Disclosure: OneHourProfessor is reader-supported. When you buy through links on my site, I may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

What a month it was.

I was able to make an (astonishing) average of $477.39 per day in the month of February.

This was the best month that I’ve ever had for my online business in regards to revenue and considering that it was a short month, that’s a really good sign and hopefully this trend continues.

One thing that you’ll notice is that I’m publishing my income report much later than I usually do. The reason for this is because my wife and I moved to a different apartment in Brazil in preparation for me moving back to the United States.

Long story short, we moved her to a cheaper apartment that would be good just for her as she is going to be here solo for a little while as we get her green card paperwork figured out.

At some point she does intend to come to the United States on a tourist visa, and I may also visit Brazil under the same circumstances, but until this goes through we are unable to purchase a house or do anything like that.

Speaking of purchasing a house, and this is something that I’ll talk about more as time goes on, we’re both strongly considering the idea of living in Puerto Rico.  The reason for this is because in the industry that we work in, it’s possible for us to have a tax rate of 4% on all of our business income, plus we loved the island when we previously visited.

So, we’d be able to pay off a ton of bills, save a bunch of money, and really set ourselves up financially for the future.

I’ll explain more about this if it looks like it’s going to become a reality, but the idea would be to do this in early 2019.

The month itself had a few highlights including;

  • I launched my first product on Amazon.com (A calendar)
  • Website 1UB website ended up going viral again and it was a direct result of my efforts

I don’t want to get in to too many details in the introduction, but there were definitely quite a few things I learned this month and I’m excited to pass these learnings on to you.

Before I dive too deeply 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) 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
Aweber Email Platform$8.70$8.70
Udemy Course Sales$23.90$23.90
ShutterstoWebsite 5 Images$24.04$24.04
Thrive Themes$478.40$478.40
Partners and Affiliates Revenue
Website 2 Partners and Affiliates$0$0
Website 3 Partners and Affiliates$0$0
Website 5 Partners and Affiliates$5.64$5.64
OHP Partners and Affiliates$128.50$128.50
Website 4 Partners and Affiliates$335.70$335.70
Website 1UB Partners and Affiliates$864.14$864.14
YouTube Revenue
Personal VLOG Channel$7.80$7.80
OHP YouTube Channel$79.06$79.06
Media.net Revenue
Website 3 Media.net Ad Revenue$9.08$9.08
Website 4 Media.net Ad Revenue$113.03$113.03
