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Complete Insanity.

This year has FLOWWWWN by for me and I can’t believe we’re already at the end of October.

I’m not gonna lie…I’m getting nervous about my $10,000 a month goal by end of 2017.

This month I pushed hard on all monetization methods across my website portfolio and although it was a good month, I’m still about $1725 away from my goal. 

There’s still hope, but it’s definitely going to come down to December and with the holidays, I don’t know that I’ll hit my goal.

But hey, $8000 a month isn’t too bad either….

I expect a dip in income this month because I’ve decided this is the month of link building.  SO much so that I’ve issued a challenge for myself.

Long story short, Website 5 has 61 articles and very little traffic.

The remedy?  Backlinks.

I’m going to try to build 60 total links in 30 days between three of my websites.  Website 5 Website 4, and THQ. 

To be clear, these are NOT forum links, purchased links, or anything like that. 

Can I do it???

Well, it’s now day 3 of the month and I already have 7 links, so we’ll see.

Anyway, let’s move into the report.

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$5.70$5.70
ShutterstoWebsite 5 Images$21.00$21.00
Udemy Course Sales$135.59$135.59
Thrive Themes$234.65$234.65
Partners and Affiliates Revenue
OHP Partners and Affiliates (Excluding listed above)$0$0
Website 4 Partners and Affiliates$192.62$192.62
Website 1UB Partners and Affiliates$601.63$601.63
YouTube Revenue
Personal VLOG Channel$13.96$13.96
OHP YouTube Channel$52.75$52.46
Media.net Revenue
Website 3 Media.net Ad Revenue$14.19$14.19
Website 4 Media.net Ad Revenue$28.17$28.17
Website 1UB Media.net Ad Revenue$309.95$309.95
Google Adsense Revenue
OneHourProfessor.com Adsense Revenue$4.03$4.03
Website 2 Adsense Revenue$13.06$13.06
Website 4 Adsense Revenue$98.23$98.23
Website 3 Adsense Revenue$603.48$603.48
Website 1 Adsense Revenue$5947.59$5947.59
Software Expenses
Google Drive Storage$2.09-$2.09
Adobe Photoshop Account$10.61-$10.61
Gmass Email Software$12.95-$12.95
Intuit Quick Books$16.99-$16.99
Legal Shield$29.90-$29.90
Deadline Funnel$37.00-$37.00
Epidemic Sound$45.00-$45.00
Meet Edgar Social Media Platform$49.00-$49.00
Namecheap$52.59-$52.59
Siteground Hosting$172.13-$172.13
Active Campaign$135.00-$135.00
Freelance Labor Expenses
Freelance Research and Labor$848.61
-$848.61
Freelance Writing and Editing$1245.10-$1245.10
TOTALS$8,276.60$2,656.97$5,610.63
Revenue By ChannelWebsite 1Website 3OHP WebsiteWebsite 4Website 2ConsultingUdemyYouTube
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 four items that jumped out to me this month:

  • THQ Google Adsense Income: Probably the best thing about this month was the 77% increase in earnings with the THQ website.  I’ll get into more detail of why this happened in the project update below, but it mostly came down to more ads on the website.
  • Website 4 Income: Income from Website 4 increased yet again. This month it was about 43%.  Unfortunately, I don’t see it growing much larger than this, though I have implemented some new things to help try to grow it a little bit more that I’ll get into during the project update.
  • Udemy: Udemy sales popped right back up when I agreed to the fixed-price Udemy promotions.  Not much of an increase here, just sales returning to normal.
  • OHP Partners and Affiliates: There was a big drop in OHP income.  Reason?  Well, I’m going to chalk it up to bad luck and nothing more.

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 are two items that I think are worth discussing this month:

  • Freelance Labor: Without a doubt, my biggest increase in expenses are here. My expenses are increasing because I’ve hired four researchers to help me gather emails for backlinking and my writers continue to push forward.  In addition, I’ve also added an editor to the mix. 

    I used to do all the editing of articles myself, but now I literally work under 4 hours a week on Website 1 and make right around $6800. 

    Now….if only I could replicate this success lol.
  • Siteground Hosting: I had to upgrade my hosting again this last month and although it costs a little bit more now, I always feel a sense of pride when I have to do this.  Why?  Simple….

    Needing a better server means you have more traffic and are likely making more money. 

Project Updates

Website 1 Update:  This is what the four-hour work week looks like.  I always thought Tim Ferris had a cool idea, but the reality is that the whole concept of barely working and making thousands of dollars seemed ridiculous.

Well, now that my editor is in place, I’m actually living it. I have to be honest, it feels good. 

