Business is a funny thing.  This month appeared to be worse than last month and the reason is simple. 

I didn’t make as much revenue.

Now, in most cases this would result in a downturn in profit, but that’s not the case in my business. 

Amazingly, I made a little more profit this month in my business despite a $5000 drop in revenue, mostly fueled by a drop in consulting revenue.

Weird, right?

My costs as of late have been inflated, so I made sure I reduced them this month and am happy with the result.

This month my total income after expenses was $21,137 which comes out to $705 in profit per day. 

I should mention before we begin, if you’re looking to start your own blog, make sure you check out my free IGNITION course today.

From a personal perspective, life changed permanently for me in the month of April 2022.

I know I’ve talked about this in my last few income reports, but I’m extremely excited to finally introduce  our little girl Saara to the world.

April was (again) a record-breaking month for the OHP site.

Overall things on the site continue to progress and I’m happy to report that I’m starting to see not only my earnings climb, but traffic as well.

The numbers are good, but my EPM did drop a little bit as a been able to get more traffic.  Obviously, I’m not upset about that as I want as much qualified traffic as possible, but it’s something worth noting.

• Pageviews increased MoM by 17% to 67
• This month I earned: $12,805. Earnings increased MoM by 2%. 
• EPM decreased MoM to $191

PLAN:  I’ve put more focus on software roundup posts and so far, it seems to be working.  I’m not entirely sure if I’ll adjust my strategy in the future or not, but right now I’m going to continue on this path and keep producing as much content as I have been.

One other thing that I’ve noticed is that I’ve had a significant uptick in companies contacting  me and trying to work with me in various capacities.  There’s a lot of negotiation that takes place here and it’s something that I’m learning as I go, but it’s cool that my site is getting recognized in this way.

I have done nothing on this site for at least 12 months except add Ezoic and it continues to print money for me.

• Pageviews increased MoM by 1% to 162
• This month I earned: $4,358. Earnings decreased MoM by 3%. 
• EPM increased MoM to $91

PLAN:  I’m going to keep publishing one blog post per week for the site and let this one run passively with my team.   

I have done nothing on this site for at least 12 months except add Ezoic and it continues to print money for me.  I have no intention of working on it and will let it sit as I work on my other projects.

• Pageviews decreased MoM by 7% to 58
• This month I earned: $1,182. Earnings decreased MoM by 31%. 
• EPM increased MoM to $33

PLAN:  This site is currently 100% passive and I do not work on it.  I keep going back and forth on the site is I’m not sure if I should simply sell it when the time is right, or take a chance and create some additional content.

My gut tells me I should create some additional content on the site because it has a domain rating over 60 and could probably outrank quite a few competitors.  There is a big Amazon affiliate play here, but I hate aligning myself with Amazon considering how poorly they’ve treated their affiliates in the past.  We’ll see what happens with this one, but for now it’s just going to sit.

Unfortunately, there was a slight downturn in both earnings and traffic this month for website 6.  I’m a little frustrated by this, but also not surprised.  I did a little bit of analysis and discovered that in March the site got a ton of traffic from “Google Discover” on a seasonal piece of content that we wrote in the past.  To be honest, I really have no idea why Google chose this piece of content and began sharing it all over the web.  I’m not upset about it, but I’m going to chalk it up to pure dumb luck.  That said, in April that same piece of content didn’t get recommended with Google Discover and because of that there was a slight drop in traffic/earnings.

• This month I earned: $1,203. Earnings decreased MoM by 3%. 
• EPM increased MoM to $89
• How Much Have I Invested in This Website: $7,836 ($800 Content budget each month)
• How Much Money Has This Website Made? $7,409
• Total ROI: -$427 (If I were to sell the website today, I can assume I’d sell for an estimated $46k.  Which means a net gain of roughly $45k)
• How Much Content is on the Website? 250 informational blog posts

My link building for the site continues as well.