Website 1UB Media.net Ad Revenue$526.56$526.56
Google Adsense Revenue
OHP Adsense Revenue$4.72$4.72
Website 2 Adsense Revenue$22.27$22.27
Website 3 Adsense Revenue$372.95$372.95
Website 4 Adsense Revenue$389.78$389.78
Website 5 Adsense Revenue$448.44$448.44
Website 1ub Adsense Revenue$9524.24$9524.24
Software Expenses
Intuit Quick Books$5.00-$5.00
Google Business Drive Storage and Apps$6.09-$6.09
EZUpc.com$9.99-$9.99
Adobe Photoshop Account$10.61-$10.61
Mailshake Email Software$19.00-$19.00
Legal Shield$29.90-$29.90
Namecheap$32.88-$32.88
Deadline Funnel$37.00-$37.00
Epidemic Sound$45.00-$45.00
Meet Edgar Social Media Platform$49.00-$49.00
Bar Code Graphics
$86.00-$86.00
Socialbee$98.00
-$98.00
Ahrefs.com$99.00-$99.00
Incorp Services$99.00-$99.00
Active Campaign$135.00-$135.00
Siteground Hosting$172.67-$172.67
Freelance Labor Expenses
Freelance Writing and Editing$686.52-$686.52
Freelance Research and Labor$760.55-$760.55
PrintSafari.com$1101.83
-$1101.83
TOTALS$13366.95$3483.04$9883.91
Revenue By ChannelWebsite 1ub WebsiteWebsite 3OHP WebsiteWebsite 4Website 2Website 5ConsultingUdemyYouTube
February 2018$10918.94$382.03 $644.36 $838.51 $22.27 $454.08 $0$23.90$86.86
January 2018$7993.31
$467.71
$757.59
$718.04
$14.26
$486.99
$0$113.95
$67.06
December 2017$6707.43$432.22$785.74$555.72$28.50$114.05$0$59.21$96.12
November 2017$7545.13$574.91$480.41$479.34$17.70$4.31$0$187.01$90.40
October 2017$6859.17$617.67$265.38$319.02$13.06$0$135.59$66.71
September 2017$6781.51$348.16$673.87$223.95$11.31$0$81.39$58.13
August 2017$7429.92$391.68$945.04$181.93$16.36$0$133.91$63.57
July 2017$5658.64$344.91$1055.57$85.84$58.55$1,496.38$41.80$94.84
June 2017$5924.41$423.04$403.84$31.71$11.87$600.00$148.88$79.81
May 2017$6805.18$214.18$79.00$9.67$8.71$51.50$76.08$82.58
April 2017$8175.11$116.65$106.71$3.57$0$80.25$57.76
March 2017$9527.42$224.16$355.12$6.43$0$137.29$59.11
February 2017$3726.98$160.48$438.54$32.99$125$165.43$52.40
January 2017$4005.52$104.19$267.33$0$222.20$41.60
December 2016$3553.43$52.63$384.57$125.00$138.07$41.32
November 2016$3778.45$22.10$357.77$125.00$259.26$48.13
October 2016$3841.36$1.37$213.88$126.00$238.90$48.92
September 2016$3102.56$402.32$112.01$271.02$57.14
August 2016$3318.70$44.72$731.05$423.49$55.08
July 2016$3353.06$347.47$135.19$186.34$52.12
June 2016$3219.41$132.77$330.00$397.55$72.22
May 2016$4677.02$253.67$206.25$135.25$75.89
April 2016$5008.23$286.38$497.50$353.02$62.52
March 2016$2311.67$265.29$556.75$301.06$60.14
February 2016$2760.21$250.70$431.25$324.58$62.00
January 2016$233.00$117.58$1140.00$400.97$46.19
December 2015$121.30$76.00$1163.75$17.15$38.83
November 2015$138.11$39.00$1150.25$245.68$36.78
October 2015$107.72$89.54$760.50$49.50$40.65
September 2015$102.95$113.10$1112.32$17.49$27.46
August 2015$39.68$51.75$1463.75$12.05$25.09