Each week all I do is make sure my editor posted the content, write a newsletter, and moderate emails and the Facebook group.  In total, under four hours of work for the week for sure.

In the future, all I have planned for this website is to keep adding content on the blog. 

Consulting Update:  Nada to update here, but that’s okay.  I like consulting just to talk to peeps in this space, but it isn’t something I need to get by.

If you’re interested in my consulting services, shoot me an emailNote: My consulting is currently $150 USD/hr.

Udemy Update: The “Creating a Successful Authority Website” course is still off of Udemy and I’ve hosted on this website instead.  You can get a free mini course here that leads up to the paid course.

That said, income has normalized off of mainly one course about email marketing.  I suspect this will drop over time and I don’t intend on making more courses on this platform.  That said, I’m sure some people would be thrilled at $100 a month in passive income, but now I can make website that generate more so I’ll focus on that.

OneHourProfessor.com Website Update:  Not really much to say as I didn’t work on the website this month.  I still want to add reviews about Gmass and Thrive Architect, but I just haven’t found the time to do so yet.

I think I’m also going to write one on OIO Publisher as it’s a pretty cool way to quickly and easily put ads that you want to sell on your own website.

THQ Website Update:  Content for the website is 100% completed and after about a year of adjustments and changes, this website is finally where I’m happy with it. 

The changes I made to the website content have already made a positive impact to the website.  Below are a few things I did and as you’ll see in the traffic stats, pageviews increased by 28% for the month, which means my methods are working.

  1. Changed the title tags to increase the click through rate from the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The average increase of CTR was about 0.50%, which is a very solid gain.
  2. Changed the content on the page to better match highly searched terms in the SERP. For instance, I added the “Near me” blurb to a few areas to show higher relevancy in the SERP for queries like this and it worked beautifully.
  3. Most websites in this niche have a list of things for people to view and that’s it, there is no depth. I went a step beyond by creating a similar list, but then making it where people could click to learn even more about each topic.  This is something no competitors did and increased my site time and pages per visit significantly.

    I don’t know exactly when you could say I made the changes because they were iterative over the last few months, but…in terms of results:

    September Pages/Session: 2.81
    October Pages/Session: 3.39

    Increase of 20.59%


September Avg. Session Duration: 1:48

October Avg. Session Duration: 2:16

Increase of 26.04%

September Bounce Rate: 67.56%

October Avg. Session Duration: 62.01%

Decrease of 8.23%

All positive results and I’m hopeful that these paired with the increase in CTR from the SERP will catapult the growth of this website.

  1. I put ads all across the website this month at about 80% ad coverage. I did this to see what the website is capable of making and though it was a big increase, I’m still not happy.  The reason is because this website can be REALLY big in terms of traffic, and It’s only about ¼ of where I think it should be.  Because of this, I am pulling down many of the ads on the website this month and focusing much more intently on backlinking. 

I’m going this route because this website could truly be massive and if I can get ranked on the right terms, 500,000 pageviews a month seems feasible.  That would mean right around $3-$4k a month, which would be awesome.

Due to this strategy, I expect a drop in income in November, but I also expect a big increase in the future earnings based on the link building (and eventual ranking increases) that will happen.

Here are some stats for the website:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

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

Website 4 Update: I have a feeling that the months of 40% income increase month over month are over for this website.  I feel like October was probably close to full earning capacity.

I did integrate an ad module to the website using OIO Publisher which, from what I’ve seen, is a pretty cool plugin.  This allowed me to add text ads to the website and that’s a huge bonus as I don’t have to deal with banner images and design.

As of now, those ads are highlighted with a yellow background on specific pages and I think they could potentially do well.

I’m charging advertisers $30 for 30 days and I think it would actually make sense for them to purchase 2-3 at once when the time is right. 

I can’t explain much more about these ads without giving away the niche, but they would purchase multiple ads because certain times of the year they’ll have an influx of products.

The only other thing I may add to the website now is an ecommerce drop shipping store. 

Haven’t ever done this before, but I could see it making a little bit of money.  Plus, this is definitely going to be something I do with Website 5 so I may as well do it here first to learn it.

Here are my statistics for this website so far:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

Oct-17

37033

84

$319.02

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



Website 5 Update:  Website 5 is well on its way to becoming a (hopefully) HUGE website in the future.  I’m not making any money with this one, but I know of a way that I’ll make some decent adsense income while I grow the rest of the website. 

For now, I’m building multiple databases and I think those will pay some decent adsense earnings.  Hopefully they can bring in $500-$1000 each month while I build out the rest of the content, which will mostly be affiliate.

This website is the first of any of mine that could eventually become REALLY big. 

