December 2014 – Monthly Income Report

Hello everyone and welcome to my December monthly income report. I want to take a second to thank all of you who have commented to me on previous income reports about how interesting these reports are and an extra thank you to those who have given me words of encouragement on my journey to creating an online business.

This month has been a good one.  I managed to completely erase my entire blog…yea thank god for backing up my website, I finished up the content for the free Internet marketing course redesign, and I was able to get another writer for my 90% outsourced niche website.

If this is your first time on my website, let me explain why I write a detailed income report each month that outlines the money I made (or lost) and the time I spent working each month.

I’m doing this for a number of reasons:

1) I strive to be transparent about what it takes to make money online. Unfortunately the “make money online” industry is full of scammers that make ridiculous promises like “Work 10 minutes and make $5,000!” The reality couldn’t be further from the truth, this online business gig is a lot of hard work and these reports show you how much time I put into my business and how much income I make from that effort.

2) These reports help me keep track of my own progress. By creating these reports every month, I’m able to see where I’m spending money and how much time I’m spending doing various tasks.

3) These reports hold me accountable. Each month I list goals I have for the following month and my hope is that my audience will hold me accountable.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s dive into the report.

How much time did I work this month?

Even with the holidays, I was able to log about 31 hours of work this month. It isn’t the most that I’ve ever worked, but considering the circumstances I’m happy that I was able to put in this much time.

Discussing this month’s time worked

As a mentioned in the November income report, it was my goal this month to complete my free Internet marketing course revisions. For those who don’t know, or haven’t been following my website for long enough, I previously had a free Internet marketing course available but didn’t feel like it met my expectations for a quality course.

Because of this, I decided that it was time to do a complete revision of the course and am very happy with where it stands now. As you’ll notice, the majority of my time worked this month was mostly focused on creating video quicktips. This is because the free Internet marketing course is really going to be a culmination of a lot of the video quicktips but organized in a way that makes this into an actual course.

I’ve also decided that I’m going to host the new Internet marketing course on Udemy because there is a large market of people there (Over 6 million students) who could also benefit from it and it will give my brand additional exposure.

Aside from working on the video quicktips, I also spent a lot of time working on my email autoresponder sequence. I hate to admit it, but previously people would sign up for my autoresponder and never get any type of actual auto response. Instead, they would just get blog updates when I had them and nothing more.

In the month of December I was able to put together four different emails in my autoresponder series and I’m happy to say that my autoresponder series is now truly valuable.

In addition to that, I also put some thought into the logistics of my email strategy. I’ve decided that instead of sending out an email every time I publish a blog post, moving forward I’m going to send one blog broadcast email per week which sums up all of the posts I created and then send out the autoresponder email.

In other words, the maximum amount of emails that people will get per week is two and I think this is good because it’s not going to be considered overwhelming. I used to send three emails per week and quite honestly, I felt like it was too much.

The last thing to note about the time work this month is that I spent two hours on my 90% outsourced niche website and this is because I had to figure out a way to find a new writer who is competent in creating articles for the site.

At this point, I think the plan is to have one article written per week by this writer and spend a small amount of time revising it to make sure it fits the standards of what I’m looking for. The writer himself has agreed to do these articles each for $7 dollars and this is a pretty reasonable rate considering each of these articles are 500 to 1,000 words.

How did the income report turn out this month?

I’m sure that a lot of people are going to look at my income report this month and wonder how it is that I spent over $600 on a website that’s already finished.

Well, believe it or not, a lot of the spend this month wasn’t focused on the OneHourProfessor.com website at all. Instead, what I did was spend a ton of time and money on the free Internet marketing course. It’s not 100% done yet as the video editor needs to complete four more videos, but majority of the course is done and this is all because I outsourced a ton of work…which drove up my cost.

The bulk of the cost was spent on the video editor, but at five dollars per hour he was a pretty good deal. The additional cost was because of the transcriber that I hired which worked for $30 per hour. Yes, she definitely did a good job and I appreciate all the hard work, but if I could’ve done it over again I would’ve hired someone through Elance for less.

Unfortunately I didn’t make as much revenue as I did last month, mainly because no one signed up for hosting at Hostgator this month, but I still think everything is fine. The expenses I had this month were just further investment and many of the videos that I created are already ranked on the first page of YouTube!

Search “How do websites make money” or “How does PPC advertising work” on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean.

This is a huge win for my brand and the OneHourProfessor.com YouTube channel now gets around 20 to 30 views per day.

Discussing this month’s income

The first part of the income this month is from Google AdSense. Now, many people would consider this almost nonexistent because it’s only $.37, but I’m going to beg to differ. You see, that $.37 was all generated from my new niche website. Yes I know, $.37 is paltry and not even a couple coffee, but it’s the start of something much bigger. Knowing that I can make $.37 this month, it will be great if I could begin to increase that amount every month until eventually I’m making a small amount of money through Google AdSense.

