more money from ads this year, Jane will have to either increase pageviews or increase ads per page. Since the ads are optimized by the ad provider, we don’t need to worry about that. So Jane’s job in 2023 is to earn more pageviews.

Pageviews for Mature Blogs

Content marketing includes creating content for different publications, social media, guest posts, podcasts and more. Other organic marketing strategies that bloggers use to increase their audiences include

• social media marketing
• email marketing
• giveaways
• guest posting
• Search Engine Optimization
• ‘pods’ (not recommended)

Paid methods to grow a blog:

• paid ads on search engines (adwords)
• paid ads on social media platforms
• influencer marketing
• traditional marketing: radio / tv/ streaming ads

We are going to focus on organic content marketing for Jane. Other strategies that I recommended to Jane are:

• social media marketing (specifically video and Pinterest)
• email marketing to retain & monetize

If you settle on Content Marketing as one of your strategies – this planner is exactly what you need!

Real Bloggers’ Goals for 2023

Planning Your Time Realistically

Content Marketing is an excellent and effective strategy to grow. Jane could grow exponentially if she did all that we provided as ‘ideas’. However, Jane is a real person with real-world commitments, as are you. So here is where we lay out realistic targets for what we can accomplish.

For Jane, we recommend that she reduce the number of new posts per week in order to have time for Pinterest and Affiliate partnerships. Although we are walking through the content marketing strategy and planner, we do recommend that Jane focus on monetizing through a variety of means. Extra traffic is a difficult and slow path forward.

Jane has been blogging for nearly 12 years and is getting pretty darn fast at writing posts. She has her photography set up all done and optimized. Her family knows that she’s not responsible for her actions should anyone touch the dish before its photographed.

In consultation with her family, Jane has chosen to work 20 hours per week. So anything that we add to her plate by way of strategy has to fit within those parameters.

A Doable and Strategic Blog Content Plan

At this point, we know Jane’s goals, we know she has 20 hours per week, and we know she has to maintain her current blog posting schedule. And we know that the following strategies, if planned out properly will help her reach her 10% goals.

Strategies to Use

Current Posting Schedule

1. New & Fabulous Dishes
2. “Best of” Roundups
3. 1 refreshed and deserving oldie
4. Seasonal and Fun New dishes

Plans by Quarter, 2023

Jane’s time is restricted, and so new strategies and tools will be phased in, as time allows. This is the target timeline, adding or testing one thing per quarter.

Content Ideas for Quarter 1 2022

Now we take our goals & tasks from above, and the content themes (1 new, 1 oldie, 1 round up, and 1 seasonal) and lay out our ideas. Here is an example from Jane’s plan to help inspire yours.

• JAN: soups & comfort food, casseroles, leftover, something white & sparkly, also try WordHero, hire someone for keywords
  • wk4 (example):
  • 1 new: snowball themed cookies
  • 1 oldie: ham leftovers
  • 1 round up: favorite casseroles
  • Black Tie Dinner Party to get over the winter slump
• FEB: romantic, pink, red, galentines, chocolate, hearts, also try 1 more tool, review keywords and review how to use them
• MAR: spring look-forward, spring vegetables, using up root vegetables in a new way, decide and purchase AI tool, confirm final keywords.

I hope this gives you an idea of how to pull these things together. And also how easy it is to do after you have your basic homework done: content themes, goals, time commitment, and brand story. If you need a hand, don’t forget to download the 2023 Content Planner & Strategy Guide. And see the extra resources I’ve included below.