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The final month of 2019 was (not surprisingly) the month of the year that I was most stressed.

It sucks because every year at this time my traffic drops and I start to panic little bit. But to make it even worse this year, it seems that a competitor of mine is stealing away some of my top terms on my best website and it’s been pretty painful to watch my market share get reduced.

This is definitely one of the downsides of having a single point of failure (one website making most of your money) and running an online business. Over time, it’s pretty much a certainty that competitors can find ways to catch up with you, so you have to react and try to recover some of your lost market share to stay relevant.

But, I have some fixes in mind that I’m going to be working on with my team to attempt to stop the bleeding.  I’ll cover more of this and the whole process in the report below.

Also, for the first time ever, I'm publishing my income report on my YouTube channel as well.  You can view that video below if you'd like, or just read through the report like usual.

Before I begin, let’s discuss this month highlights:

  • Website 4 has had some amazing success with a seasonal FBA product I sell each year.  This year I put in an order for 250 units and now I’m down to 87.  In total, this has made me over $1000 in profit.
  • Website 5 had it’s best month ever, again, surpassing what it did in November of 2019.  Two months in a row of record earnings is a very good sign.
  • Website 7 is now making a good chunk of money and anticipate this continuing to increase with time.  Just like Website 5, it had a record month for the second month in a row.
  • This OneHourProfessor YouTube channel had its best month ever and is going to be a HUGE focus in 2020.  I’ll explain more in the report about why that is.
  • My consulting income in December was the largest it’s ever been and this has (surprisingly) rekindled my love for consulting because I get to genuinely help people. 

This month my total income after expenses was $20,757.55 which comes out to $669.60 Per day.

Personal Life Update

December didn’t have any surprises from a personal standpoint. My wife and I were able to hang out with some close friends and also went to a few different Christmas parties to hang out with family.

I also got to disconnect from my online business in the last week of December and it’s always nice to do that each year. It gives me a chance to recharge and really think my strategy for the next year.

Even though I do my best to not work during this time, my mind can’t help but race and try to figure out what direction my business should go in the next year.  Happens every year, used to it by now.

I’ve also been diving further into listening to audiobooks because, well, all of the really successful people out there that I want to emulate seem to read pretty often.

In December I was able to complete “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand and “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” by Ashlee Vance. 

Both of these are very good reads for different reasons.

The Fountainhead was a recommendation by Mark Cuban and something that I thoroughly enjoyed. Though it’s fiction, it essentially follows around a person who does whatever he pleases and never apologizes for his convictions. In my opinion, it was a great read for any entrepreneur that is doubting themselves and what they feel is important to them.

The book about Elon Musk is simply something that I’ve always wanted to read. I find him fascinating as an individual because he aspires to move the human race forward and seems to have the intelligence and hard work ethic to do so.

To be quite honest with you, I don’t think I’m capable of what he has done but I’d love to impact hundreds of thousands of people and help the world on a smaller scale. While it’s not as impactful as him, this really is what gives me a purpose in life.

Whether helping people with a niche website that I create, or teaching thousands of people how to create and grow an online business, I’ve found that my best work is done when I’m truly impacting people.

These two books have given me a bit of a mindset change going into 2020. 

Whenever I chase the money, I just don’t care as much about the cause.

So, I’m going to stop thinking about money and focus solely on helping people. I realize that the money is going to come for the value that I deliver and if I deliver a lot of value, the money is an afterthought.

That’s all for the personal update.

Before I begin the actual report, If you’d like to begin a similar journey as myself and try to create a passive income online business, I recommend you read this write-up I did.

It explains the truth about online business and should help educate you before you move forward with anything.

If this is your first time on my website let me explain a few things about my detailed income reports 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.

Keep in mind, I don’t create these to gloat about my earnings. I create them to help you understand the true “earning curve” of online business.

On a side note, I don’t disclose my actual website URL’s on my reports because I’ve had bad experiences with copycats in the past. 

So, in my income reports, you’ll see website generalizations like Website 1, Website 3, Website 5 Website 4, etc.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s dive into the report.

2019 Year in Review and Future Plans

I think one of the best things about doing these income reports is when I do an annual review of my goals.

So far, every single year I’ve been able to surpass my growth expectations in both traffic and revenue which is a pretty cool feeling.

It’s funny because in the beginning of the year I have no idea how I’m going to achieve these goals, but by the end of year I’ve made significant progress without even realizing it.

