The blog is entirely custom. Several years ago I made my own blogging software just as a fun side-project, and I decided to use that code as the base for The Yummy Life. It sucks missing out on all the great WordPress plugins, but it's really nice having absolute control over the entire experience. I know you technically have control with WordPress, but it's much harder to edit someone else's code than your own (for me, anyway).
Until recently, Amazon made up almost all of our revenue. Now that we're doing slightly better with advertising, Amazon makes up about 60-70%. We also sell a $1 eBook, but we only sell about one per day, so that revenue isn't significant. This information isn't up-to-date, but you can read a blog post about our monetization: http://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/articles/259/How_I_monetized_...
Visitor information:
-65% new, 35% returning
-1.7 pages per visit
-1.2 million page views last month
-Most traffic comes from Pinterest or direct. We get ~3000 visitors from search each day. My mom (understandably) hates link building, so we don't have many inbound links meaning there's not much referral traffic, and we also have weak SEO relative to other blogs our size.
I have a few questions:
* Are you building on top of a blog platform, or is this mostly custom? (The BuiltWith page makes this site appear full of tech [1]).
* What % of the revenue comes from Amazon referral links?
* Are there other revenue sources?
* Can you discuss your visitor distribution (first time vs. repeat), and traffic sources?
1: http://builtwith.com/?http%3a%2f%2fwww.theyummylife.com%2fRe...