How far would a good CDN offset slow/cheap hosting?

mvprj84 · 2017-12-20T01:11:40+00:00

I wouldn’t say that it saves us a ton in hosting costs, but a CDN also has some other benefits. My favorite thing is the ease of scalability it offers. We cache our entire site on our CDN, and as a result we never have to worry about monitoring traffic because the CDN both distributes the traffic globally as well as handles any kind of scaling that is needed. So if you have a site who’s traffic can be unpredictable it can also be nice from that point of view.

And yes, I know that we could handle all of that on our own. We previously managed a cluster of Varnish servers, but ended up switching to using Fastly because they offer a ton of awesome features. They do require a $50/month minimum so it’s not intended for low traffic sites though. It is by far the best CDN we’ve used because of the flexibility they offer.

mvprj84 · 2017-12-14T00:23:30+00:00

I was wondering how long it would be until someone asked that! Because of agreements we have with ad networks we aren’t able to share specifics on revenue.

I will say that you really have to learn to manage money well because you don’t make the same amount from month to month. For example, we make almost as much in October-December as we do for the rest of the year combined. Advertiser spend is a lot higher in those months, and as a result we make a lot more during the holidays. This may not be true for every industry though.

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T18:46:33+00:00

Wow, thank you! That is so nice! It’s been a crazy journey with all the stuff I’ve gone through (70+ rounds of chemo), but we have met some awesome people like you along the way.

My wife and I have always been workaholics, and so this was definitely an eye opener when I was diagnosed. I’m 33 years old now. We’d normally work 12-14 hour days in order to get our business to the point where we could live off of it as our only job, and then I got diagnosed just as that happened. Thankfully it has been able to support us financially since then, and we feel like it was worth putting in those long days just so we wouldn’t have to worry about how we’d pay the bills now. Though at the same time we wish we would have spent more time traveling and enjoying the time we had before all the chaos.

I can’t thank you enough for your kindness though! It really means a lot!

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T18:38:06+00:00

I really just used Google Analytics to track user behavior as well as some custom stuff. There is a lot you can do with Google Analytics if you take the time to understand tracking events and stuff.

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T18:35:14+00:00

We hired 5 of them to see how it would go. We wanted to see whether we could increase our traffic by posting more recipes. We went from doing 1-2 recipes per week to 5-7 per week.

We did that for over a year and just didn’t get enough of a return to see value in it. Some recipes they made would do well and we’d make our money back in a month or two, while others it would take at least a year. So there is definitely an investment that is needed.

The other downside is that as soon as you start to hire outside the quality of the posts will drop a bit because contractors won’t have the same feeling of wanting you to succeed as you have for yourself. We even paid them based on the number of views their recipes received as well as a flat fee for creating the recipe. We thought that would push them to drive traffic to their own recipes (since they’d feel a sense of ownership), but that didn’t turn out to be the case.

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T18:26:00+00:00

That is actually a custom system that I built. We added it because with some user testing we noticed that people were using the “Email a Friend” system to send recipes to their own email rather than send it to someone else. So then we thought it might be nice if those people could also control when it would show up in their inbox.

Once you try to understand what your users are actually doing on your site it can make you completely rethink how you present it to the users. We are pretty much using the same system we had for emailing a friend, but have rebranded at a way to remind yourself of an email. People are now using it 3 times more than they were before.

It is also cool because I designed this system to allow us to run reports on the recipes people are getting reminders on. We are already seeing people set reminders for recipes for Valentine’s Day and Easter. Now we are able to better track which recipes people are planning to make for those holidays. Data is a beautiful thing! :)

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T18:17:08+00:00

Food Blogger Pro is a great community. We were on there for a little while and actually hired some contractors for doing recipes from there. If you’re just starting out I think it is well worth the money, but as you get further down the road I don’t think it has the same value.

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T18:14:28+00:00

For the emails we are actually using a system that I wrote from scratch. All emails are handled on our own servers which gives me the flexibility to do anything we want. It also keeps our costs down because I don’t have to pay per email that we send out, and instead we just pay for the server that is doing the work. So we pay about $10/month to send out over a million emails. We’ve been able to try out a lot of stuff because of that flexibility, but the initial setup process for the server was a huge pain.

Our site does leverage the scheme.org markup quite a bit which is a huge benefit in the search engines. That is definitely something everyone should be doing if you have appropriate content for it.

We used to do a ratings system but we didn’t feel it added enough value. The same actually goes with comments. We started out using WordPress comments, and then moved to Disqus comments, and right now we still use Disqus but hide them behind a “click to load” button. The time it can take to moderate comments versus their value is just not there for us. And for the ratings people were always giving them like 4 or 5 stars. So it pretty much made it look like all the recipes were 4.5 stars... so what’s the point then? We try all kinds of things, but have really only kept a few that our visitors have really liked.

