Before I dive too deeply into 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.

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 four items that jumped out to me this month:

• Udemy Income: Staying consistent with years prior, I saw an increase in earnings in the month of November and I have no doubt this has to do with black Friday. After seeing how good I did this month, I looked back in the past and saw that this is a very typical spike that you see this time year. While it was only just over $200, that’s almost a 100% increase from the prior month and I’ve done absolutely nothing to make it happen. Obviously, I’m pretty happy about that and give kudos to the Udemy team for their marketing efforts.
• OHP Website: There were quite a few random affiliate purchases this month which increased the amount of revenue that the OHP website made. Beyond that, I also saw that for some reason there were more purchases of Thrive Themes than usual. I didn’t do anything to make this happen, so I just assume that it had to do with the holiday season and their own marketing efforts.
• Website 5: This was the highest earning month for Website 5 at about $386 and this was a 21% increase from the prior month. While it still isn’t a ton of money, it’s good to see that the trend here is moving upward and revenue continues to increase.
• Website 3: This is an outlier for all the wrong reasons. There was a 26% decrease in revenue generated from this website in the month of November and while it was entirely my fault, it was a hard lesson learned.

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 were two items that jumped out to me this month:

• Calendar Printing Services: I had some additional printing costs for the calendar because the original run that they completed didn’t turn out correctly. This is partially my fault and partially their fault. I approved their file and didn’t notice that they had two months of June in the calendar itself.  Also, I had to pay a little bit extra as my original order wasn’t for the right calendar size. While this is more than I would’ve liked, I still think we can be profitable with this item on Amazon. I don’t want to call it a winner yet, but the calendar has been doing pretty well so far in the month of December.
• NeverBounce: This is a service that I use to review the email addresses that I’m going to complete outreach to for link building prior to sending any written emails. This is really important because the more bounced emails you have, the lower your deliverability rates are. And once people don’t see your emails, your link building efforts really suffer. If any of you are trying link building at scale and using email outreach to try to acquire those links, I highly recommend this service as they make the process very simple. Just upload a list of target emails and they will clean the list for you and let you know which ones are the bad apples to pick out of the bunch.

Website 3 Update:  Man, oh man, I really f&#ked up with this website in the month of November.

As I mentioned in my intro, it all came down to me adding a no index tag on the staging website.

Basically, whenever I roll out any large updates to any of my websites I first do a staging version of the website. This is a website that Google should never see and is an exact replication of my current website. The idea is that I create this website and test out all of the changes prior to pushing anything live.

This is exactly what I did and we made some pretty major updates that I think make the website much better. But, the problem was that I had a tag on the website telling Google that it should no longer index any of the pages.  I did this to make sure the staging version of the website wasn’t showing up in Google results.

Without realizing it, I pushed this version of the website with the no index tag live and my traffic absolutely tanked.

Here’s a picture of exactly what it looked like:

While I don’t think that I’m 100% back to where I was, I think that I’m about 95% of the way there and considering how bad it was, I’m happy with that outcome.

To recover from this absolutely stupid mistake like this, all I had to do was remove the tag and resubmit the site map index Google Search Console. Once I did that, Google took care of the rest.

Here’s a graph of the last 12 months of progress.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Double and triple cheWebsite 5 updates. Moving forward I’ll always check specifically if I have a tag added to the website.
• Backlinks are coming more easily. While it isn’t reflected in this report, I’ve noticed that many of my link targets really like the revisions that I made to the website and are more willing to link to me as a resource. This is incredibly important and I think that the total number of back links will increase significantly by the end of December.

Website 4 Update:

Not a whole lot to report for the month of November. There was a nice increase in referring domains and that’s because I have a link building strategy built into the website that continues to work.

One of the cool things that I’ve been able to do for this website is mostly related to the calendar.

Right now, if you go to Google and you search “Best Calendar for WEBSITE TOPIC”, my website is the number one Google search result.

If you go to Amazon and search “WEBSITE TOPIC Calendar”, my website is the number one search result.

Aside from all of this, I have a very large and engaged Facebook audience of about 16,000 people who I’m pushing to purchase the calendar as well.

All of this is leading to me being the industry leader for this particular type of calendar and while I’m not sure how it’s going to end up selling through the end of the month of December, this is exactly what I’d like to do with other physical products that I create in the future.

I’ve talked numerous times how I’d like to get onto Amazon as a seller because I’d like to diversify into physical products, and if I’m able to monopolize all of the search engines like I have with this calendar, it’s very likely that I’m going to create multiple revenue streams for years to come.

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

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Referring domains had another nice increase and earnings also increased. All of this helps the traffic maintain and keeps this as one of my steadier projects that I’ve worked on.

