I’m very proud to report that March was the most successful month I’ve ever had for my business in terms of revenue.  I was SUPER excited to earn over $40,000 for the first time ever (outside of selling websites and seeing huge anomalous spikes). 

This was such a big moment for me that my wife and I went out to a casino to celebrate!

Where I promptly lost $200 gambling in blackjack.

…..I should probably find a better way to celebrate.

Anyway, there were many positive things that occurred across various different websites in March that I’ll discuss in the report below.

I’d say that the highlight of this month is the fact that website 6 is absolutely knocking it out of the park.  I’ll get into more details within the reports, but I’m seeing some crazy good traffic and earning increases there.

This month my total income after expenses was $21,123 which comes out to $681 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.

March was a bit more exciting than February from a personal standpoint.

While our little baby girl hasn’t been born yet, there’s been a lot of doctors appointments and preparation for our first child.

My wife has done an amazing job of getting our nursery ready and at this point we are going to the doctor often to make sure things are moving along nicely.  At this point, they are and we are super excited to have our little girl join us soon.  

NOTE:  This report was delayed because Saara, our new baby girl was born on April 5^th.  We induced her on April 3^rd and it took a few days for her to actually come out.  Needless to say, it’s been a busy start to the month which has delayed this publishing and in my next income report, I’ll share some pics etc. to introduce her to all of you. 

That’s all for the personal update.

I’m happy to report that this was the most profitable month for the OHP website since it’s started.  Affiliate income continues to rise and it looks as if I’m beginning to hit a stride with the site.

It’s been very frustrating getting to this point because it’s just so darn competitive compared to other niche websites that I have, but there were a lot of positive things this month that are showing a lot of positive momentum. 

While traffic dropped a little bit MoM, I think the thing that I’m most excited about is how much I’m earning per thousand views.  I think the highest I’ve ever had with a site before was around $50, but now the site has eclipsed that by 4x and I’m hoping to continue this trend.

Again, this shows that the right traffic is much more important than hundreds of thousands of unqualified pageviews.

• Pageviews decreased MoM by 7% to 57k.
• This month I earned: $12,527. Earnings increased MoM by 26%. 
• EPM increased MoM to $219

PLAN:  For now I’m going to keep pushing forward with the OHP site just as I have in the past.  Things are working and I think I’d be a fool to change my approach now.  I’m continuing to contribute 3-4 guest posts each week and I’m shifting my content strategy a little bit to focus more on software roundup posts as opposed to simple reviews.

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 18% to 161k.
• This month I earned: $4,514. Earnings increased MoM by 23%. 
• EPM increased MoM to $28.04

PLAN:  I’m going to keep publishing one blog post per week for the site.  It’s using a writer that I already have on staff and when I publish new content here it ranks quickly.  This site is primarily focused on display ads and while the earnings aren’t bad, I don’t want to focus too much here as some of my other sites have a much bigger opportunity in my opinion. 

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.

I did have an interesting situation come up this month where an individual contacted me trying to take out an ad on the website.  I agreed to help and this ended up earning me an additional $500 this month.

• Pageviews decreased MoM by 2% to 63k.
• This month I earned: $1,703. Earnings increased MoM by 32%. 
• EPM increased MoM to $27.19

PLAN:  This site is currently 100% passive and I do not work on it.  I intend on selling this site once I’m consistently making enough from other sites to justify it.

Without a doubt, this is the number one growth site in my portfolio currently.  Not only did I see significant growth in page views this month, but earnings far surpassed my expectations.

 I suspect that this growth isn’t sustainable and will be slowing down over the next couple of months, but as long as I continue to move in a positive direction I’ll be happy.