Legalmatch was down a little bit this month and only accounted for one conversion which brought in $2.50. It’s small, but I expected a drop with the holidays. After all, who wants to look for a lawyer during the holidays?

Again, Shutterstock images brought in $9.80 for the month. I’m always mystified about how few people convert on my Shutterstock link, but unfortunately there just isn’t that much I can do about it. With that being said, I’ll definitely take the commission from them and am excited to see what else will happen in the coming months.

Aweber still has one person who signed up through my affiliate link for it and I continue to receive a monthly commission for that original referral.

Discussing this month’s expenses

Well, it was another month of investment. I fixed a few problems with the OneHourProfessor.com website sign-up process, I paid for roughly 85% of the Internet marketing course revisions, and I hired on a new writer for my niche website. Obviously this all comes at a cost, but I don’t foresee having to spend a large amount of money on development in January. I think that what will happen is I will continue to spend money on the development of the free Internet marketing course redesign.

I’m also considering creating another course, that is a paid course, on Udemy.

I’ve taken a vow on making sure that all the content on the OneHourProfessor.com website is free, but as you can see from these income reports, I’m just not generating enough money yet. With that being said, I’m thinking that if I create a Udemy course and price it appropriately, what I will do is allow all of the followers of my website to get the paid course at a significantly reduced rate.

By significant, I’m thinking somewhere between 75% to 90% off of the regular price. Now, I know that that isn’t “free” and it might frustrate a few people, but I need to start making more money from this endeavor in order to put more time into it.

With that being said, I’ve heard from multiple people that my content is great and that my website is helpful for them which is awesome because that’s always been the goal. With that being said, I want to work on this more and the only way to do that is make more money with it.

Aside from those expenses on Elance, all of my other fixed costs were the same this month except for a little Twitter advertising. You could see that I spent $19.08 on Twitter advertising sthis month and if you guessed that it was advertising my income report, you are correct. I have found that these reports are immensely popular and wanted to get more people to see them.

Did I Meet my Goals for December?

1) Finish the Internet Marketing 101 course content

Yes, I was technically able to finish the course content for the Internet marketing 101 course redesign. On the other hand, my video editor hasn’t completely finished everything yet though I think it’ll be done soon. Once he has finished his content, I’ll be uploading everything to Udemy and submitting the course. I know that they are going to push back with a few revisions, at which time I will fix a few things, but I think that at the very latest I should be able to finally launch the course by February 1st and will definitely keep everyone aware that has signed up for me email list.

2) Get my video editor to edit/complete all of the content that I create.

Nope, he has four more videos to go. This is a little frustrating because it was out of my hands and my editor disappeared for a few days during the holidays, but I can’t be too upset considering he is right at the finish line of creating this course.

3) Get the course all uploaded into Udemy and share the end result with all of you!

As of now I’ve got everything completely uploaded to Udemy and the course is coming together really well. In total, I think it’s going to be around 3 to 4 hours of content and, as I said previously, many of the videos in the course are already ranked on the first page of YouTube and getting some great feedback. I know that this course is going to be awesome and I’m really excited to see what people think about.

Three goals for January:

1) Launch the Internet marketing course

I know at some point I’m going to launch my course on Udemy but I know that I’m going to have pushback from the platform and they will want me to make edits in order to finalize that course. So, my first goal is just to actually press the launch button and have all the content loaded in and all of the resources available.

2) Revise the internet marketing course and give it a final launch

You’re not going to hear about my launch above because it’s really just going to be a soft launch in which Udemy will take a few days to review my course and then tell me what it is that I did wrong. However, you will hear about this final launch and this will be the one where I push the course out and then everybody has access to it.

3) Fix my email autoresponder

As I mentioned previously in this income report, I’ve already fixed my email autoresponder a little bit but I think that there is still a lot of room for improvement. The good thing about me fixing this email autoresponder is that I really feel like I’m providing value for people because a lot of the content that I put there isn’t the same stuff that you find on the blog or in video quicktips. With that being said, if you aren’t currently signed up for email from me….now is a good time to sign up. The most you’ll get is two emails per week and I guarantee you’ll learn some cool stuff along the way.

Sorry, had to put a small plug in for my own email list, but I really think people will find it more helpful now! 🙂

So, that’s it for this month. I hope you enjoyed reading my income report for December and welcome anybody who has created a Udemy course before to comment below. I guess you could say right now I’m really sold on the concept of Udemy and I’m hoping that this will be my saving grace in terms of making additional income, but we will see what happens.