2019 was no exception.

Here are my 2019 goals:

Grow my Website 5 to over 150,000 pageviews monthly – FAIL

Website 5 is now starting to show some signs of promise, but it’s definitely been a bumpy road. If you read over my previous income reports you’ll see that I’ve tried so many different things to try to make this website work and nearly all of them failed.

Oddly enough, when I basically gave up on the website and just left it alone, it started to increase in revenue and traffic. I’m not sure what to say about it, but I’m happy to see where the revenue is now and I intend on increasing it even more in the future.

Create Physical Products and Sell over $15,000 using Amazon FBA – FAIL

Total fail here.  I keep saying how I want to jump further into Amazon FBA and build more products to sell, but common sense keeps telling me to stop. Obviously, websites work for me and as much as I want to get into physical products, it just doesn’t make sense until I have a website that can drive a lot of the sales.

Earn $20,000 Per Month in Business Income - SUCCESS

I was able to achieve this in 3 of the 12 months of the year and two of those times was in the final quarter of the year.  I attribute this to a lot of hard work throughout the year and finding ways to further diversify my income. Beyond that, I’ve also found ways to earn even more with Website 1 which I didn’t think of before. 

Year End Finances Review

My annual revenue in 2019 was $284,462.11

Compared to an annual revenue of $194,715.77 in 2018. 

This equates to a 46% increase YoY in revenue

----

My annual profit in 2019 was $216,165.86

Compared to an annual profit of $157,683.88

This equates to a 37% increase YoY in profit.

---

My 2018 Gross Profit Margin was 81%

My 2019 Gross Profit Margin was 76%

Why has my gross profit margin dropped by 5% YoY?  It’s pretty simple.

As I’ve grown, I realized one of the best ways to succeed is to continually diversify and expand the business. Because of this, I’ve  increase the amount of investment in the business to try to grow it even faster than it’s been growing.

While the percentage decrease isn’t ideal in gross profit margin, it’s not too impactful for me personally because even though I’m investing more into the business, my profit has increased by 37% so day to day… I’m not feeling any impact at all and actually have more money than I ever have.

Here are my 2020 goals:

Grow the One Hour Professor YouTube Channel to 100,000 subscribers

I don’t really talk about my YouTube channel too often, but it’s something that I really enjoy.

Plus, it’s a great way for me to help people and I started to get some really good comments on my videos.

As I said previously, in 2020 I really want to focus helping people and this channel is a great way to do it because I am now officially an authority in the online business space.

It’s weird to think about because I still remember when I was trying to make $500 a month (and failing miserably), but now I’m able to achieve numbers that most people can’t and I want to help others do something similar.

That said, I refuse to be a “hype” type of guy and I’m going to give all the advice I can as straight as I possibly can. In addition to that, to help me focus on this goal, I actually invested money into a new background for my channel and even got a camera to make everything much more professional.

My plan is to focus on speaking about my experiences with an online business, but also to talk a little bit more about finance and investing.

Not many people know this, but finance is a huge interest of mine and something that I’ve been pretty good at my entire life.  Because I have an interest in it and it fits right into the scope of what people are interested in with online business, I’m going to talk about both of them.

After reviewing a lot of YouTube, I got really sick of YouTubers who have made a large portion of their income outside of online business…..talking about online business. 

It annoys me as they aren’t really experts in the field.

I am, and the fact that I’ve been able to create multiple profitable websites proves that. 

Reach $50,000 per month in Business Revenue

Lofty goal?  You bet.

Do I have a plan to get there? 

Kind of.

This is one of those goals that I have no idea how I’ll hit, but I’m going to really push hard to do so. 

As of now my plan is to continue to grow my portfolio of authority websites and also spend time growing my personal brand with YouTube and this website.  The way I see it, the more people I serve, the more money I make, and the more purpose I feel. 

So, my hope is that I’m able to deliver enough value to enough people that it will yield $50,000 per month in revenue.  We’ll see.

Add Two Websites to Portfolio

As of now I have two new websites in mind that I want to add to my portfolio, but I’m not going to add them yet. I need the current set of websites that I’m working on to grow enough to where the profit they’re making can support the creation of new websites.

Ideas are never a problem, it’s just a matter of executing those ideas and making them profitable without expanding too fast and sinking the ship.

