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Well, November is in the books and holy cow did I screw up this month.  Not just this month, but I’ve BEEN screwing up the last few months without realizing it.

I’ll get into more detail within this income report, but it simply comes down to the fact that I’ve been doing too much without paying enough attention to detail. You’ll understand what I mean after reading this one, but I’m definitely not immune to failure and November was full of it.

Also, I want to mentioned that I’m changing things up on my income reports moving forward.  I feel like I’ve been saying the same thing over and over for the last few months, so this month I’m working on fixing that and reformatting the income report.  I’m getting rid of my “time worked” report, the discussion around all expenses, and I have added “key lessons learned” to the report.

But before I begin the income report, 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.

2) These reports help me keep track of my own progress.

3) These reports hold me accountable.

In short, I don’t create these to gloat about my earnings. I create them to help you understand the true “earning curve” of online business. Now that we got that out of the way, let’s dive into the report.

How did the income report turn out this month?

PRODUCT OR SERVICEREVENUEEXPENSESNET INCOME
Amazon Ebook Sales$4.12$4.12
Aweber Email Platform$5.70$5.70
Shutterstock$5.80$5.80
Long Tail Pro Keyword Research$9.97$9.97
MyPerfectResume.com$14.08$14.08
OHP Course Sales$39.00$39.00
YouTube Channel$48.13$48.13
Consulting$125.00$125.00
Website 1 Partnerships$208.00$208.00
Udemy Course Sales$259.26$259.26
Thrive Themes$295.00$295.00
Website 1ub Media.net Ad Revenue$312.66$312.66
Indeed.com$402.36$402.36
Ecommerce Website - MCM Google Adsense Ad Revenue$0.29$0.29
OneHourProfessor.com Google Adsense Ad Revenue$2.30$2.30
TranscriptionJobsHQ.com Google Adsense Revenue$10.55$10.55
Authority Website - THQ Google Adsense Ad Revenue$22.10$22.10
Website 1 Google Adsense Ad Revenue$2,937.23$2,937.23
Google Drive Storage$2.09-$2.09
Adobe Photoshop Account$10.61-$10.61
Intuit Quick Books$11.99-$11.99
Gmass Email Software$12.95-$12.95
Meet Edgar Social Media Platform$49.00-$49.00
Comcast Internet$82.52-$82.52
ConvertKit Email Software$119.00-$119.00
Siteground Hosting$95.00-$95.00
Authority Hacker Membership$299.00-$299.00
Upwork Freelancers (New Authority Website)$1,045.65-$1,045.65
TOTALS$4,601.55$1,721.81$2,879.74

monthly-income-report-november

Revenue By ChannelWebsite 1ConsultingUdemyOHP WebsiteYouTubeAuthority Website - THQ
November 2016$3778.45$125.00$259.26$357.77$48.13$22.10
October 2016$3841.36$126.00$238.90$213.88$48.92$1.37
September 2016$3102.56$112.01$271.02$402.32$57.14
August 2016$3318.70$731.05$423.49$44.72$55.08
July 2016$3353.06$135.19$186.34$347.47$52.12
June 2016$3219.41$330.00$397.55$132.77$72.22
May 2016$4677.02$206.25$135.25$253.67$75.89
April 2016$5008.23$497.50$353.02$286.38$62.52
March 2016$2311.67$556.75$301.06$265.29$60.14
February 2016$2760.21$431.25$324.58$250.70$62.00
January 2016$233.00$1140.00$400.97$117.58$46.19
December 2015$121.30$1163.75$17.15$76.00$38.83
November 2015$138.11$1150.25$245.68$39.00$36.78
October 2015$107.72$760.50$49.50$89.54$40.65
September 2015$102.95$1112.32$17.49$113.10$27.46
August 2015$39.68$1463.75$12.05$51.75$25.09

Discussing This Month’s Income Outliers

Every month I have income that streams and from multiple sources and quite frankly, a lot of that is pretty regular. However, each month I tend to see a few line items that are drastically different from the prior month. In this section, I’m only going to discuss the items that have increased or decreased substantially.

