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Another amazing month for my online business and actually the third-best month I’ve ever had. This particular month was incredibly exciting because I’m really starting to see a lot of hard work from the past beginning to pay off.

For much of the time that I’ve had an online business, one of my websites accounted for at least 80% of my earnings every single month. However, that is no longer the case and I really feel like this could eventually end up doubling my income as one of my websites is growing at an astronomical rate and showing no signs of slowing down.

In the month of May I was able to make an average of $356.80 per day after expenses.

This month’s highlights included;

  • Website 3 is starting to crush it and I am confident that as time goes on, this will continue to grow. If this website is able to do everything that I think it can, it will eventually surpass all of the other properties that I have combined in terms of revenue.
  • A negative turned to a huge positive as I was able to take a suspension from the Indeed.com job API and partner with a company that may end up paying me an extra $3000 per month when all is said and done.

On a personal level, I was able to work for the entire month of May and it felt nice. It feels like I’ve been so distracted with different things going on that my concentration in my business has been diverted, but this month I was 100% focused and it really shows with all of the stuff I got accomplished.

My wife and I have a trip planned to Peru in the middle of June and it’s going to be a week long. I’m really excited to see Machu Picchu as it’s something I’ve had on my bucket list forever and it’s nice to know that my businesses will continue to run even without me here. I’ll try to post a few pictures for you guys.

For those of you that are tired of hearing me report that I’m making over $10,000 per month and wondering why it can’t happen to you, I highly recommend that you take my free course that explains how to start an authority website.

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
ShutterstoWebsite 5 Images$23.62$23.62
Udemy Course Sales$44.40$44.40
Thrive Themes$252.00$252.00
Partners and Affiliates Revenue
OHP Partners and Affiliates$0$0
Website 5 Partners and Affiliates$8.42$8.42
Website 3 Partners and Affiliates$35.97$35.97
Website 4 Partners and Affiliates$315.00$315.00
Website 1UB Partners and Affiliates$1,380.82$1,380.82
YouTube Revenue
Personal VLOG Channel$9.00$9.00
OHP YouTube Channel$91.82$91.82
Media.net Revenue
Website 3 Media.net Ad Revenue$28.62$28.62
Website 4 Media.net Ad Revenue$118.52$118.52
Website 1UB Media.net Ad Revenue$451.90$451.90
Amazon FBA Revenue
Website 4 Calendar$50.12$50.12
Google Adsense Revenue
Website 2 Adsense Revenue$6.96$6.96
OHP Adsense Revenue$15.49$15.49
Website 5 Adsense Revenue$31.81$31.81
Website 4 Adsense Revenue$215.55$215.55
Website 3 Adsense Revenue$4223.67$4223.67
Website 1ub Adsense Revenue$7320.22$7320.22
Software Expenses
Intuit Quick Books$10.00-$5.00
Adobe Photoshop Account$10.61-$10.61
Google Business Drive Storage and Apps$12.09-$12.09
Mailshake Email Software$19.00-$19.00
Deadline Funnel$37.00-$37.00
Epidemic Sound$45.00-$45.00
Namecheap$58.68-$58.68
Ahrefs.com$99.00-$99.00
Active Campaign$118.17
-$118.17
Active Campaign$135.00-$135.00
Siteground Hosting$150.00-$150.00
Freelance Labor Expenses
Freelance Writing and Editing$1344.77-$1344.77
Freelance Research and Labor$1536.20-$1536.20
TOTALS$14632.61$3575.52$11057.09
Revenue By ChannelWebsite 1ub WebsiteWebsite 3OHP WebsiteWebsite 4Website 2Website 5ConsultingUdemyYouTube
May 2018$9152.94$4288.26$391.63$699.19$6.96$40.23$0$44.40$100.82
April 2018$9637.30$2028.65$545.01$804.71$11.74$236.23$0$24.90$85.48
March 2018$14236.64$778.01$380.29$1362.83$13.78$224.68$0$80.61$94.79
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 two items that jumped out to me this month:

  • Website 1UB Partners and Affiliates Revenue: Because I was essentially cut off from the API at Indeed.com, I was forced to seek other partners that could showcase jobs on the website. Lucky for me, I was able to find one and this is what accounted for the increase in revenue. To be completely honest with you, I feel like the solution that I have now is actually better than what the results were showing with Indeed anyway, so it’s a win for myself and my website visitors.
  • Website 3 Overall Revenue: This website continues to grow in traffic and this growth is driving a whole lot of Google AdSense revenue. I expect June to be even better and I’m really excited to see how far this website can go.