As of now, my portfolio is running very smoothly and I have enough writers and editors in place to continue to grow them. Every month or two I’ll review the workload to see if it makes sense to add more resources and work to the portfolio. 

But, the answer right now, is that it doesn’t.

How did the Income Report Turn Out This Month?

PRODUCT OR SERVICEREVENUEEXPENSESNET INCOME
Udemy.com$17.69$17.69
Aweber Email Platform$20.70$20.70
ShutterstoWebsite 5 Images$40.00$40.00
Thrive Themes$402.00$402.00
OHP Course Sales$441.00$441.00
Website 4 Amazon FBA Sales$1324.07$1324.07
Consulting$2575.00$2575.00
Partners and Affiliates Revenue
OHP Partners and Affiliates$11.98$11.98
Website 5 Partners and Affiliates$50.36$50.36
Website 6 Partners and Affiliates$78.56$78.56
Website 4 Partners and Affiliates$282.95$282.95
Website 3 Partners and Affiliates$327.62$327.62
Website 1 Partners and Affiliates$10,587.74$10,587.74
YouTube Revenue
YT Channel - DM$16.61$16.61
Thalita YouTube Channel$20.87$20.87
OHP YouTube Channel$165.18$165.18
Media.net Revenue
Website 3 Media.net Ad Revenue$39.31$39.31
Website 4 Media.net Ad Revenue$60.23$60.23
Website 1 Media.net Ad Revenue$130.26$130.26
Google Adsense Revenue
Website 2 Adsense Revenue$9.36$9.36
OHP Adsense Revenue$19.13$19.13
Website 4 Adsense Revenue$197.67$197.67
Website 7 Adsense Revenue$304.53$304.53
Website 5 Adsense Revenue$644.25$644.25
Website 3 Adsense Revenue$1,659.28$1,659.28
Website 1 Adsense Revenue$8,665.27$8,665.27
Software Expenses
Adobe Photoshop Account$10.61-$10.61
Tailwind Pinterest Marketing App$14.99-$14.99
Epidemic Sound$15.00-$15.00
Manage WP$15.30-$15.30
Namecheap$22.22-$22.22
Deadline Funnel$37.00-$37.00
Google Business Drive Storage and Apps$40.08-$40.08
Surfer SEO $41.30-$41.30
Upwork Premium Employer Plan$49.00-$49.00
Vid IQ YouTube Software$49.00-$49.00
Mailshake Email Software$57.00-$57.00
Intuit Quick Books$80.00-$80.00
Ahrefs$107.66-$107.66
Shutterstock Monthly Subscription$125.00-$125.00
Active Campaign$135.00-$135.00
Siteground Hosting$155.00-$155.00
Kinsta Hosting$300.00-$300.00
Advertising Expenses
YouTube Advertising (No longer running)$257.53
-$257.53
Freelance Labor Expenses
Freelance Writing$2,734.80-$2,734.80
Freelance Research, Editing, Video Production, and Misc. Labor$3,087.64-$3,087.64
TOTALS$28,091.68$7,334.13$20,757.55
Revenue By ChannelWebsite 1Website 3OHP WebsiteWebsite 4Website 2Website 5Website 6Website 7ConsultingUdemyYouTube
December 2019$19,383.27
$2,026.21
$934.81
$1,864.92
$9.36
$694.61
$78.56
$304.53
$2,575.00
$17.69
$202.66
November 2019$21,920.53 $2,173.90 $602.88$1,338.93 $15.77 $617.31 $182.80
$196.02
$0$21.59 $358.91
October 2019$23,620.75$2,546.04$1,073.56$711.71$72.89$230.27$84.62$58.41$300.00$30.00$202.14
September 2019$21,006.31 $2,627.86 $335.35 $585.93 $14.72 $170.04 $50.33 $17.80 $0$35.00 $177.05
August 2019$17,817.28 $2,590.92 $414.58 $553.82 $23.67 $133.92 $97.26
$2.57
$275.00
$40.00
$156.00
July 2019$16,855.42$3,652.24$427.66$574.78$17.16$74.26$76.00$2.10$0$35$130.26
June 2019$15,402.28$5,561.07$709.07$562.63$30.74$46.29$100.19$0$0$141.46
May 2019$17,578.97 $4,900.70 $1,062.34 $749.14 $22.25 $61.17 $35.71$0
$0$116.02
April 2019$16,273.68$4,078.83$239.73$700.42$9.53$46.05$0$0$76.86
March 2019$17,006.79$3,620.30 $439.88$931.22 $19.98$152.99 $0$20.24$76.24
February 2019$15,656.00$2,799.98$551.53$647.94$15.68$291.72$0$28.75$65.63
January 2019$16,483.03 $3,280.64 $469.30$1,009.83$10.41$401.91$600.00$45.75$76.52
December 2018$11,776.03$2,488.53$483.96$2,078.19$20.16$487.37$0$98.43$73.60
November 2018$12,886.78$2,324.75$657.86$789.26$10.67$386.31$0$205.87$79.91
October 2018$13,246.69$3,135.04
$369.22$747.29$15.46$306.89$150$93.27$83.86
September 2018$11,784.71$3,853.20$321.67$628.97$0.00$210.72$175$14.94$82.99
August 2018$11,556.29$3,266.47$512.72$980.89$5.31$39.81$0$97.18$93.63
July 2018$12,864.08$4,991.15$722.76$707.66$8.05$26.84$0$91.48$84.33
June 2018$11138.00$6,858.01$432.01$797.02$11.06$52.42$0$50.92$95.96
May 2018$9152.94$4,288.26$391.63$699.19$6.96$40.23$0$44.40$100.82
April 2018$9637.30$2,028.65$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

