I can’t believe it’s been a year since the first annual report for Served With Rice. I still feel like a beginner at blogging, although the site can no longer be called young! Like last year, I’ll go over my experiences in writing a food blog, going over the revenues and costs, and make some plans for the coming year. If you want to read more about the nuts and bolts of how I run this blog, don’t forget to also check out the behind the scenes tour as well!

A year of consolidation

This year was a hectic one with a lot going on in my personal life. I wasn’t able to get as much new stuff done with the website as I planned, but because I had a routine going I could grind out the posts on schedule. I’m glad that I still get more ideas than I can cook, and cook more than I can post. And I’ve been accumulating a backlog of recipe photos to act as a cushion for if I can’t cook as often.

This year did have several wins. The Radish Cake recipe was the first season specific dish, where I recreated my grandmother’s recipe for this savoury snack for Chinese New Year. It was quite a landmark – up till now, the recipes I post were incidental. I posted what I cooked. But the radish cake was the first time that I planned ahead, and cooked what I wanted to post.

There were several developments in other areas too. I’ve started exploring new post formats, such as sharing my experiences at the two Michelin starred restaurant Sühring in Bangkok. I started trying more recipes outside of my usual chicken and rice routine, like the Date Night series for special occasion meals that give big budget results with relatively little effort.

I also reworked the way my posts were categorised. Read my 100-post commemorative special for the details (these meta-posts are a new thing too, incidentally), but basically I streamlined the categories so the pages look a bit cleaner. There’s also a new Calorie Conscious category, and it’s not a coincidence that it appeared just as I started a fat loss phase for my fitness goals.

Past promises

Let’s look at what I said I would do in last year’s annual report. The hit rate is embarrassingly low, but let’s count the wins.

I did tone down the ads. It wasn’t too hard – just fiddled around with the auto ads settings in Google Adsense. I thought it would decrease my ad revenue, but if anything it might have increased it! Maybe people stay around longer now that the user experience is better, but the difference isn’t obvious when looking at my Analytics. It still doesn’t quite pass the Grandma test though, so definitely still a work in progress in this aspect.

I have a lot of thoughts about the e-book. It’s going to be a huge project, and I might begin with something simpler, like a free one-page cheat sheet of 10 recipes for chicken and rice as a lead magnet to entice people to join the newsletter. It would also give me experience in creating and distributing digital products. I have the recipes in mind already, but I haven’t gotten around to putting it together.

Unfortunately that is the closest of the plans that came to fruition. Running a blog can be such a time sink if you want to get everything right – promoting, paid advertising, doing the SEO right. I can see why some people do this full time, or even get a team of people to manage large and active sites.

Reviewing Performance

Quiet beginnings

February 2023 is when I started consistently getting double digit view counts from search engines. Funny thing is, it was so exhilarating to see when it first happened, but I quickly got used to that and kept wanting to see even better results. The hedonic treadmill in action, I guess. But at this time I still got most of my traffic from direct links from Reddit and Facebook, and I was slowly building up multiple trails of breadcrumbs that bring people to the site.

This was the point when I felt I could tone down the auto ads. Instead of earning less, my ad revenue actually rose up to roughly USD$0.25 a day. You read that right – a quarter a day was an improvement. The site was far from profitable. Which is okay, I am more than happy to run it for fun. I have a cap on how much time and effort I put into it, and SWR gets as big as it can with those constraints.

A lucky break

Sometimes, things change because of external factors completely outside of your control. Just like how the Onsen Tamago post blew up because of a comment I posted on Reddit, I caught a lot of tailwind unexpectedly from the Google March update.

With the views came the ad revenue. Along with another surge in traffic during the Easter weekend, I ended up breaking even for March with about USD$34 in earnings! An exhilarating feeling that words cannot describe. My blog baby just stood up on its own feet!

Things die down in April and May though, and I run a roughly USD$0.4 deficit per day. They pick up again in June, due to traffic and ad revenue from the Zongzi post celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival, and another burst of traffic as July 4th approached.

I ended up closing June with USD$49 in revenue (and about USD$15 in profit), with some days grossing as high as USD$4.25. July and August continued to be barely profitable, which meant that the website ended its second year of operation with a positive balance sheet for 4 of the 12 months. Not bad, for putting in just a several hours a week.

Financials

As the website wraps up its second year of operations, there’s now enough data available to start tracking results in a more longitudinal perspective. Let’s look at the financials and statistics for the first and second years side by side:

	9/2022-8/2023	9/2023-8/2024	Since inception
Posts	60	43	103
Views	16,808	51,572	68,380
Costs (USD$)	122	421	543
Revenue (USD$)	22.7	200.3	223
Profit (USD$)	-99.3	-220.7	-320

As you can see, the views really picked up in the 2023-2024 year, as did the ad revenue. Unfortunately that did not translate into profits, because the hosting and other services got a lot more expensive after the first year (something I discussed in my last annual report).