There were three line items that jumped out to me this month:

  • href=”https://onehourprofessor.com/thrivethemes”>Thrive Themes: I use Thrive themes on all of my websites that I built in the last year and there’s a good reason why. In my opinion, this is the best platform to not only have a theme for your website, but also have multiple tools to make you successful at your fingertips. I’m not sure exactly why there was such an increase in purchases this month with Thrive Themes, but I’m definitely not complaining.
  • Website 1ub Media.net Revenue: It was pretty cool to see that I made just over $300 with Media.net this month. The reason why it’s so cool to me is that prior to signing up for the Authority Hacker membership, I didn’t even know what this was. In addition to that, the cost of the membership for Authority Hacker is $300 a month and the fact that I made that on media.net means that I completely offset the cost for this month.
  • Authority Website – THQ Google Adsense Ad Revenue: In November I had a very large increase in revenue for my new authority websites Adsense revenue. It went from $1.37 in October to $22.10 in November.  A lot of this is attributed to the fact that I put more ads on the website, but I’m also seeing a large increase in traffic there and I’m very confident that this one is going to be as big, if not bigger, than my Website 1ub authority website.

Discussing This Month’s Expense Outliers

Similar to the income I make every month, there are certain expenses that I consider “fixed”.  With that being said, as I did in the income area, I’m only going to discuss the outliers or new items added as expenses.

There are only two line items that I think are worth discussing:

  • Authority Hacker Membership: As I mentioned three months ago, I purchased a membership from Authority Hacker to join their high-level mastermind and get additional training. I was really hesitant to do this, but the thing that swayed me was they had a module focused on optimizing a website that makes revenue from Google AdSense.  Since my purchase, I have increased revenue by more than $300/month and I’m excited to say that next month will be the last payment.  This membership has been worth every penny.
  • Upwork Freelancers: The majority of my expenses this month were, as always, writers. I spent just over thousand dollars this month and that’s significantly less than what I usually spend.  However,  this portion of my expenses is $200 more than I should be. The reason for this is I haven’t been paying enough attention and instead of hiring a writer to complete work for $0.01/word, I accidentally hired someone to complete work for $0.10 per word.  That’s right, $0.10 per WORD!!!  If I could regularly make that type of income from writing, I would be a writer myself.

Long story short, I realized the mistake after the writer had completed about 7500 words and told them flat out this was an honest mistake and I wasn’t going to be able to pay $750 for what they had done. We negotiated, and luckily they are willing to reduce the cost by about 50%.

Project Updates

Website 1 Update: I feel like this website is hitting the ceiling in terms of its earning potential and the only real way that I can make more money is by doing one of two things:

  • Increase search engine rank of my highest revenue generating pages.
  • Focus on ad optimization and increase revenue generated across the website with existing traffic.

In a way, I guess I’m going to be doing a little bit of both, but one of my main goals in December is going to be learning “DFP”, which is an ad server program that’s completely free and offered by Google. When using this ad server, you’re able to join multiple networks and have them bid against each other for your ad space.

The more competition that you have, the higher the ad space is worth and I’m hoping that by bidding these networks against each other I’ll end up making a little bit more per thousand visits to my pages.

Consulting Update:  Consulting income is “meh” as of right now. It’s kind of a shame because I actually enjoy working with online entrepreneurs, but it really isn’t passive and my whole goal is to create passive income channels where I literally make money while I sleep.

Udemy Update: Pretty good income from this channel this month considering I did absolutely nothing. I’m simply letting Udemy do their marketing and I’m finally ranking for a few terms in the Udemy platform that actually gives me organic traffic, which is increasing my revenue.

OneHourProfessor.com Website Update:  Again I’m wrestling with the idea of focusing more on this website and creating additional courses. In addition to that, I’m thinking about including a full course page where people can find every course that I’ve created and creating funnels for each of them. However, every time I think of this, I remind myself that this has never paid off in the past and I really think it’s unlikely to in the future. We’ll see if my attitude changes with the new year.