Project Updates

Website 1 Update

Although I had a pretty good month for the website, the traffic here is falling much more than I like to see and I need to stop the bleeding.

Aside from getting hit by the update on November 8, I noticed that one of my competitors started to eat away at my market share in December by taking position 1 on some of the highest searched terms of this website ranks for.

While I definitely had quite a few days of lost sleep, I’ve come to terms of this now and realize this is just a part of doing business online.

Sometimes, Google isn’t going to be in your favor and you have to try to make your website better to win that favor back.

This is foreign to me because ever since creating this website, I’ve been the leader in the industry. While I’m still leading the industry, I am teetering between myself and this other competitor and although it’s annoying, it’s just making my content better and helping me serve people in a better way.

The plan for now is to revise a lot of the content on the website to try to make it even more useful and give users (and Google) what it’s looking for.

This basically is going to consist of me taking a resource that we already have and expanding it significantly. The main page that I rank for is going to have around 4000 words added and become a much better resource than what it is currently.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to rebound and take these SERP positions back, or if Google is going to favor the other website and I’ll lose a significant amount of revenue over the next couple months.

At the end of the day, even if I lose 50% of the revenue from this website I’ll still be making a lot of money and it’s much better than working a full-time job anywhere else.

While I don’t think that a 50% loss is likely, it could happen, but I’ll do my absolute best to revise my own website to make it even better and win Google over again.

Here’s a graph of the last 13 months of progress:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

Dec-19

246,409

746

$19,383.27

Nov-19

269,639

718

$21,920.53

Oct-19

323,681

669

$23,620.75

Sep-19

309,050

651

$21,006.31

Aug-19

296,076

659

$17,817.28

Jul-19

302,646

623

$16,855.42

Jun-19

270,447

602

$15,402.28

May-19

296,686

594

$17,578.97

Apr-19

270,983

638

$16,273.68

Mar-19

257,616

639

$17,006.79

Feb-19

254,351

604

$15,656.00

Jan-19

333,317

597

$16,483.03

Dec-18

279,239

606

$11,776.03

Udemy Update

I no longer focus on Udemy and have no intention of going back.  They sell my courses for $10 each and I’m just not okay with that.

OHP Website Update

The OHP website itself had absolutely no content published on it in the month of December aside from last month’s income report.

One cool thing that will begin to happen in 2020 is that I’m going to find a way to outsource everything so that when I publish something on the One Hour Professor YouTube channel, it will result in a new blog post being pushed to the website as well.

I’m doing this because my website has significant domain authority and continually grows, but I never blog here other than income reports. If you ask me, that’s a waste of a resource and one of the best ways to help more people (and make more money) is to get my content I’ve created published here as well.

I won’t be doing this right away as I’m trying to get the YouTube channel process figured out, but in time I’ll find a way to start pushing content over to the website.

Website 3 Update

Website 3 did pretty well this month with minimal effort.

I’ve done basically nothing except publish one article per week on this website and it continues to bring in thousands every month.

Although I had some things that I wanted to do in December to try to move this website forward, I wasn’t able to complete them.

