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April was was my highest profit month of my online business that I’ve ever had.

This was especially awesome because it was a short month with only 30 days.

It wasn’t my highest earning revenue month that I’ve ever had, but the combination of revenue and reduced expenses equated to my highest profit month.

Aside from that, all of my web projects continue to move forward and I feel pretty good about my business at the moment. Things definitely aren’t perfect and there’s always room for improvement, but I feel much better this month than I did last month.

This month my total income after expenses was $17,067.31 which comes out to $568.91 per day.

Personal Life Update

The work on our house continues and we’re thankfully beginning to see an end in sight.

In May we expect to be redoing all of the floors on the first floor of the house and redoing our entire kitchen.

In addition to that, my wife and I have decided to re-boot our vlog channel on YouTube

For those that don’t know, we used to update this channel frequently when we lived in Brazil.  I was looking over it this last week and realized that we still get frequent requests to return via the comments, so we’ve decided to do just that.

Before I had dreams and aspirations of growing this channel really large and making a business out of it, but now I’m looking at it as a hobby of sorts that’s also a great way to capture memories.

We’re going to have 1 or 2 videos posted weekly and then, when we go on a vacation or something, we’ll be posting more frequently.

Before it was a pretty difficult to do this because we put too much pressure on ourselves, but now we’re outsourcing every part of it except the filming, so it should be pretty easy to stay consistent with it. 

It won’t be business focused all the time, but if you’re interested in our lives (and I’ll try to throw in some business stuff if you request it in the comments), make sure you follow us.

We’ve also decided that it would make sense to get a large fence put in our backyard and though it’s going to set us back quite a bit of money (We’re on a third of an acre), it’ll give us a lot of much needed privacy because we have a corner lot.

Other than the house, my wife will be traveling back to Brazil at the end of the month to complete her final interview to finally get her green card for the United States.

She’ll also be bringing my favorite little doggie named Petunia (our pug) that I haven’t seen in over a year.

I have no idea how she’s going to be able to handle that dog through two plane rides, but I’m very excited for when they land and we can finally be a family.

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.

How did the Income Report Turn Out This Month?

PRODUCT OR SERVICEREVENUEEXPENSESNET INCOME
Website 4 FBA Merchandise Sales$12.74$12.74
Aweber Email Platform$20.70$20.70
ShutterstoWebsite 5 Images$52.00$52.00
OHP Course Sales$79.00$79.00
Thrive Themes$108.60$108.60
Partners and Affiliates Revenue
Website 5 Partners and Affiliates$18.68$18.68
Website 4 Partners and Affiliates$422.62$422.62
Website 3 Partners and Affiliates$1,064.55$1,064.55
Website 1 Partners and Affiliates$8,299.54$8,299.54
YouTube Revenue
Personal VLOG Channel$10.65$10.65
OHP YouTube Channel$66.21$66.21
Media.net Revenue
Website 3 Media.net Ad Revenue$15.73$15.73
Website 4 Media.net Ad Revenue$77.10$77.10
Website 1 Media.net Ad Revenue$154.87$154.87
Google Adsense Revenue
OHP Adsense Revenue$8.63$8.63
Website 2 Adsense Revenue$9.53$9.53
Website 5 Adsense Revenue$27.37$27.37
Website 4 Adsense Revenue$187.96$187.96
Website 3 Adsense Revenue$2,998.55$2,998.55
Website 1 Adsense Revenue$7,819.27$7,819.27
Software Expenses
Adobe Photoshop Account$10.61-$10.61
Manage WP$14.00-$14.00
Namecheap$13.16-$13.16
Mailshake Email Software$19.00-$19.00
Google Business Drive Storage and Apps$32.09-$32.09
Deadline Funnel$37.00-$37.00
Intuit Quick Books$40.00-$40.00
Ahrefs$99.00-$99.00
Active Campaign$135.00-$135.00
Siteground Hosting$235.00-$235.00
Freelance Labor Expenses
Freelance Writing$1,622.58-$1,622.58
Freelance Research, Editing, and Misc. Labor$2,129.55-$2,129.55
TOTALS$21,454.304,386.99$17,067.31
Revenue By ChannelWebsite 1Website 3OHP WebsiteWebsite 4Website 2Website 5ConsultingUdemyYouTube
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