WordPress.com gets a lot of flak for being big, bulky and not having the best customer services. That’s especially the case if you go to places like r/Blogging on Reddit, where it seems like nobody has anything good to say about WordPress.com.

I’ll be honest and say that if I treated SWR purely as a business, I have every reason to move on to a cheaper service. The overhead is pretty steep right now, especially for such a small site. But the inertia and the routine of publishing is keeping the site chugging along, and WordPress.com is part of that inertia. Because this is a hobby site, I value the familiarity more than the absolute financial cost.

Having said that, if I do have the chance, I would be very interested in cutting costs by getting new providers for my hosting, my SSL and the assorted bits and bobs.

Lessons learned from two years of blogging

The tides and the currents

Views vary a lot. I’ve heard it many times from other online creators, but I needed to experience it myself to believe it. It was also very empowering to see the effects of my efforts to drive traffic to the site come to fruition.

I started doing collaborations and exchanging backlinks with other bloggers in January of 2023. That made some small but noticeable changes to my view counts. I had more views, more traffic coming in from search engines, and more ad revenue.

I also seemed to get a different audience. Before this point, most of my traffic came during the US daytime, but since January most of the views were during the US evening. I don’t know what’s going on, but whatever the reason, I’m happy for the traffic.

From my personal experience, online success boils down to this: pick something you like to do, deliver consistently, and hope for the best. There are so many external factors outside of your control, and all you can do is be prepared for when the spotlight swings your way – for good or for bad.

Death, Taxes and Spam

Oh man, the freaking spam! I knew blogging wasn’t all glitter and glamour, but there was no way I could be prepared for the amount of spam that would clog up the comments and the contact form responses.

Some of them are pretty funny though, and I thought you might like to see them and have a laugh as well. And as I spend a couple minutes a day shifting through the trash, I noticed some themes and patterns emerge. Here are some types of spam comments that the site receives:

Vague flattery

The strategy behind this type of spam isn’t hard to understand. Maybe I’d approve the comment if it makes me feel and look good, in which case the associated spam link will become visible to other visitors. Notice how it’s vaguely worded, so that it can apply to any topic or niche and can be shotgunned everywhere by a bot.

Over the top praise

From the glowing review this viewer gave me, you would have thought that I simultaneously saved their grandma’s life, cured their dog’s cancer, and brought lasting peace to the Middle East. This might have gotten past me, were it not for the odd grammar and spelling.

Remember kids, if someone is saying something that makes you feel great, there’s a good chance they’re trying to butter you up for something.

Negging

This is further into 4-D chess territory than I can comfortably figure out. What’s the strategy behind pointing out a supposed mistake or technical error? Perhaps I’m more likely to act on something if I thought it was negatively affecting the site, but I don’t see how that would improve the spam’s chances of getting greater exposure.

Non sequitur

… come on, now. I know you’re a spammer, but at least have the self respect to put some effort into it.

Going forward

I find it hard to come up with any big, ambitious goals when it comes to where I want to take my blog next. The coming year is going to be basically more of the same: I post what I cook, and I cook what I’ve settled into over the past 10 or so years. This food is what I like, it’s what supports my fitness goals, and it’s what fits into my schedule and lifestyle. I’ll keep trying to post every Thursday, and show you all how I juggle nutrition and busy work weeks in a nutrition-conscious and macro-friendly way.

That’s not to say there won’t be any changes, though. I’m looking forward to bringing home more culinary inspirations from my travels, like learning how to make Bolognese from an actual couple from Bologna. Or, figuring out ways to put my appliances to good use, like with the almost disastrous Pumpkin Soup.

2023-2024 has been a particularly hectic year, and as things ease up I look forward to ramp up my social media engagement. Reddit has brought in a steady trickle of traffic from some very old posts, and I’ve put off developing my presence on Pinterest and Facebook for far too long. I’m also going to try and get more backlinks, which seemed to be one of the things that revved up the search engine traffic.

But like a multi-headed hydra, life spawns new challenges just as I make my way past old ones. For now, I am happy to keep this site chugging along, and whatever extra time and energy I get might be put towards fixing technical issues and finally getting the e-book started.

A Message to Future SWR

Thanks for sticking around until the end! I’m glad I finally get the time to sit down and lay out the year in review. I would have done it in November, but better late than never. Running this site is a lot of fun, but I’m a big boy with big priorities. Maybe I’ll start the e-book, maybe I’ll work out a way to reduce the costs. But mostly, I hope to lock things down and keep the recipes coming for the next year.

This concludes the second annual report for www.servedwithrice.com. I hope you liked this deep dive into the inner workings of this food blog! Join the newsletter if you want to stay updated on further developments, and get the scoop on new recipes. I’d love to see you around here again!

Cheers!

SWR

13/12/2024

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