I still have these goals in mind to fix this website in the future, but it’s such a competitive space that it makes it hard to get enthused.

All in all, my pageviews have increased YoY and my hope is that as time goes on, my domain authority will continue to grow here as well.

Here’s a graph of the last 13 months of progress.

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

Dec-19

125286

556

$2,026.21

Nov-19

125330

535

$2,173.90

Oct-19

138041

494

$2,546.04

Sep-19

143883

417

$2,627.86

Aug-19

152799

424

$2,590.92

Jul-19

191629

432

$3,652.24

Jun-19

256176

427

$5,561.07

May-19

257171

421

$4,900.70

Apr-19

194433

482

$4,078.83

Mar-19

174087

473

$3,620.30

Feb-19

141825

405

$2,799.98

Jan-19

161334

441

$3,280.64

Dec-18

97508

450

$2,488.53

 

Website 4 Update

Website 4 did incredibly well in December, but that’s mostly because I tie Amazon FBA earnings in with the website revenue.

Surprisingly, the product that I created this year has sold really well and although I’m not sold out of the product yet, I just may be by the end of February.

If that’s the case, I’ve already promised myself that I’ll do this again in 2020. It’s really not an easy product to make and it’s seasonal, but it’s made me a fair bit of money this year and I think it’s something that’s worth creating in the future.

Pageviews to the website dropped a lot from last year and this is a bit alarming.  I know that I could fix this website and get it back the glory days of around $1000/month, but I just don’t have the energy right now.

It may happen in the future, but right now I’m going to leave it as I have more pressing matters to work on.  My hope is that it will maintain the earnings or I’ll assign a writer to fix it and get the income higher like it used to be.

Here are my statistics for this website in the last 13 months:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

Dec-19

39,787

311

$1,864.92

Nov-19

45,328

305

$1,338.93

Oct-19

54243

273

$711.71

Sep-19

52337

248

$585.93

Aug-19

52905

244

$553.82

Jul-19

50016

266

$574.78

Jun-19

47102

269

$562.63

May-19

51419

260

$749.14

Apr-19

51688

286

$700.42

Mar-19

56758

283

$931.22

Feb-19

55893

250

$647.94

Jan-19

62079

241

$1,009.83

Dec-18

58605

218

$2,078.19

 

Website 5 Update

Yet again, Website 5 has found a way to grow.

I really haven’t done anything to make this happen but MoM the traffic increased by 17%.  It’s kind of incredible to see the website that I almost gave up on come back from almost nothing to become what it is.

I’m so enthused by the increase that I’ve seen that I’m going to invest in content for this website again. As of now, my writer is going to create two pieces of content each week focused 100% on reviewing products.

This website has a lot of informational content now, but the goal was always to build out affiliate content much more significantly than I ever did. Now that the website seems to have fallen in favor with Google, I think it makes sense to start publishing review content in the hopes that I get ranked.

While I don’t know exactly what will happen here, this is a website that could be incredibly large if it meets my expectations.

December was the best month that this website has ever had and beat the record earning month of November. Even more encouraging is the fact that this was my fourth highest traffic month since the website was created.

Assuming that Google continually rewards the content on the website, pageviews should continue to increase which means revenue will follow suit.

Here are my statistics for this website for the last 13 months:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

Dec-19

72621

416

$694.61

Nov-19

61908

412

$617.31

Oct-19

51442

379

$230.27

Sep-19

41366

357

$170.04

Aug-19

31226

350

$133.92

Jul-19

4171

328

$74.26

Jun-19

5443

311

$46.29

May-19

6847

318

$61.17

Apr-19

14922

346

$46.05

Mar-19

41295

372

$152.99

Feb-19

72698

379

$291.72

Jan-19

80255

359

$401.91

Dec-18

76156

339

$487.37

 

Website 7 Update

Another month down, and another huge step forward on Website 7. 

Yet again, December was a record-breaking month for both page views and earnings for this website.

Surprisingly even to me, this website has been able to achieve quite a bit in just under a year.

As of now, I’m at month nine and earned just over $300 this month.

While the plan is to eventually create informational products to sell, when I pair that with Google Adsense this puppy could definitely make quite a bit each month.

What’s more exciting is that I’m starting to quickly rank #2 in the SERP with some really high-volume keywords that my number one competitor has owned for years.

This shows me that niche selection is still very important and if you get in a niche that isn’t very competitive, you can make a significant dent fairly quickly.