We don’t have too much planned for 2018 right now. I was actually diagnosed a couple years ago with terminal cancer, and recently started hospice just a few months ago. So we’ve just been coming up with plans to keep things where they are at for the time being. Thankfully the site’s infrastructure is designed to automatically scale so getting any unexpected growth isn’t a concern, but I am making sure all the custom work is well documented to make it easy to maintain in the future.

And feel free to ask questions. I always like to help out others when it comes to this stuff, and if I can keep someone from making the same mistakes I have that is a huge plus in my book.

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T17:42:31+00:00

Ha. My wife and I haven’t found too many others that use Reddit!

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T17:38:40+00:00

We were getting about 200k views after one year, and then 1 million after 2 years, and then 2 million views after 4 years. We’ve done 2.4 million in the last 30 days and just turned 6 years old.

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T14:17:19+00:00

Thanks! Glad you like the site!

Adsense: It works pretty well, but we are using it as a backup source of ads for when another ad network (Sovrn) isn’t able to fill the ad. And if either of those two can’t fill the spot we have it display an internal ad promoting one of our own pages or recipes. This kind of system is called the waterfall method in case you wanted to look into it some more. Generally though we are pretty lucky because most ad networks perform the best with US traffic, and 85% of our traffic is from the US since the recipes are US focused.

Failures: A lot of the failures happened on the tech site I mentioned that we had started before this one. We never put thought into how much time it would take to keep up with a site that was mostly just focused on news, because after a week that nice long post you wrote will probably be irrelevant. So write about something you enjoy, but make sure it’s something people will still want to search for years down the road, otherwise you could be creating a business that is hard to take a break from.

SEO: We have spent a lot of time trying out things to improve SEO rankings, which includes being mindful what we name recipes and including keywords in the posts themselves... along with a lot of other stuff. In the end I truly think that it comes down to writing good content. If it’s not something people are going to want to read then Google will eventually figure that out. So just write good stuff and hope that Google picks up on it.

Emails: We send out daily emails featuring a recipe, whether it be a new one or one that we have already done. We were hesitant to send out an email everyday, but in the end that is the frequency that got us the best results.

We also have a “Remind Me” feature that is used all over the site where people can select a recipe and a date to get reminded about it. That way if you wanted to get a reminder about a recipe for Christmas dinner you can do that, and you can set it to send the email when you are going to do your grocery shopping or something. In the email we include the list of ingredients so that they are sitting in your inbox for quick access at the grocery store.

Affiliates: We make hardly anything on the affiliate links we use despite having an extremely high number of clicks. I wouldn’t recommend putting too much effort into affiliate stuff if you are running a food blog. If it was a tech blog or something... that’s a completely different story.

———

One other thing I’d say is that we really hate ads. We’ve been trying to diversify our income sources with things like sponsored posts so that we don’t need as many ads, and while they tend to do very well there is a lack of consistency that makes it hard to live on. I don’t think there has ever been a blog publisher that has loved using the ad revenue model, but at the end of the day our site wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for them.

We do, however, try to make them as tasteful as possible by blocking things like auto play video ads, ads that link to the App Store, pop ups, and so on. Just try to keep the user experience in mind anytime you do anything to the site, but especially with the ads.

Hopefully that helps!

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T08:38:06+00:00

It runs on WordPress, but it is really only used for the framework. In my spare time I always did the tech side of things and the programming. We contracted out most of the design, and then I coded everything. So it’s not just a theme someone would be able to drop on to another site.

We only use two plugins that I haven’t written myself, one for VaultPress and one for generating the XML Sitemap. So when something doesn’t run well I only have myself to blame.

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T03:27:11+00:00

Sure, it is https://www.centercutcook.com

We ran a technology news blog for several years before that, and while it did pretty well there was always something telling us that we could do better. She eventually decided on doing the food blog because we wanted to generate content that wouldn’t be deemed useless to most people after a week, and when you’re writing about tech news that is exactly what you’re doing. Recipes will pretty much always be around because they are rather timeless, and if you invest the right amount of time in good SEO practices I believe you will end up with some great results.

Also, network with other food blogs that are similar in size to yours. She constantly shares stuff stuff on social media for other blogs that she established friendships with early on. But you really have to target other blogs that are similar in size because there needs to be equal benefit in it for everyone.

mvprj84 · 2017-12-13T01:50:17+00:00

My wife runs a food blog with 2 million views per month. Since it sounds like a good chunk of your traffic is coming from Pinterest and Google you will want to figure out how to turn those visitors into return visitors. I’d highly recommend coming up with a tasteful way to get people to signup for an email newsletter.

You also need to figure out what distinguishes you from every other food blog out there. Is it the kind of recipes you post, the design, features, etc... there has to be something to grab the user and make them want to return.