 

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.

There was one item that jumped out to me this month:

  • Freelance Research and Labor: When Indeed cut me off from using their API, there was a solid two weeks where my website didn’t have any job listings showing. This is obviously a very big problem and the increase in labor costs is because I had to fire my old developer and find a new one to solve this issue. It was expensive, and I’ll still incur some additional costs in June, but this is an outlier for my expenses that was absolutely required.

Project Updates

Website 1UB Update:  While this website is almost always very uneventful each month, May was an exception.

This website is focused on helping people get jobs and used to use the Indeed.com API in order to show all of the different jobs available.

For some reason, and I really have no idea why, the folks at Indeed feel like my traffic is “unqualified”.  I have no idea what this means and can’t seem to get a straight answer from them, but this led to me losing access to their API to showcase jobs on my website.

This was obviously a very big problem and one that I’m still annoyed by. They actually did this to me before, but I was able to just reapply for another account and make it so that I had access again.

However, this time that wasn’t the case. None of the traffic that I send their way is fake and I’ve never done anything to try to game the system, but they just insist that it’s not good enough.

You know what I say that?

Screw em’

It sucks that they won’t let me show their listings on my website, but this also forced me to find another partner and because I did it looks like I’ll now be making around $3000 extra per month.

The reason is because this other partner will pay me every time I send traffic to them and someone clicks on a job listing that’s sponsored.  This is what really annoyed me about Indeed revoking my API access. 

With them, I didn’t even have a publisher engagement so they never had to pay me anything.  All I was doing was using their API to send traffic their way and apparently this wasn’t okay.

If you ever create a job website, realize that this is one of the risks. If anybody ever asks, I’ll do my absolute best to recommend that they use anyone but Indeed to showcase jobs on their website. 

They won’t let you join their publisher program and if they do, they may ban you and never explain why that is.

Consulting Update: No consulting agreements for the month.  If you’re interested in my consulting services, shoot me an emailNote: My consulting is currently $300 USD/hr.

Udemy Update: My thoughts on Udemy?  Who cares.  My revenue from this channel continues to fall and I’m okay with that, it’s just not where my focus is nowadays.

OHP Website Update:  This was the month where I was hoping to relaunch this website in an effort to make it more focused as a financial blog.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case because my partner has had some pretty serious personal issues that she’s been dealing with and it’s delaying everything.

To be completely honest, it’s not really a big deal because I already have enough on my plate. That said, keep this in mind if you ever try to partner someone.  It’s difficult for me to not begin because when I have an idea and I want to start, I tend to do research and begin immediately.

She’s very different in that she wants a calculated approach. 

Not that this is a bad thing, but my experience has taught me sometimes you just need to start in order to learn.

All that said, hopefully things calm down on her end soon and we can get things started.

Website 3 Update:  I’m obviously ecstatic to see how successful this website did in the month of May. I genuinely think that in time this could surpass all of my other channels in terms of earnings, but we’ll have to see how well I can do.

Here are some stats for Website 3 for the last 12 months:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

May-18

237151

349

$4,288.26

Apr-18

175754

335

$2,028.65

Mar-18

147139

303

$778.01

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

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • The referring domains jumped again this month and I expect that to continue for a little while longer. As of right now I’m in the process of a “deep” link building campaign. This essentially means that instead of building links to the homepage, I’m putting more of a focus on getting links to specific pages. While this is much more difficult to do, I’m beginning to see some success and am hopeful that this success will continue.
  • Earnings grew over 100% MoM. It’s pretty incredible to see how quickly this website is growing. For such a long time it wasn’t getting any love from Google and I continued to build links. Now you can see that the earnings are becoming very significant.

Website 4 Update:

There really wasn’t a whole lot of activity on this website in the month of May.

I’m not even publishing blog posts anymore as I feel like we’ve written pretty much everything that we can and I’m kind of just letting it sit right now.

Earnings did drop a little bit for the month, but a big reason for this is because the calendar that I was previously including in my earnings has now stopped selling.

As you may recall from my February Income report, I launched a 2018 calendar for the audience of this website and it actually did pretty well overall, but those earnings are stopping now that we’re halfway to the year.

Here are my statistics for this website in the last 12 months:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

May-18

47806

147

$699.19

Apr-18

55862

143

$804.71

Mar-18

66996

128

$1,362.83

Feb-18

58672

113

$838.51

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

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • I need to find a way to increase the income for this website. To be completely honest, I’m leaning towards the idea of creating specific products on Amazon that relate to the main topic of the website, but I’m not 100% sure if it’s a good idea.