That said, I’ve also invested over $13k in the website so….it’s not like we aren’t pushing hard to make this happen.

One of the cool things I’ve noticed with this website is that I only had to run one link building campaign and since then I’ve done absolutely nothing from a link building perspective.

This goes against my usual thought that you need to continually link build in order to succeed.

Basically, what I’m starting to realize is you can run a link building campaign, see what Google does with the website, and then run another link building campaign if the results aren’t as good as you had hoped.

I really think that there is something to be said for unnatural link building velocity.

When Google sees too many links going to a website too quickly, I personally feel that they will penalize the website momentarily.

The only proof I have of this is what happened to me with Website 5 which, at one point in time, was getting 5-6 links per day.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I think the link velocity ended up hurting the website and ultimately, it’s just now starting to come back from that.

With this website, I’ve done the exact opposite.

I’ve run one link building campaign that did pretty well and I’ve left everything alone since then.

Granted, this is a low competitive niche, but so far it seems to be working so I’m not going to change a thing.

How Much Have I Invested in This Website: $15,421.00

How Much Money Has This Website Made? $581.43

Total ROI: $-14,839.57

How Much Content is on the Website:

Keep in mind that this is an informational type of website, not affiliate related at all.  My plan is to monetize with AdSense and info products I create.

622 Informational pages on the website

50 Informational Blog Posts 

What Do I Plan on Doing in the Next Month With This Website?

I plan on doing more of the same with this website in January.

Creating more quality content and trying to continue to grow the website is paramount. Luckily, I’m in favor of Google and don’t seem to need to do a link building at this point.

I do have a function on the website that collects data from users by them inputting information and I’d like to revise the way that works because it isn’t as good as I’d like it to be. 

My goal is to eventually use this data to create information that nobody else has, but I’m not able to do that with the way that the websites functions at this point, so some change is needed.

We’ll see how it goes, but the data should be really helpful to many and allow me to approach organizations with really unique content that they’re likely looking to get their hands on.

Below is a summary of the website so far:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

Dec-19

23112

109

$304.53

Nov-19

18308

97

$196.02

Oct-19

9118

67

$58.41

Sep-19

5185

46

$17.80

Aug-19

3163

40

$2.57

Jul-19

2464

22

$2.10

Jun-19

1618

10

$0.00

May-19

2393

7

$0.00

Apr-19

2045

2

$0.00

 

Website 6 Update

Definitely took a big step back in December with Website 6 and needless to say, that’s a bit frustrating.

This website is in a huge niche and has a whole lot of potential, but it doesn’t seem to have reached that potential just yet.

After reviewing the content strategy, I’m trying to make it so that the content is a little more comprehensive and even better than it was previously.

I don’t even think that it was bad before, I just want Google to understand that it’s the best out there and hopefully with time, that’ll happen.

Beyond this, we continue to link build to this website very slowly and I have to believe that this is helping the cause.

I was able to see a 37% increase in traffic last month and though there was a 5% drop this month, I think we can attribute a lot of that success to the link building efforts.

I still have hope for this website, but it’s definitely taking longer than I would’ve liked.

How Much Have I Invested in This Website: $4,783.66

How Much Money Has This Website Made? $705.47

Total ROI: -$4,078.19

How Much Content is on the Website:

This website is mostly focused on affiliate content with some informational content.  There is also a big play for sponsored brand content in the future.

191 Blog Posts

What Do I Plan on Doing in the Next Month With This Website?

With this website, like many of my others, I’m going to continue to create content and try to grow the website organically.

I’ll also keep link building slowly using Instagram as that has been pretty successful.

The goal has been to get maybe 1 to 2 links per week and so far, we’ve been able to achieve that at a very slow rate. I think that this slow growth rate with links looks much more natural than getting a ton of links at one time.

I’m also going to try to throw Google AdSense on the website in January to see if we can increase the earnings. I don’t know if this is going to negatively impact the affiliate income yet, but I’m going to test it out to see if it’s worth it.

One of the biggest problems with this website is that the earnings have yet to be consistent. One month I’ll do really well, the next month will be pretty bad.

This is because this website is mostly earning from affiliate income and if I can get ad income to increase, it’s likely to resolve some of those issues.