This Month’s Income Outliers

Every month I have income that streams in 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 only discuss the items that have increased or decreased significantly.

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

  • Website 1UB Adsense/Media.net Revenue: I’ll discuss this more in Website 1UB project update, but the website was able to go viral this month and because of that, the AdSense and media.net revenue was far above the norm.​
  • CK Adsense Revenue: This website continues to grow its revenue and the increase from AdSense in February was due to implementing ads across multiple pages of the website that previously didn’t have any ads at all.
  • Website 4 Overall Revenue: I’m truly amazed that this website continues to increase its income month after month. In February I was able to make $838.51 with this website and I really didn’t think it would ever get past $500. The revenue is split across three different streams of income including Google AdSense, Media.net, and Amazon affiliates.  I think that this diversity of revenue has really helped solidify it as a pretty good passive income stream for a long time.

This Month’s Expense Outliers

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

One of my goals this month was to launch my product on Amazon for Amazon FBA and though I was able to do this, I definitely had some outliers in terms of expenses from previous months.

  • EZUpc.com: When you sell on Amazon, you have to have a UPC code for that specific item. I obviously don’t have any UPC codes lying around, so I was able to purchase one on this website and use it.
  • BarCodeGraphic.com: This expense was completely avoidable but it comes with the learning experience. When you send a product to Amazon, you have to adhere a FNSKU label on it.  This is essentially a UPC code for Amazon to keep your inventory managed in their warehouses. I had to use this service to print out a row of FNSKU labels for me that my mom manually affixed onto each of the calendars that I created. In the future, I’ll simply just print the FNSKU label on the item/package itself.
  • SocialBee.io: This is an expense that I’ve been waiting to incur for years. As you may know if you’ve read my previous income reports, I’ve been using MeetEdgar to manage my social media posting across all of my profiles. While the tool is good, it costs $50/month to have, which is entirely too much for what it does. However, I haven’t been able to find anything that I like better that provided the same or better functionality. Then, this month there was a deal on AppSumo for a relatively new tool called SocialBee and I gave it a shot.  I can say without a doubt that I actually like this tool better than MeeEdgar and feel that their interface is much more intuitive.  Plus, and this is the best part, I was able to purchase a lifetime deal to the software for $50.  Needless to say, I’m happy to save $550 a year by using a better product.
  • Ahrefs.com: Another expense that will be ongoing is a subscription to Ahrefs.  Frankly, I think that this tool is overpriced and you can technically use it for one month and cancel your membership, but at this point I’m making enough money to continually subscribe to the software and track a lot of SEO benchmarks that I’ve wanted track for a long time.
  • Incorp Services: Ahhh yes, the joys of having a corporation. This month I incurred a fee of $100 from the platform that I use to manage a lot of my corporate documentation. This is the fee that I have to pay every year to have my corporation and although it’s an annoying one, it’s an absolute requirement.
  • Siteground.com: Though this expense wasn’t extremely higher than last month, I did pay more money in hosting fees this month because Website 1UB website went viral.  Any time that I have to pay more in hosting, I’m not upset because it means that I’m getting more traffic, which obviously means that I’m making more money.
  • PrintSafari.com: This was by far the largest expense outlier of the month and was the printing and shipping of 260 different calendars that I had created.  For what it’s worth, this was a pretty scary experiment because I wasn’t able to see a printed version of the product prior to it being given to me. That said, after receiving the shipment, I’m extremely happy with the quality of the printed products that this company created. I had nothing but a great experience and highly recommend them if you’re looking for printed products of any type.

Project Updates

Website 1 Update:  Website 1 went viral again this month and that was no accident.

I mentioned above how I was finally able to find a replacement for my social media posting tool MeetEdgar and when this happened I had to manually go through all of the different posts that I had loaded previously and re-create them in the new social media platform, SocialBee.

While this was a bit of a pain in the butt, I’m really glad it happened.

The reason why I really like this new platform (and liked MeetEdgar) is because it allows you to create a social media post once and recycle it multiple times.

I’m not talking about posting the same thing over and over every single day, but creating a library of content that can then be recycled every few weeks or months.

While reviewing what I was doing with Meet Edgar previously, it dawned on me that I didn’t have any posts in my Facebook group instructing the group members to share Website 1.  

I did this with the hope that the website would maybe go viral again.

Lucky for me, it did.

And when it does, I tend to make quite a bit of money in a very short time. ​

I think the best part about this is that the website could potentially continue to go viral in the future as this is all automatically loaded in and people are joining the Facebook group I’ve created every single day.

Aside from ​the social media changes, this website is still running on autopilot.

The writer for my website did run out of topics and I had to replenish the ​Google Spreadsheet that we use​ to manage blog topics, but that was minimal work.

Consulting Update:  No consulting agreements for the month.  If you’re interested in my consulting services, shoot me an emailNote: My consulting is currently $​200 USD/hr.

Udemy Update: ​It looks like my time with the easy money from Udemy might be coming to an end.  At $23.90 for the month, this isn't even worth looking into. I think the most I ever made from Udemy in a given month was about $400 and while that’s decent, it’s hard for me to want to focus on this platform considering my websites can make that in a day.

OHP Website Update:  ​I'm still working on the transition to make this website so that it’s more focused as a financial blog versus an Internet marketing one.

I was really quiet in February and will probably be really quiet in March as well as I ​have a vacation with my wife scheduled, moved her to a new apartment, and have to move myself back to the United States.

That said, I have a close friend that I've wanted to go into business with for a long time and her and I agreed that this is a project we both want to work on. We’ve been talking about the idea of creating a podcast which is something I’ve always wanted to do, but we’ll have to see how all that pans out.  

More to come on this website in the future once we can focus on it.

Website 3 Update:  In February, I continued to p​lug along with this website building links as I have been doing for the last month or two.

I’m not currently having any additional blog content written, though it is something I’m considering, and my hope is that this website will eventually be noticed by Google as a reputable source.


Website 4 Update:

This website continues to amaze me. At one point, I was just hoping to hit $500 a month and when I did that in December, I assumed that that was the ceiling of the earning potential of this website.

However, January proved that that isn’t the case.

I’m not even going to make a guess as to what this website can make in February, but considering it’s a short month and I really think that I have hit a ceiling on the earnings for this website, I have to assume that it will be less than what I made in January.  But who knows, only time will tell.