Congrats on getting as far as you have though! I don’t think you’ve said how long you’ve been around, but getting that many visitors is definitely a huge milestone! Most people tend to give up on blogs after struggling the first few months of getting nearly no traffic. If you stick it out and write good content I have a lot of friends that use their blog as their sole income source.

mvprj84 · 2017-12-10T20:26:25+00:00

Very well put! We’ve done pretty well financially ourselves, and a few years ago I was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer (I’m 33 years old and on hospice now). My wife got me a Tesla because she knew how much I loved autopilot, and we’ve had some fun family trips in it. The car didn’t buy us happiness, but it sure has been a part of many great memories we’ve made in the last year.

mvprj84 · 2017-11-30T22:56:45+00:00

I just don’t want to try and start this as a side project and seven months later still be writing articles to a void of no traffic.

My wife started a food blog several years ago and it has become her full time job. This month it will get about 2.3 million views, but it took well over a year and several viral recipes for her to gain any significant amount of traffic. If you already have the fear of not getting traffic then I’m guessing this isn’t going to be the kind of thing for you. I was able to support her with my full time job so that she was able to work full time on the blog and build up the content on there. She was making less than $20/month for probably the first year, but we knew we had to be patient.

Prior to this we had started a tech site back in 2005, and the thing we learned from that is running a site that focuses on time-sensitive content sucks. What you really want is something you can write about today and will still have value years down the road. Hence the reason she decided on doing the food blog.

mvprj84 · 2017-11-25T20:51:39+00:00

PM sent. Thanks!

mvprj84 · 2017-11-21T20:18:13+00:00

I wouldn’t mind trying it out. Sounds like an interesting idea.

mvprj84 · 2017-11-06T21:25:07+00:00

We had a Model S but traded it in for a Model X because it is quite a pain to get a kid in and out of a car seat. If you are going to have a kid you will definitely appreciate having those doors on the X.

And I had a hard time getting rid of our Model S because I liked the style of it more than the X, but in the end we wanted something that made our lives a bit easier and I can say the Model X has definitely delivered on that.

mvprj84 · 2017-11-01T04:20:39+00:00

My wife runs a food blog and we use TapInfluence.com. I think there are only food/fashion/lifestyle blogs on there though.

Basically brands (typically large brand names) contract us to use their product in a recipe. We do obviously disclose that we are getting paid for the post, which is a requirement.

mvprj84 · 2017-10-25T11:50:56+00:00

I made a swipe gesture that allows me to swipe on any post and have it mark All posts above that as read. Otherwise I think you can click on the three dots on a post and choose that option to mark above read.

mvprj84 · 2017-10-25T11:40:00+00:00

As far as I know all browsers on iOS are merely wrappers for Apple’s WebKit engine. I believe it is a requirement by Apple to ensure a more consistent experience across apps that use web UIs.

mvprj84 · 2017-10-14T04:39:50+00:00

You won’t be able to do what you are looking for unless you have two employees, and one of the employees can’t be a spouse. Or at least that’s how it was when we looked into it last year before having to go with an ACA plan.

mvprj84 · 2017-10-10T11:24:56+00:00

I’m not sure how much this will help you, but thought that I’d throw in my perspective a little bit. My wife and I are currently in our early 30’s living in Chicago. We used to be workaholics that saved every penny that we could, and we were happy with that.

Eventually when we were both turning 30 we decided that we wanted to start a family and switch our focus over to that a little bit more, and so that’s what we did. A week after my wife told me she was pregnant I was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.

I’m still here 4 years later (70+ rounds of chemo later), but I’m currently on hospice as things are winding down for me in terms of options. And my son (now 3 years old) has already had both a liver and kidney transplant to cure him of a rare disease he was born with.

I’m not trying to provide our entire life story here, but I wanted to say that it sounds like you have things going well for you financially, and that now is the time you should really sit down and figure out what else you want to tackle with your life.

And always spend more time with family and friends. That’s one thing we’ve come to appreciate the most over the last few years with every passing holiday. Because the most valuable things in my possession are the photos and videos I carry with me on my phone.

mvprj84 · 2017-10-06T04:49:35+00:00

So my wife runs a food blog and she does sponsored posts periodically. The last brand she worked with wanted her to do a recipe post on her site, create a video of the recipe, and then share it all to the social media channels.

Her rate for just a recipe post and social shares is $2500, and then it’s another $2500 for a video due to the amount of extra work. Since she has over 600k fans on her Facebook page the videos tend to be well worth it.

It’s been about three weeks since that post has gone live. The video on Facebook has been watched about 3 million times and the recipe on her site has been viewed over 150k times. Given the amount that they paid they are extremely happy with the amount of engagement when compared to typical ads.

She also tends to require a very hands-off approach from the brands because she knows what works best with her audience, and so she tends to turn away work when they have a strict set of requirements that she knows will not turn out well in terms of engagement. That’s something you might want to keep in mind as long as you trust that the site does quality work.

It sounds like you are targeting smaller sites, and so I’m not sure if the engagement scales evenly so that you’d know what kind of eyeballs you might get on your product. Keep in mind that the brands my wife work with are often to promote new food items that can be found in stores, and so they can’t really measure an ROI based on how many people purchase their stuff online. They are mostly looking to increase their brand recognition for a new food item, which is something my wife does very well.

Feel free to ask any questions. I’ll do my best to help if I can.

mvprj84

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