Below is a summary of the website so far:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

Dec-19

7287

257

$78.56

Nov-19

7681

235

$182.80

Oct-19

5184

191

$84.62

Sep-19

4915

148

$50.33

Aug-19

4591

136

$97.26

Jul-19

6432

92

$76.00

Jun-19

7914

87

$100.19

May-19

5989

73

$35.71

 

Website 8 Update 

Still the youngest in my portfolio, this website is still a baby.

It makes me no money and all I’m doing is adding content to it with hopes to age it and in the future begin working on it.

It was kind of weird to see the pageviews this month, but I think that that only happened because of my virtual assistant and a writer. 

On a side note, my wife absolutely loves the topic of this website and though it’s in a competitive area, it’s also a very broad domain name. I think this website could be really big one day if we focus on it and she even mentioned the idea of creating a YouTube channel focused on the topic of the website.

While I’m not sure if that’ll happen or not, it’s an interesting idea and something that we’ll definitely consider.

How Much Have I Invested in This Website: $936.98

How Much Money Has This Website Made? $0

Total ROI: -$936.98

How Much Content is on the Website/YouTube:

This website is mostly focused on affiliate content with some informational content. 

21 Informational Blog Posts

Thalita YouTube Channel

If you’re wondering why my wife’s YouTube Channel is included in my income reports, it’s because it’s all part of the same business.  For more details, look at the Thalita YouTube Channel update on this income report when I introduced it. 

So, the good news about this YouTube channel is that we stopped investing so heavily in it.

For the last three months this line item was dragging down my total earnings, or at least the perception of my total earnings, because there was a lot of expenses related to advertising this channel.

We were able to find a way to get subscribers for less than a dollar each, but this definitely wasn’t sustainable in the long term so we had to do it for a limited time.

Now that she has a good subscriber base, we pulled back on these expenses completely and the only expenses moving forward for this channel is her editors.

The idea is to go to a full 100 videos before we adjust her strategy. She’s working on doing this now and we’re coming close to the point where we can see if we should continue to try to grow this channel.

How Much Have We Invested in This YouTube Channel:

Editors: $3,187.25

Ads: $6,232.60

Total: $9,419.85

How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $248.01

Total ROI: -$9,171.84

How Much Content is on the YouTube Channel?

75 Videos

Below are the metrics of the channel so far:

Month

Views

Total Subscribers

Earnings

Dec-19

9,783

107

$20.54

Nov-19

267,950

3,561

$187.74

Oct-19

197,938

2,995

$39.73

One Hour Professor YouTube Channel *NEW*

Moving forward, this is going to be a new line item on the income report. 

If you haven’t subscribed yet, do it!  I’ll be publishing a ton of great content here this year and you won’t want to miss out.

The plan with this channel is to publish three videos a week every week for the remainder of the year. I know that it’s going to be a little bit difficult in the month of January to achieve this goal because I’m trying to get my video editor up to speed and figure out a process.

But he’s already finished my first video and it looks pretty good, so I think I’ll be able to swing this. It’s definitely going to take a little bit of time for me to get into the habit of creating these videos, but I already have about 50 topics figured out and it seems pretty easy to shoot.

Some of you are probably wondering why I decided to focus on this channel so much this year. There are definitely a number of reasons.

  • I legitimately enjoy teaching people. I’m a college professor by trade, so it should come as no surprise that I actually enjoy doing this.
  • I want to help more people so I have purpose in my work. As I said previously, the money is always a good thing but I’m much more energized when I know that I’m helping people. This channel has grown pretty well without any real effort by myself.  If I put effort into this, I think it could be huge.
  • It pays well. As great as it is to help people, I also want to make sure that I’m making money and it turns out that YouTube can pay really well in the online business/finance niche.  So, of course I want to do is for that reason as well.
  • I need to diversify. Just like any other project that I take on, my business is all about diversification. The income hit that I took on Website 1 is a reminder that no one is invulnerable. This will make it diversified even further than what I currently am.
  • Last, but definitely not least, is that I want to have my own brand. People can try to copy my content, people can try to copy my video style, but people will never be able to replicate me. I want to grow my own brand into something that’s larger than all of my authority websites combined.  And really, why not?  I’m successful at what I do and a lot of people can learn from what I know.

How Much Have I Invested in This YouTube Channel:

Total: $30.00

How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $469.21

Total ROI: $439.21

*Keep in mind this channel was previously profitable before included on report.

How Much Content is on the YouTube Channel?