My plan is to grow it in traffic as much as I can to somewhere between 300-500k pageviews monthly, and then I plan on actually making products for the brand and selling on Amazon.

To me, this is where the real money is and if I can do things right, I see no reason why I couldn’t pull in $10k a month with this website alone. 

The idea will be to use this website as a vehicle to grow my Amazon business/brand while simultaneously growing the website.  I’ll utilize reviews and my email list to send people to the Amazon store to buy the products.

For now, we’re just at the starting stages…but I do think this one will be huge by the end of 2018.

In October I started link building the last few days of the month and it shows below. 

That said, it’s a miniscule amount of backlinks, but I’ve got a great system down now and think I can add quite a few links in November.

Here are my statistics for this website so far:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

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.

  • STOP what isn’t working: In the last few months, I redid my sales funnel for my course and did webinars every single week to try to entice sales.  The result?  1 sale that can’t even be attributed to the webinars.  Although the webinars were fun for me, I spent at least 8-10 hours working on them and all of the other stuff and only made $100.  I think it’s time to call it quits on this project.  The course is still really good and I’ll never understand why people aren’t buying it, but I’m done focusing on it.
  • Systematizing Backlinking is Huge: I still don’t have this fully outsourced, but I’ve got a pretty good process in place to try to make a system out of backlinking.  Because of this, I feel like efficiency in this area is at an all-time high and I expect great things for Website 5 due to this.
  • Editors are Worth Every Penny: I was hesitant to get an editor because I was being a cheap control freak and doing things myself.  But now that I have one, there is no way I will ever look back.  An editor reads over everything, gives writers feedback, chooses the image, and uploads all of it to WordPress.  Honestly, not a TON of work, maybe 20 minutes per article.  But something that is incredibly vital to having a good website.  I hired her because I found myself slipping on the QA department and figured she could do better than I did.  So far?  100% correct and such a godsend.  I don’t think I’ll ever work without an editor again.

Did I Meet my Goals for October?

Link Build to the THQ website (FAIL…but now fixed)

I made a decision in the month of October to not link build to the THQ website as I wanted to see how much it could actually make if fully monetized.  The result?  Right around $600 – $650 per month seems like the answer.  Now…this was nice.  But now that Google is noticing some positive trends in Time on Site and Pageviews per visitor, I think it’s time do double down on the link building to increase rank further.

Some of you may wonder why I don’t monetize the website fully and link build at the same time. 

Well, if I do that, I am certain I won’t get as many links.  So instead of risking it, I’m going this route instead.

Sell More OHP Courses (FAIL…and I’m done trying)

No sales for the course and it’s fine, I give up.  I have no idea what I am doing wrong and why people don’t buy my course considering I’ve shown that my system works time and time again with multiple websites. 

But hey, that’s just how it is I guess. 

Link Building to Website 5 (SUCCESS)

I started link building to Website 5 and had some initial success.  I spent a ton of time in October (probably around 15 hours) doing competitive research and now I have a TON of new link targets for this website.  With the process automated quite a bit, I expect some good things in November.

Goals for November

60 Links in 30 Days

Between Website 5 THQ, and BBC, I’m going to do my best to hit 60 links built this month. Although some may say this will set off alarms for Google because it’s “unnatural”, I did a very similar link building tactic on Website 4 and it worked wonders.  So, I’m going to try to do the same thing here, but on a much larger scale.

Complete Gmass Review

I’m making it a goal this month to finish the Gmass review on OneHourProfessor.  I’m using this tool right now in my link building campaign and scheduling all of my emails in bulk which has been an amazing time saver, so I need to share this with everyone.  The funny thing is, I’ve already recorded a video showing how I’m doing everything, I just need to edit it and write something up.

Because I anticipate answering 30-40 emails per day this month, I’m going to stop my goals here. 

We’ll see how well everything turns out, but here’s to hoping I can hit 60 links in 30 days!

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

  • Ron hi, can you be more specific in your link building process? I’m also focusing on optimizing my process of getting backlinks. Are you guest posting? What criteria do you use for filtering bad/good sites? I use TF > 10 and mostly organic traffic from SimilarWeb plugin…

    • Hey there!

      So I have never really done guest posting as I feel like it takes a whole lot of time to get a link. Instead, I work on creating a really good piece of content and then sharing that content with others and seeing if they will link.

      In terms of “good” or “bad” site….I use Ahrefs and typically will go for those with a Domain Authority over 10. Usually I want to get the domain authority over 50 or so, but in the beginning I’m just trying to get any link so I see no need to filter further.

      I’m actually going to be releasing a tutorial soon that should help. I’ll email everyone about it when it’s up 🙂

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