Website 5 Update: 

This website continues to grow and I think that I’m starting to see a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel.

While I’m still not exactly where I want to be, all of the link building that I’ve done here seems to be having a positive impact on the website and I continue to see growth in both traffic and earnings.

The referring domains continue to increase and though we finished the outreach for one of the databases, I have another one being built right now which should equate to somewhere between 50 to 100 additional links.

Once that’s done, I’m going to look into additional link building ideas and continue to try to increase the authority of this website for the next few months.

I’ve mentioned numerous times how we did product review writeups for this website and they didn’t rank. Well, those keywords I wrote about are now on page 3 and page 5 Google search results. While this isn’t getting me any traffic or commissions, it’s a significant increase from what they were previously and this is a very positive thing to see.

While I continue to build links, I’m also working to write two more review type of posts in an effort to see if a newly published articles can rank well.

I’ve also changed my strategy a little bit.  Now I’m looking at some of my weaker competitors and seeing what they’re website is ranking for. Once I see a keyword that they rank for that I think I can make something better than, I’m pouncing and trying to outrank them on Google.

By the end of December I’ll definitely know if this works and if it does, you can bet that I’ll have my writers writing more and more review type of content in an effort to further monetize this website.

Here are my statistics for this website so far:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Patience and persistence are still king. It took over a year for me to start to see any real movement on this website, and now you’re seeing that things are growing pretty significantly.
• Over the last two months I’ve had a 50% increase in traffic and I don’t see that stopping. This isn’t due to new content, it’s due to the fact that Google is beginning to give me better placement based on my previous efforts of content generation and link building.

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.

• Check and double check before major updates: I should have known this already, but before you ever do a major update on your website, really make sure that you check all of the things you change so that you can avoid an issue like I had. While I was able to recover, this was definitely something that hurt my online business for the month and if Google wasn’t willing to quickly change things, I’d really be hurting right now.
• Monopolizing Search Engines is Amazing: Not to say that I’ve done this multiple times, but the fact that I’m able to rank number one in Google and Amazon for the calendar that I’m trying to sell is pretty amazing. I’m not sure exactly how large of a producty this is going to be, but anybody that’s looking for this type of calendar during the holidays is going to find me and it’s pretty awesome to know that I was able to do this. Now, if I can do this with Evergreen products, it’s very likely that I’ll be making a healthy sum from each Amazon product that I launch in the future.
• Houses are time consuming: This has nothing to do with my online business, but owning a house is turning out to already be a lot of work. I don’t really mind this because it’s mine, but I’ve already spent a good 15 to 20 hours doing various tasks at the house with no end in sight.

Did I Meet my Goals for November?

Get BBC Calendar for Sale on Amazon (COMPLETED)

I was able to get the calendar up and for sale on Amazon. Not only that, I was able to get a quick increase in sales from the beginning, which led to me being ranked number one when people search for this type of calendar.

Brainstorm (FAIL)

I really wanted to step back and think about my business in the month of November, but with the house closing that just wasn’t possible. The next few months are going to be busy and it’ll be interesting to see how I balance my business and the house itself.

Better Understand Pinterest (FAIL)

I really wanted to do this in November but then I realized that I’m making a pretty foolish beginner mistake. Now that I’m seasoned, I’m a big fan of just in time learning. What this means is that I only learn about something just before I’m about to implement it in my business. While I could focus on understanding Pinterest now, the reality is that I’m a few months away from implementing it in my business so I need to hold off until I’m ready to actually implement it. I intend on training my virtual assistant on how to create a Pinterest following as well, so this is a large project.

What Are My Goals for December?

Publish CK Reviews

I mentioned it above, but I really want to make sure that I publish a few new review type blog posts on this website in the month of December. Now that the website seems to be growing organically and I have quite a few links, I’m hoping that reviews that are low competition will get ranked pretty quickly. If they do, I can quickly ramp up the earnings for this website.

Goal Setting for 2019

Setting year-long goals is something I’ve done since I started my online business and when doing so, I like to sit back and really reflect on the year itself. In 2018 I was able to grow my business by over 100% (second year in a row) and while I’m hoping I’ll be able to do that again in 2019, it could be a pretty lofty goal. That all said, I definitely want to take some time to think about it.

Relax and Work on the House

Relaxing and working on the house sounds like an oxymoron.  Most people would say you can only do one or the other, and not both. For me, believe it or not, I find some of the work that I have to do around the house relaxing as it feels good to complete something that is a part of the home that you own. I’m sure I’ll get sick of this eventually, but I want to take time in December to work less on my business and work on my home more to make it what we really want.

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