48 Videos

Below are the metrics of the channel since October 2019 (When I started to work more on it)

Total subscribers at time of this writing: 5,344

Month

Views

Total Subscribers

Earnings

Dec-19

12,164

162

$165.18

Nov-19

11,104

129

$154.62

Oct-19

10,897

148

$149.41

 

DM YouTube Channel *NEW*

You could call this channel a total experiment.

Basically, my wife and I previously had a Vlog YouTube channel that had around 30,000 subscribers.

While this is great, it wasn’t as successful as it appeared because the majority of those subscribers were from Brazil and spoke Portuguese.

Because of this, and because we hadn’t published anything on the channel in over two years, my wife decided that she wanted to take the current channel and change the name/topic to something they would (probably) like.

The idea being that she can create a YouTube channel full of different compilations and helpful videos where she doesn’t have to shoot anything herself.

At the present time, she’s editing all of this personally and trying to publish 40 videos to see how all of them do.

If she’s able to make one or two go viral, or something seems to be working, we’ll continue on with this strategy. If it doesn’t work, I actually don’t know what we’ll do yet.

The good thing is that this keeps my wife busy and she’s just trying to diversify her own projects to find something that will be successful.

I like her approach here and considering she’s very focused on YouTube, I think this could be an interesting experiment.

The cost of this is absolutely nothing other than my wife’s editing time and she’s pretty good at what she does, so it’s not taking her a bunch of effort to do this.

How Much Have I Invested in This YouTube Channel:

Total: $0

How Much Money Has This YouTube Channel Made? $44.71      

Total ROI: $44.71

*Keep in mind this channel was previously profitable before included on report.

How Much Content is on the YouTube Channel?

16 Videos

Below are the metrics of the channel since October 2019 (When I started to work more on it).  Remember, we are losing subscribers because she changed the name of the channel and topic completely. 

Total subscribers at time of this writing: 32,683

Month

Views

Monthly Subscribers

Earnings

Dec-19

6,386

-524

$16.61

Nov-19

4,529

-75

$14.40

Oct-19

2,344

-116

$13.70

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.

  • YouTube is an Interesting Beast: For a long time, I’ve worked (very little) on my YouTube, but now I’m starting to see how great of a platform this can be if used appropriately. I’m making about $165 a month on this and have done next to nothing to make that happen. While it is a labor-intensive project for myself, if I can grow my own brand it’s definitely worth it.  In addition to that, my wife is pushing hard on YouTube as well and were doing this because we see it as a great platform to grow. 
  • Diversify or Die: I’ve talked about this before, but diversifying your online business is the key to its survival. I’ve had a little bit of a downturn in the last couple months and though it hurts to see, the more diversified I am the less it hurts to see any one channel go down the tubes. If you want to succeed in any business, you need to diversify.
  • No One is Untouchable: My Website 1 has dominated the search engines for years and in my particular niche, I’ve had absolutely no problems ranking number one for practically everything. However, after the November 8th update, things changed and now I’m dealing with a lot more competition. At the end of the day, Google is king and if they decide your website isn’t as good as someone else’s, it’s going to lose rankings.

Did I Meet my Goals for December?

Link Whisper Review (Repeat) – FAIL

Nope, fail again.  However, now that I have a focus on YouTube and my own personal brand I’m confident that this will happen in January.

Get Rankings Back on Website 1 – FAIL

Not really, actually not at all.  Website 1 is still bleeding and though I’m trying to plug the wound, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to.  I’m still going to continue to work to try to fix this, and we’ll see what happens.  I shouldn’t have made this a goal though because I can’t control it.

Revise Most Important Articles on Website 1 – SUCCESS

Done.  I was able to revise a lot of my important articles and though I haven’t seen anything positive from it yet, we’ll see what the future holds.

What Are my Goals for January?

Link Whisper Review (Repeat)

Again….I’ll throw this on here.  Still need to do this and want to, just haven’t had the time or focus.

Record 10 YouTube Videos

 The key with YouTube for me is to be able to work ahead.  My idea is to get a video editor trained and create videos for a month or two months in the future. The idea being that I can still focus on other projects while my YouTube continues to publish three times a week. 

Finalize Website 1 Content Revisions Team

For Website 1, my focus right now is on content revisions and I brought a new member on to the team to help with this. This month, I want to finalize that process and make it so that both writers and the editor are on the same page and it’s running smoothly. This will just take some more training on my end.

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

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