This website has quickly become one of my most passive entities.  Really, I don’t do anything.

I have a writer who creates one article a week and an editor that edits that article and posts it for me.

Oh, and I also manage the Facebook group for the website which gets like 50-100 people requesting membership a day.  That sounds like it could be time consuming, but I’ve appointed two very active people in the group as administrators and they clean out the crap if it ever appears.

They also do this for free, so that’s a positive.

Because this Facebook group is growing so significantly, I’ve decided that I need to try to monetize it.  This is not an easy task for me as I’ve never been faced with this before.  In fact, the growth of this Facebook group has been very surprisingly to me.  I had no idea it would do so well.

So, here’s what I came up with.

I’ve decided to create a calendar where users submitted pictures and then I put those pictures into a calendar and try to sell it back to the group.

The idea now is that I’m going to print about 300 copies of the calendar, give 15 a way to those that submitted the best entries, and list the calendar on Amazon.

This is an interesting project for me for two main reasons.

First, it helps me understand how to monetize a Facebook group.

Second, this is technically my first entrance into the world of Amazon FBA and while I’m really not sure how this calendar will do, the Junglescout research tool I got a few months ago said that this could be a pretty profitable endeavor.

Again, I have no idea if it will succeed and I’m reluctant to spend $1000 to get all of the calendars made, but at this point I have to try it as it’s the only way I’ll ever learn.

Here are some stats for the website:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

Feb-18

104511

297

$382.03

Jan-18

131882

366

$467.71

Dec-17

87827

315

$432.22

Nov-17

121271

291

$574.91

Oct-17

100009

258

$617.67

Sep-17

71187

214

$348.16

Aug-17

78722

218

$391.68

Jul-17

99153

203

$344.91

Jun-17

97079

187

$423.04

May-17

72443

155

$214.17

Apr-17

43266

117

$116.65

Mar-17

51833

100

$224.16

Feb-17

43485

69

$160.48

Jan-17

26409

44

$104.19

Dec-16

9049

23

$49.50

Nov-16

5953

15

$22.11


KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • You’ll notice that the referring domains dropped quite a bit in February and frankly, I have no idea why that is. My thought is that Google must have previously had incorrect data and altered things as I looked at my actual link profile and didn’t lose a significant amount of referring domains.
  • Pageviews also dropped a little bit this month, but I think it’s okay as ​it was a short month.
  • Earnings dropped a little bit but nothing significant. For now I’m happy with how this website is going and my hope is that as I continue to build links I’ll eventually be rank higher in Google.

Website 4 Update:

Again, Website 4 surpasses my expectations.

I know one of these months it’s going to earn less than the prior month, but ever since it started it’s been a money-making machine.

I was able to further monetize the Facebook group by posting random affiliate products inside of the group itself and p​ost quite a few links in the group to all blog posts that I’ve written for the audience.

This was done in the middle of February, so I have no idea how much it’s going to impact the earnings moving forward, but hopefully we can get this bad boy to $1000 a month in earnings.

Here are my statistics for this website so far:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

Jan-18

57533

112

$718.04

Dec-17

49076

109

$555.72

Nov-17

43380

106

$479.34

Oct-17

37033

84

$349.02

Sep-17

31267

80

$223.95

Aug-17

25686

79

$181.93

Jul-17

19931

73

$85.84

Jun-17

10976

71

$31.71

May-17

6751

67

$9.67

Apr-17

3581

60

$0.00

Mar-17

2267

21

$0.00

Feb-17

1844

18

$0.00

Jan-17

3565

12

$0.00

Dec-16

418

6

$0.00

Nov-16

114

0

$0.00

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • The website revenue growth has been consistent ever since I started the website and has never had a single month where it was less than the prior month. This is a huge win for me and I’m hoping that this trend will continue.
  • As mentioned already in my post, I’ve created a calendar for the Facebook group of this website and my hope is that this will go really well. I will be reporting on this in the future, but I spent about $1,300 between all expenses to make this happen. The idea is that I’ll be able to get people to purchase the calendar from this group and then Amazon organic rankings will continue to sell the calendar moving forward.

Website 5 Update:  Website 5 continues to do well and the number of referring domains is increasing significantly.

My total earnings for February were a little bit less in January, but this was expected considering it was a short month.

Beyond that, at the end of February I noticed that income has dropped off pretty significantly as has some traffic to some of the pages that I’ve created.