    While this is a large market, creating the products in this category are going to be a pretty large undertaking. But, if I’m able to capitalize on this and utilize the Facebook group which now has 10,000 people in it to showcase the product(s), it’s likely that I could make a couple thousand dollars a month from it. I’m going to have to look into this further, it’s just not something that’s a priority at the moment.

Website 5 Update:  This website is still struggling quite a bit and although I’ve built a significant amount of backlinks, it doesn’t seem to matter to Google at this point.

I’m working to continue to generate back links for this website to show Google that it is worthy of getting ranked, but there’s definitely a lot of work to do here and it could be months before I see any movement.

Here are my statistics for this website so far:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

May-18

31276

216

$40.23

Apr-18

32821

206

$236.23

Mar-18

32968

201

$224.68

Feb-18

50782

192

$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

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Referring domains increased a decent amount, but I need to continue to grow this in order to be successful. In my eyes, this is the number one metric that is going to get this website out of its slump and the only way I can do it is to link building campaigns.
  • Income dropped off a cliff in the month of May and I’m actually okay with that. Believe it or not, this was a move that I did on purpose in an effort to reduce the amount of ads on my website. Because there such a focus of link building right now, and my other websites are doing so well, I’d much rather put a platform with very few ads in front of people to try to entice them to give me links. I also wanted to see if the ads were hurting my rankings, but it didn’t appear to be true.

    For now, I’ve have added ads to the top 10 pages on the website in an effort to generate a little bit of income, but my focus right now is growth and back links.

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.

  • Deep Linking is Tough: I’ve focused so much time lately on trying to get deep links to my website, that I’m realizing just how difficult this is. The typical strategy that people do is try to write guest blog posts because when you do this, you’re usually able to link specifically to a page that you want people to see. As great as that is, I’m realizing that people almost always want money in order to make that happen and technically buying links is against Google’s terms of service. That said, it’s kind of a gray area because it isn’t against Google’s terms of service to purchase a sponsored post, which inevitably has a link in it. I’m still trying to figure out my plan of action on this because it isn’t easy, but deep linking is very challenging if you don’t use PBN’s, and this is something I absolutely refuse to do.
  • Always Have a Backup Plan:  The fact of the matter is that I should have been ready for Indeed to remove their API access. This already happened to me before and I was able to quickly fix it, but this month I learned a hard lesson that you should always have a backup plan when working exclusively with one partner. Truth be told, this type of situation just occurs sometimes and you have to have something in your mind as a fix if it does.

Did I Meet my Goals for May?

30 Backlinks to my Portfolio (SUCCESS)

According to the data in Google search Console, I had 64 new links added to my websites this month. I actually know for a fact that this is an overestimate, but this is what Google is recognizing so I’m going to go with it. If I had to guess about links actually built, it’s probably around 30….but Google didn’t recognize links already built I guess. 

Finish Building CK Database and Start New One (SUCCESS)

It’s awesome to see the new database being built and once it’s completed it’ll have around 1000 pages added on to my website. The entire process is completely outsourced and though it is costing me some money to create, I have no doubt that in time this will pay off.

Get Plans All Set for the OHP Podcast (FAIL)

As I said earlier, my partner is having some pretty significant personal issues that she’s dealing with and it stopped me from achieving this goal. But, I guess that’s what you get when you partner with somebody. I don’t have full control of everything. If I did have full control, I have no doubt that I’d probably already be creating my podcast every single week.

What Are my Goals for June?

10 Deep Backlinks to my Portfolio

Instead of just getting backlinks to my portfolio, this month I want to make a goal of getting 10 deep backlinks. In other words, links to specific pages on my website other than the home page. I’m really not 100% sure if I’ll be able to do this, but if I can I’m going to see some very significant gains in revenue by ranking pages that will yield the most income for me.

Begin Outreach for New CK Database

Almost all of the links that I have on Website 5 are because of the first database I built. Now, my goal is to begin outreach for the second database that’s already being built in an effort to increase the number of links to this website.

Plan an Infographic Campaign for Website 5

Because links are such an important part of succeeding, I decided that I’m going to launch an infographic campaign for Website 5.  Truth be told, I’ve never done one of these before and I’m really not 100% sure what the best practices are.

In the month of June, I’m going to do my best to plan this and try to find a quality infographic designer to create something.

 

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

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