• Shotgun Skyscraper: This campaign has been launched and thus far I’ve had no success.  It’s still very early and it was launched a few days ago, so we’ll see what ends up happening here.
• Image Link building: Similar to above, I’ve yet to see any links coming from this campaign.  The good news is that some of the images that we created to get links  have gotten indexed very highly on the SERP, which is exactly what I wanted.  I have a feeling that this will eventually work, but it’s a long-term thing.
• Guest Posting: We’ve compiled a solid list of different outlets where we want to guest post.  We continue research here, but as of now it’s looking like we’ve got an idea of places that may feature us.  We’re not going to begin outreach yet as we are still amid getting every other campaign buttoned up.
• HARO Link Building: I’ve engaged with Niche Website Builders (Click here to get 10% off their services) to help me with HARO.  As of now, they’ve delivered four high authority placements with websites that have a DR of 70+ on each.  They’re continuing to submit new queries and I look forward to seeing what else gets inclusion.  Unfortunately, two of these links have been “nofollow”, but those (thankfully) don’t count.  So, we’ll see what ends up getting secured with time. 

PLAN: As of now I continue to have content created for the site.  At the moment I have one full-time writer located in another country who continually create solid content for me.

We still have a big focus on creating content for high search volume keywords (usually 50k+ searchers per month or more) and though I’ve seen little success from this strategy so far, I think it will be a winner in the long run.

One thing that has been cool to see is how many longtail keywords I’m getting ranked for with this strategy.  While I’m not ranking for very high-volume search keywords that I want, I have noticed a significant increase in rankings for longtail search queries for keywords that get 1-10k searches per month.  My intention is to eventually create blog posts specific to some of these longtail search queries to try to get Google to understand that individual posts should be ranked for these longtail keywords while the main post should be ranked for the primary keyword.

I’ve never worked on a site that has had this much search volume or used this strategy before, so it’s going to be interesting to see what works.

This is now the third month in a row that I’ve seen a small decline in traffic for this site.  Iit’s annoying considering my team keeps producing content for the site and I expect that the traffic along with earnings to continue to rise.

The referring domains of the site continues to rise as well, so it’s weird to see this reverse trend on traffic and earnings.  Again, it hasn’t been a drastic reversal but it is something that I find annoying.

• Pageviews decreased MoM by 4% to 147k.
• This month I earned: $6,364. Earnings decreased MoM by 5%. 
• EPM remained the same MoM at $43
• How Much Have I Invested in This Website: $44,960 ($1800 Content budget each month)
• How Much Money Has This Website Made? $85,141
• Total ROI: $40,181 (If I were to sell the website today, I can assume I’d sell for an estimated $246,000. Which means a net gain of about $286,000)
• How Much Content is on the Website: Keep in mind that this is an informational type of website, not affiliate related at all.
  • 1795 Informational pages on the website
  • 173 Informational Blog Posts

PLAN: As of now I intend to continue to move forward with exactly how things have been going on the site.  I’m annoyed at the fact that I’m seeing a downward trend with traffic and earnings, but it just doesn’t make sense to stop the process at this point.  Until I see a drastic drop off in a single month, I’m not going to be concerned.  I investigated Google Search Console to see if I could see any alarming trends, but I don’t.  These are slight decreases that have coincidently happened three months in a row, and I’d like to see a positive month in April.  But I guess that’s up to the Google gods.

It was good to see an increase in earnings this month for this website.  I looked into it and it seems that it’s mostly an anomaly as there were a few different items purchased on Amazon that were high ticket and drove up the commission.  I’m not going to complain of course, but I don’t know if this is a sustainable increase.  Beyond that, unfortunately my main writer for this website quit in April.  Long story short, she’s decided to get out of writing as a profession and is getting a different job instead.  I wished her well, but now that leaves me without somebody to continue to create content for the site.

• Pageviews increased MoM by 2% to 11.2k
• This month I earned: $331. Earnings increased MoM by 76%. 
• EPM increased MoM to $41
• How Much Have I Invested in This Website: $10,164 ($400 Content budget each month)
• How Much Money Has This Website Made? $2,203
• Total ROI: -$7,961 (If I were to sell the website today, I can assume I’d sell for an estimated $7k. Which means a net loss of about $900)
• How Much Content is on the Website? Keep in mind this website is mostly focused on affiliate content with some informational content. 
  • 319 Informational Blog Posts

PLAN:  At the end of the day the site hasn’t been profitable yet and I’m not seeing upward trends, so I’m just going to let it sit and age as I continue to focus on the OHP site and website 6.  Although it wasn’t costing much to produce more content, I see no reason to continue considering there are very little increases in traffic.  So, I’m going to build links here as opportunities arise and just let the site sit for a little while.  I did this with website 6 last year and it worked well, so hopefully the same thing happens with this site.