Ecommerce Website MCM Update: This website sucks.  To be honest, I like the concept a lot and I think that this could go well, but I’m realizing that for these ecommerce type of websites it’s very difficult to get back links.  As I become to a more seasoned Internet marketer, I found that the value of back links is insurmountable and without them your website is destined to fail. In addition to that, having to pay $40 per blog article isn’t financially viable and something that I can’t afford to do at the moment.

This website is an Amazon affiliate website and although I love the idea of creating this brand, I’ve come to realize that these websites are miserable to manage. Even though I have a writer creating the content, I still spend 1 to 2 hours on each blog post formatting everything correctly.

Lastly, even though we just had black Friday and I was expecting to see some sales come from this website, I haven’t seen a single commission yet.  As much as I want this one happen, I’m beginning to come to the realization that it was a mistake making this and I don’t think I’m going to continue on.

Authority Website JFFT Update: This website also sucks.  I mentioned last month how I made a huge mistake in creating a website in this niche because the traffic for my main keyword was somehow under 3,000 searches per month. Again, simple oversight on my end and a pretty dumb mistake that I made because I was rushing through things.

Though I can’t be completely upset and this reason is because this and the ecommerce website failure have caused me to refocus.

Authority Website THQ Update: This is the project I should have been working on the whole time.  It turns out, this authority website is the only one that’s trending in a positive manner and looks to be very promising from what I’m seeing so far.

I’ve decided that I’m going to throw an extra table in my income reports for the coming months to show the growth that happens on this website as it happens.  I wish I would have started it a little earlier, but better late than never.

MonthSessionsReferring DomainsEarningsTotal PagesIndexed Pages
Nov-16309815$22.111007705

 

There are a few key things that you’ll notice here in the figures above.

  • The sessions are already over 3,000/month and that’s pretty darn good for being fully launched for only about two months.
  • Referring domains are my back-linking efforts and as you can see, I already have 15 other websites linking to me. If you’re wondering, this is one of the big reasons why my sessions have increased so much. Every single day I’m sending out 25-30 emails to link prospects and I’m typically getting one to two emails back per day with people who are saying that they will link back to me. If this keeps up, I’m going to have a ridiculously powerful link profile and will be much more powerful than all of my competitors in under six months.
  • I’d be willing to bet that my earnings will double next month even with the holiday. The reason for this isn’t because I’m going to do a lot of ad optimization, but I think that I’ll have a pretty large increase in traffic simply based on more pages being indexed and my link building efforts.
  • For whatever reason, I’ve had a really hard time getting all of my pages index correctly in Google with this website. However, it looks like things are getting better on that end so I fully anticipate that all of my pages will be indexed in Google by the end of December.

NEW Authority Website Website 4 Update:

Last month I mentioned how I was going to do one other authority website and this is the one I was talking about.

As of now, this website is looking like it could do really well. All I’m doing is having my two writers create two blog posts per week and I’m doing research for link building opportunities.

I’ve been pretty creative with the link building tactics here and have found a way to get links back from just over 300 websites that have been in existance for 5, 10, maybe even 15 years.  Basically, I’m offering some type of “verification” for them that is free to get, but they need to link back to me in order to receive it.

I really wish I could explain more about this and my thinking behind it, but because someone previously copied Website 1ub website, I’m no longer willing to be completely transparent.

I’m thinking that with the plan I put forth, I should be able to get quite a few links because if they don’t link back to me, it’s going to make them look less “official” on the state-by-state database that I’ve created and it prohibits them from getting free marketing.

We’ll see how it goes, but I have a good feeling about this website.  Here are my statistics for this website so far:

MonthSessionsReferring DomainsEarningsTotal PagesIndexed Pages
Nov-16330$0.00247

Lessons Learned

This is a new section of my income report and something that I think is incredibly important. Every month, I’m going to reflect back and tell you a few different lessons that I’ve learned. My hope is that the lessons each month will be a cautionary tale for you that makes it so that you don’t make the dumb mistakes that I do along the way.