While I’m not 100% sure how this is going to impact the website in March, I’m hypothesizing that there will be a decrease in total earnings for the website.

This is frustrating and it's definitely a setback, but I’m going to try to ​figure out why this is happening and continue to move forward with the other plans that I have for the website.

Beyond the drop in earnings from Google AdSense and Media.net, the other troubling thing with this website is that I’ve created two very in-depth review posts to try to get some affiliate income and those have been completely ignored by Google.

This is surprising to me because the domain authority should be able to carry these low competitive posts to the top of page one in Google, but that hasn’t been the case at all with this website.

According to Aherf’s, this website has a domain authority of 61 and that is the highest of any website I’ve ever created.

However, this domain authority hasn’t help me at all in ranking for these very low competition terms and I’m beginning to wonder how accurate that number actually is.

Pair that with the fact that this website is now only seven months old and there’s a chance that Google decided it was​ giving it too much credit too quickly.

Regardless of what’s happens, I’m going to stay the course as I know that things can change over time, but I still believe that this website can do really well in the future.

Here are my statistics for this website so far:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

Feb-18

50782

183

$454.08

Jan-18

73491

170

$486.99

Dec-17

54092

129

$114.05

Nov-17

23153

59

$4.31

Oct-17

6166

7

$0.00

Sep-17

92

1

$0.00

Aug-17

0

1

$0.00


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.

  • Nothing is Guaranteed: I hate to admit this, but I was already starting to count the checks rolling in from Website 5. Meaning, because of how well everything was going, I was convinced that it was going to continue and the website couldn’t possibly get penalized. Unfortunately though, toward the end of February, this began to happen and we’ll see how March plays out, but I think it’s going to be a bloodbath. The key learning takeaway here is to never take your rankings or income for granted. Enjoy it while it lasts, but realize that nothing is guaranteed in the world of websites and internet marketing.
  • Selling on Amazon is a HUGE hassle: I learned a LOT this month by listing my calendar on Amazon.com.  Mainly, I learned that selling on Amazon is a huge hassle and there are a lot of different things that need to be done in order to get your product into their database. However, I was able to do this and although it is a huge hassle, I’m convinced that it’s worth it once you get it right.
  • The Best Way to Learn Something is to do it Yourself:  To prepare for selling on Amazon I purchased a course through Udemy.com in the hopes that I would learn everything I needed to know. While this course is really well put together and helped me a lot, nothing could’ve possibly helped me learn more than going through the process of creating a product myself and listing it on Amazon.

Did I Meet my Goals for February?

Build 40 Links (FAIL)

I was only able to build 29 links in the month of February. That said, I don’t think I'll ​be too upset about building just over a link a day for the month, but I definitely need to step up here if I want to be successful with my websites moving forward.

Write a Review About Long Tail Pro (FAIL)

I’m lazy.

That’s all I have to say about it, I didn’t do this because I was lazy.

Plus, truth be told, I don’t really want to do this and the fact that I’m changing this website into a financial one very soon, I don’t know that it really makes sense to write this anymore.​

Get my Website 4 Calendar on Amazon for FBA (SUCCESS)

I’m happy to say that I was able to get my calendar listed on Amazon and it took up a ton of time this month, but it was a great​ learning experience.

Goals for ​March

Try to Rank the CK Review Posts

By the end of March, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to rank at least one of the CK review posts that I spent so much time writing. I really have no idea if I’ll be able to make this happen, but my plan is to build links to these posts in an effort to give them a boost in the eyes of Google.

Get 31 Links to My Website Portfolio

It’s amazing to me that I’m able to say this, but I’m stepping back my link building efforts and my hope is that I can get ​one link per day for the month of March. Remember, I have to move my wife to a new apartment, go on vacation, and then move myself to the United States. This is basically going to eat up two weeks of the month and if I’m able to build 31 links while that happens, then I’ll be pretty proud of myself.

Setup PPC Ads for Website 4 Amazon Product

While I’m not exactly sure how well Website 4 calendar is going to sell, the one thing I do know is that I have to set up Amazon PPC ads to continue to​sell it. The idea here is that I will be able to rank my product in the top three on Amazon for the search terms that I’m going for and organic sales will eventually carry this listing and keep it profitable.

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

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}
>