• Pageviews decreased MoM by 2% to 796.
• This month I earned: $11. Earnings decreased MoM by 21%. 
• EPM decreased MoM to $14
• How Much Content is on the Website?
  • 25 Informational Blog Posts
• PLAN: This site is currently 100% passive and I do not work on it. 

I really don’t have much to report on this site in the month of April.  I’ve done nothing for it and it really hasn’t done anything for me either.  My hope is that it will continue to age well.

• Pageviews decreased MoM by 29% to 9k.
• This month I earned: $0. This site is not yet monetized. 
• EPM remained at $0.
• How Much Content is on the Website?
  • 33 Informational Blog Posts

PLAN:  As of this point, I am having this site sit and I’m going to see how it grows over time.  There’s been nothing produced on the site for a while in terms of content and I’m continuing to build links to it when I get the opportunities.

We had a catastrophic development on this channel in the month of April.  Long story short, YouTube has demonetized the channel.  If I’m being honest, I’m not entirely surprised as my wife was being a little careless in the way that she was creating the videos when she started.  The issue comes down to giving credit to those who own the content.  She does a lot more of this now than she did in the beginning, and it’s come back to haunt us.  I’m not entirely sure what’s going to happen here and if she’ll end up fixing all the old videos or removing them, but moving forward I’m going to remove this project from income reports until she finds a way to get monetized again.

As a reminder, this is a faceless Youtube channel that my wife and I created and continue to have a team work on.  If you’re interested in building an outsourced YouTube channel like this, I recommend that you check out this webinar.

• Views increased MoM by 2% to 265
• This month I earned: $1,250. Earnings decreased MoM by 10%. 
• Subscriber growth decreased MoM by 1%.
• How Much Did We Invest in This YouTube Channel: $4,970 (Estimate of $350/month in expenses)
• How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $15,341
• Total ROI: $10,371

Views maintained for the OneHourProfessor YouTube channel this month.  As of now, I have no plans to return but that may change in the future.

• Views increased MoM by 1% to 16.1
• This month I earned: $398. Earnings increased MoM by 14%. 
• Subscriber growth decreased MoM by 4%
• How Much Have I Invested in This YouTube Channel: $3,927
• How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $14,712
• Total ROI: $10,785 (If I were to sell the channel today, I can assume I’d sell for an estimated $13k. Which means a net gain of about $27k)

PLAN: At this point I must stay away from publishing new content on my channel.  My sites take a ton of my mental capacity and history has shown I’m more skilled in this area.

This channel continues to perform poorly and we are just letting it sit at this point.  There is no reason to focus on it, earning and view aren’t close to making this a sustainable or profitable channel.  If you’re interested in building an outsourced YouTube channel like this, I recommend that you check out this webinar.

• Views increased MoM by 26% to 9k.
• This month I earned: $12. Earnings remained the same 
• Subscriber growth increased MoM by 29%
• How Much Have We Invested in This YouTube Channel: $4,100 (We’ve stopped investing here)
• How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $69
• Total ROI: -$4,031 (If I were to sell the channel today, I can assume I’d sell for an estimated $400. Which means a net loss of about $3,600)

PLAN:  For now this channel is simply going to sit.  I’d love to continue to work on it, but the channel itself appears to be flawed.  Even if were able to get a significant amount of views on the channel, the earnings per thousand views is in the range of $2 to $3, which just isn’t enough.

Thalita’s vlog is getting cut back as well.  My wife is simply too busy with our child to work on this for now and the immediate future. 

• Views decreased MoM by 55% to 39
• This month she earned: $54. Earnings decreased MoM by 64%. 
• Subscriber growth decreased MoM by 38%
• How Much Did We Invest in This YouTube Channel: $2,110
• How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $972
• Total ROI: -$1,138

PLAN:  Instead of continuing to work on this Youtube channel, Thalita is partnering with me on website six and will focus on that for now. 

Lessons Learned

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.

• Babies are exhausting: This goes without saying.  After having a child, I can confidently say that babies are simply exhausting.   
• Control Your Expenses: As mentioned in this report, I made more profit this month than last even though I had $5k less in revenue.  This is a good reminder that reducing cost and increasing profit margin is a good idea if income isn’t raising quickly enough.  
• Careful with YouTube: I was a little shocked that YouTube flipped a switch and demonetized our entire channel in a single day with little warning.  I would have thought I would get more of a heads up, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.