• This month I earned: $1,245. Earnings increased MoM by 127%. 
• EPM increased MoM to $29.79
• How Much Have I Invested in This Website: $7,036 ($800 Content budget each month)
• How Much Money Has This Website Made? $6,206
• Total ROI: -$830 (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? 243 informational blog posts

My link building for the site continues as well:

• Shotgun Skyscraper: I’m still working on launching this campaign.  It’s become a lot more annoying to warm up an email account than it used to be and I’m having a problem doing so.  That said, I’m almost at the finish line on this and should be able to get this done shortly.
• Image Link building: Many images have been uploaded to the Internet in an effort to encourage others to link to us through the placement of these images.  From my experience, this is a long-term link-building tactic, but we have hundreds of targets at this point.
• Guest Posting: The research for these guest posting opportunities continues and while we found a lot of targets, it’s a little bit more difficult to find the right opportunities in this niche than I expected.  That said, I still think will be able to find plenty of opportunities.   
• 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 two 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.

PLAN: My team and I are continuing to develop content for the site.  I purposely focused on much higher search volume terms in an effort to grow the site in a short amount of time.  We’re talking about the types of queries that are searched 30,000 times per month or more.  While I haven’t seen any big traffic increases yet on these high-volume posts, my hope is that this will happen soon and I’ll be able to grow the traffic to the site exponentially in a very short amount of time.

Again, there was a slight decline in page views and earnings for the second month in a row.  I’m not too concerned about it because it was such a small drop, but at the same time, I’m not a fan of watching this site decline after so many months of it growing so well.

I’m not necessarily hitting the panic button yet, but my hope is that the site gets more love in April than it did in March.

• Pageviews decreased MoM by 2% to 154k.
• This month I earned: $6,669. Earnings decreased MoM by 1%. 
• EPM remained the same MoM at $43
• How Much Have I Invested in This Website: $43,160 ($1800 Content budget each month)
• How Much Money Has This Website Made? $78,777
• Total ROI: $35,617 (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 $282,000)
• How Much Content is on the Website: Keep in mind that this is an informational type of website, not affiliate-related at all.
  • 1757 Informational pages on the website
  • 171 Informational Blog Posts

PLAN: As of now I intend to continue to move forward with exactly how things have been going on the site.  Over the last couple of months, I’ve increased the content budget and while I haven’t seen a big return on investment from that yet, I do believe that with time this will end up paying off.

I’m not going to do any link building near or adjust my strategy significantly because the site gets a lot of links naturally at this point.  For now, we’ll just continue to publish content and hope that the rankings will continue to increase 

This site had a decent increase in traffic this month and while I’m not entirely sure if this will sustain itself over the next few months.  This was paired with an increase in earnings that was significant as well, so hopefully, this is the next site up to explode in growth.  That’s the idea that we had in our heads when we built it, but it hasn’t happened yet.  

• Pageviews increased MoM by 8% to 11k.
• This month I earned: $188. Earnings increased MoM by 23%. 
• EPM increased MoM to $17
• How Much Have I Invested in This Website: $9,764 ($400 Content budget each month)
• How Much Money Has This Website Made? $1,872
• Total ROI: -$7,892 (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. 
  • 300 Informational Blog Posts

PLAN:  For now I’m going to continue to publish 2-3 posts per week while slowly building relevant backlinks when I have a chance.  Though I’m pushing really hard to build backlinks on website 6 at the moment, I’m taking a much more lax approach here as I’m not seeing as many opportunities.  But, when I do see them, I’m definitely taking advantage.

• Pageviews decreased MoM by 8% to 810.
• This month I earned: $14. Earnings decreased MoM by 7%. 
• EPM remained the same MoM at $17
• 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 meant to hire a new writer for the site and begin producing more content, but I find it very difficult to justify the expense with all the other opportunities I’m facing at the moment.  Month to month this site is pretty stagnant and while the authority of the domain is growing, I just haven’t seen a growth trend that coincides.

• Pageviews increased MoM by 33% to 2.7k.
• 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: For now this site is just going to sit.  I’m very well aware that I should be producing new content for it, but I just can’t justify hiring someone to do so as it is such a minimal opportunity compared to other sites in my portfolio at the moment.  As of now, my money is definitely better spent increasing production on other sites, and for the foreseeable future that’s exactly what I’ll be doing instead of investing here.

