It’s October 20th, and I’m just now publishing my September income report. Ahh! As of September 1st, I was using a personal laptop, over 4 years old, for all matters of creating content and managing this website. In early September, that laptop’s hard drive died. I spent a couple of weeks assembling and setting up a desktop computer in my spare time, and figuring out how to recover my dead laptop’s files without spending a fortune. Luckily, I was able to do this (using an Ubuntu boot CD, if anyone was curious). Not so luckily, I missed out on a solid ~3 weeks of working on anything blog-related. I discuss this more below.
This month the needle moved slightly forward to make September my most profitable month ever (by a very slim margin). If not for some cost associated with the computer problems, the margin would have been much more, since I earned by far my highest-to-date profit. You can check out the income and expenses breakdown below.
A look back at September
I published 4 new recipes in September:
Baked Falafel Salad – a no-frills basic falafel recipe that I’m pretty happy with but that hasn’t gained much traction. I think I knew going in that I was not going to rank for falafel searches or have this recipe go viral but I decided it was a good idea to have a ‘falafel 101’ recipe on my site, since some readers will check here first if they’re looking for one.
One Pot Ratatouille Rice – A nice late summer/fall-themed one pot meal which readers have been making and enjoying.
Kung Pao Chickpeas – Not the huge hit I was hoping for, but pretty popular.
Almond Ricotta – A nice basic recipe that I can now use within other recipes like pizza, lasagna, etc.
Income
AdThrive – $1,269.00
Amazon Affiliates – $62.40
Sponsored content – $175.00
Total Income: $1,506.40
Expenses
Chromebook – $179.14
Market research – $29.00
Total expenses: $208.14
Observations
Did this whole incident figure into my September income? Eh, yes and no. (Thankfully it occurred when I had already gone live with September’s sponsored content, since that was a firm deadline.) That’s the beauty of passive income: whether I’m sitting here typing away at a new blog post, or out going for a walk because I have no functioning computer, folks are continuing to visit already-existing content on the website and I am continuing to earn advertisement revenue.
A couple of points, though: (1) I did cave and buy a Chromebook, since having a laptop is pretty essential for working on recipes – I take lots of notes during the cooking and testing process. I already had most of the components of the desktop computer gathering dust in my closet, so there was no question that was going to be my replacement computer, but I still needed something portable to support the above need, and to take with me when I travel so that I can check in on the site and address any critical issues.
(2) I can’t possibly tell you the downstream effects right now. If I had finalized and published 6 seasonal late summer/autumn recipes, instead of 3 (I’m counting the almond ricotta as a fill-in recipe, just in terms of seasonality), then I would have had 2x the chance of one of them going viral or just becoming fairly popular. You can’t be lucky if you don’t even show up.
So, I’m a little frustrated with the whole thing. Historically September tends to be a great month for creating some new hit recipes, and I feel like I missed out a little bit. If this was my full-time job, I would have scrambled a LOT harder to get back in the swing of things. But while my desk sat there computer-less and unused, the rest of my life went on. I had to go to work, feed myself, exercise, and do all of those other things that humans do. I’m blessed with a great life; I’m grateful that my biggest “problem” last month was not creating much new content for my website that I run on the side.
I'm Shannon, the writer and photographer of Yup, it's Vegan! I'm a morning person based in Baltimore, USA. My mission is to create healthy plant-based recipes that anyone would enjoy, using seasonal produce with inspiration from global flavors.