  • Pay Attention: I simply wasn’t paying enough attention when I created my last two Authority Websites. Not only that, but I hired a writer for 10 times my normal cost recently because I was in a rush to get things done.  When you’re doing this online business stuff, you need to really pay attention to the work in front of you. It’s easy to get distracted when you’re excited about a project, but if you want to succeed, you need to be laser focused on your current task (whatever it is).
  • Bootstrap like you have nothing: I found over the last 2 to 3 months that I’ve been spending like a madman without paying much attention to the quality of work that I’ve been getting. This is not how I was when I created Website 1ub and I know it’s because I started to make a little bit more money so I stressed about it less. This isn’t the right way to do things.  Every time you create a new website, act like you’re coming from absolutely nothing.  Don’t get overconfident, don’t think it will just “happen”.  Good things only happen to those who are careful with their planning and spend their money wisely.
  • Linkbuilding is next to godliness: If you aren’t link building, you’re not going to be successful.  Truth be told, I don’t even see it as link building at this point. In my mind, I’m simply making people aware of a website that I’ve created and asking them to consider linking to it if they find a valuable.  After you launch a new website and have a decent amount of content (25+ pages), find a way to get people to link to you.  Without links, your website won’t rank well in search engines and it’s unlikely it will succeed at all.
  • You’ll fail sometimes, get over it: I’m not immune to failure and neither are you. I wouldn’t say that I necessarily embrace failure, but I think that when I fail it’s a nice reminder that I don’t have it all figured out. When you fail, don’t feel sorry for yourself.  Look at what went wrong, learn a lesson, continue moving forward.
  • Know your projected expenses before they happen: In the last few months I was spending like crazy. My expenses fluctuated a lot because I needed to complete databases, programming needed to be done, and there was a lot of writing to be done. Moving forward, I’m going to take a much more careful and calculated approach to expenses.  To keep your expenses in check, in the beginning of every month you should estimate what your expenses will be and stick to those numbers.

 

The table below is projecting my expenses for December and I’ll see how closely I can stick to this:

ItemFixed CostsVariable Costs
Google Drive Storage$2.09 
Adobe Photoshop$10.61 
Intuit Quick Books$11.99 
Gmass Email Software$12.95 
Meet Edgar Social Media$49.00 
Internet$85 
Convertkit$119.00 
Siteground Hosting$95.00 
Authority Hacker Membership$299 
Website 1UB Writer – 3 Posts/Week $168
Website 4 Writers – 4 Posts/Week $120
THQ Writer – City Descriptions $160
THQ Writer – 1 Post/Week $60
TOTAL$684.64$508

Did I Meet my Goals for November?

1) Hire Writers For New Authority Websites – SUCCESS

I have all of my writers in place for my current websites and my new authority website, so I’m all set here.

2) Get 10 backlinks for the THQ Website Links – SUCCESS

In this month alone, I was able to get 15 total backlinks.  We’ll see what the future holds, but I anticipate a lot more backlinks happening with my current strategy.

3) Reduce Costs – SUCCESS

I was able to reduce costs in November and it was a necessary step to make my business leaner and more profitable.

Goals for December

Reduce Costs

I want to reduce my costs even further in December.  I’m really trying to trim down expenses and I see some costs savings available in December as well.

Get 15 backlinks

Because I had a lot of success in the last month building links, I’ve decided to try to replicate that again in December.  I have a plan to get this done, but it’s in the hands of the websites I email.  Hopefully my link building tactics are well-received, only time will tell.

Finish researching database for new Authority Website

Because I’m reducing costs, I’m managing the entire process of researching/building out the database for my new authority website.  To be honest, it’s an awful task and it’s a RIDICULOUS amount of work that I could easily outsource. But I’m cutting back on expenses, so this is something I’m going to have to struggle through.  This month, I want to finish the research portion of the website and begin building out the state-by-state database pages.

What are your goals for the month?  What questions do you have?  Let me know in the comments below!

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