Another month of this YouTube channel showed a steady increase in earnings compared to the past.  For some reason, there was a pretty large jump in earnings this month and I can’t attribute that to anything other than fluctuation of ad revenue.  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 7% to 261k.
• This month I earned: $1,382. Earnings increased MoM by 25%. 
• Subscriber growth increased MoM by 1%.
• How Much Did We Invest in This YouTube Channel: $4,620 (Estimate of $350/month in expenses)
• How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $14,091
• Total ROI: $9,471 (If I were to sell the channel today, I can assume I’d sell for an estimated $38k. Which means a net gain of about $47k)

PLAN:  The team that my wife and I (mostly my wife to be honest) have built continues to publish videos 5 times a week and we intend on keeping that publishing schedule.

Views continue to drop for the OneHourProfessor YouTube channel this month and I understand why.  It just isn’t a good business move for me to get involved in this channel right now as my time is better spent elsewhere.  I may eventually get back to it, but YouTube is quite a content treadmill and I’m not a big fan of the business model.  Call me crazy, but I’d rather have a passive platform instead. 

• Views decreased MoM by 11% to 16k.
• This month I earned: $349. Earnings decreased MoM by 21%. 
• Subscriber growth decreased MoM by 17%
• How Much Have I Invested in This YouTube Channel: $3,927
• How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $14,314
• Total ROI: $10,387 (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, plus it’s more lucrative. 

Unfortunately, it looks like we are 1 for 2 in the Faceless YouTube channel model.  While my wife and I agreed that this channel made a lot of sense, it’s become apparent that this isn’t the case and it’s not going to be successful.  Not only does the channel have a very small amount of views, but the earnings are very poor compared to other channels we’ve started.  If you’re interested in building an outsourced YouTube channel like this, I recommend that you check out this webinar.

• Views increased MoM by 24% to 7.9k.
• This month I earned: $12. Earnings increased MoM by 9%. 
• Subscriber growth decreased MoM by 2%
• How Much Have We Invested in This YouTube Channel: $4,100 (We’ve stopped investing here)
• How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $57
• Total ROI: -$4,043 (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 we’re able to get a significant amount of views on the channel, the earnings per thousand views are in the range of $2 to $3, which just isn’t enough to justify working on the project. 

Thalita’s vlog had another good month but she’s going to be cutting back on her contributions here.  She’s been wavering on whether or not she should continue to produce content here over the last few months because of how low the pay is per thousand views.  Even though the channel is growing significantly, because it’s in Brazil, it’s going to take a very long time to earn a decent income from it. 

• Views increased MoM by 15% to 86k.
• This month she earned: $148. Earnings increased MoM by 29%. 
• Subscriber growth decreased MoM by 2%
• How Much Did We Invest in This YouTube Channel: $2,110 (Estimate of $160/month in expenses)
• How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $918
• Total ROI: -$1,192

PLAN:  Instead of continuing to work on this Youtube channel, Thalita is partnering with me on website six and will only be posting on this channel when she has the time.  In other words, this is going to turn into more of a hobby project.  That said, this will be my last month including it in my income report.  It just isn’t profitable enough to justify the efforts. 

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.

• Pour Gas on the Right Fires: As you can see from this income report, website 6 had a HUGE jump in earnings this last month and I attribute that to the fact that I recognized the site was doing well and went all in.  So the lesson this month is to notice when a site is showing potential and push hard to grow it as much as you can when the signs are there.
• Know When to Quit: There are two faceless Youtube channels that my wife and I are basically quitting this month.  One is her blog, the other is a themed channel we made a while ago.  This goes along with the usual advice to cut your losers when they aren’t panning out and instead focused on the winners after you’ve given a proper amount of time to projects.  
• Celebrate the Small Things: While making $40k in revenue for the month wasn’t really a big deal in the grand scheme of things this really wasn’t a big deal, but it was a HUGE moment of success for me.  I’d really like to get to 100k/month consistently in revenue by the end of 2022, so we’ll see if this is a glimpse of things to come.