Monthly Review: January 2017

Welcome to my first monthly blog review of Looks Good Lets Eat.

After seeing some fantastic food blogs around, they all have a common theme once they are content and established. Am I content? Of course. Am I established? A little but not as much as I would like. That theme is a blog review or income report.

I am not quite at the stage of producing an income report, mainly because I make nothing from my blog.

So why start a monthly blog review now you ask? Well if to be honest with you and myself it is to enable the evaluation of my blog and to maintain focus. The blog is two years old in February 2017…I know how time flies.

January brought with it a fresh start. You may remember at the end of 2016 I had taken a little time away from the blog because my job and my degree had taken its toll and made keeping up with working on the blog tough. I am back now and hoping to keep a little routine in place to enable better planning of recipe building and blogging in general.

With each of the upcoming monthly reviews, I will hopefully concentrate on a few areas.  These are, but not exclusive to;

• Monthly recipe reviews;
• Blog stats and figures;
• What recipes to expect in the coming month and;
• Any extra work I aim to achieve.

I hope that by focusing on these areas this will enable me to plan my blog, but more importantly give you the reader an idea of how I manage my blog and have something to look forward to reading.

Where better to start than with this month’s recipes.

I only uploaded two recipes this month but how lovely they were; homely, simple and a winner for all the family.

Italian Chicken Tray Bake

Ultimate Toad in the Hole

Januarys Stats and Analysis

This is a concept that I am putting into practice to hopefully show how my blog grows (fingers crossed) and allow me to concentrate on keeping a routine. As I move forward and create more reports, I will able to bring in some relative comparisons which will also help with making better posts and recipes to allow better engagement to you the readers.

Below is my first set of stats and shows my page views for the whole month of January.

Below is a comparison against the previous month. For me, my main achievement is that I had seen an increase of 47% page views and 59% sessions. I would put this down to getting back to the blog and posting recipes and using social media more. This is good news, and I hope to maintain the climb and bring in more visitors and hopefully more fans of our family food for your table.

February’s goals

Well for February I am hoping to work on several items. I think I may have bitten off more than I can handle but it is one way of keeping me in touch with maintaining my blog and keeping the standard high. Below is a short list of my goals for February 2017.

• Review all of my photos and delete those I deem unnecessary.
• Learn how to take better photos with my DSLR camera.
• Update some areas of my blog to make it that little bit more professional.
• Work on managing social media, mainly Pinterest.

So there we go, I did it, my first monthly blog review.

Please leave any feedback and tips below as all is welcome along with my learning journey of bringing our family food for your table.

Thanks for reading

Alan Brewer.