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:

  • Thrive Themes: Most of my income sources this month didn’t change drastically, but Thrive Themes is one of those exceptions. Unfortunately, there was a huge dip in earnings with this source and I’m not really sure exactly why that is. In the past I created a really good tutorial/review of this platform because I personally love it and use it across all of my websites, but that tutorial/review probably needs to be refreshed. What I made before is still relevant, but obviously they’ve come up with a ton of new functionality since then.
  • Udemy: The Udemy gravy train might have finally come to a stop. This is the first time ever that I made $0 from Udemy in the last few years. I can’t say that I’m really upset by this because I haven’t created a course in some time on the platform, but it was a nice ride while it lasted.

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, Editing, and Misc. Labor Fees: I was able to reduce my investment in new development projects for the month of April and this is just because I’m getting to a point where my websites have the functionality that they need. I’m confident that I’ll have new development projects in the future, but I expect these costs to stay lower for some time.

​Project Updates

Website 1 Update:  All of the content revisions that I did for this website are definitely paying off.

Page views are up just over 5% MoM and continue to rise.

I’m definitely not done with revising all the content for this website, but the steps that we’ve taken so far to increase traffic are definitely working and my hope is that this will continue.

As of right now I have a writer that revises 8 articles every single week and I’m slowly revising all the most visited content as I go through the most popular articles.

It’s slow-moving because I’m the bottleneck, but I wanted to make sure that I took the time to revise this content myself as it’s so important to the success of the website.

One thing that happened which was very interesting this month is I got an email from an individual that had a specific problem that is usually pretty widespread among the community that this website serves.

So, I worked with this individual to better understand the problem and then tried to find appropriate affiliate programs.

After looking around, I found that I could join an affiliate program which paid $400-$600 for every 3-minute phone call

This was astonishing to me because that’s a really large payout for generating phone call.

I haven’t generated a qualified call just yet for them, but I think that I’ll eventually be seeing some commissions from this affiliate program.

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

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

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

Nov-18

319,096

600

$12,886.78

Oct-18

340,903

600

$13,246.69

Sep-18

301,207

596

$11,784.71

Aug-18

319,731

547

$11,556.29

Jul-18

330,002

561

$12,864.08

Jun-18

312,903

517

$11,138.00

May-18

356,722

553

$9,152.94

Apr-18

481,361

517

$9,637.30

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Though it looks like traffic dropped significantly YoY, that’s actually not true. The reason why pageviews were so high in April of last year is because the website went viral.
  • Pageviews have absolutely been lower in the last few months than they were previously, but I’ve really dialed in the monetization of this website and I’m making significantly more than I was before per 1,000 visitors to the website.

Udemy Update: I no longer focus on Udemy and any income I receive is completely passive.

OHP Website Update: I no longer focus on this website outside of these income reports.  This may change one day, but not right now.

Website 3 Update:  I saw another nice increase in pageviews for this website in the month of April and this is definitely a positive sign.

In April the traffic growth was about 12%, but keep in mind that this is on top of the traffic growth in March which was about 23%.

So, over the last two months pageviews have increased on this website by about 35%.

This is a huge positive, but it’s still not good enough. I’m confident that this website can surpass my other ones if I figure out exactly what Google is looking for.

Let me explain…

In my specific case, all of my competitors have tweaked their pages in a way that provides information that mine doesn’t. So, I’m going to spend some time revising my content in an effort to give Google a result that’s more similar to my competitors and hopefully more closely related to what they expect websites to show with this search query.

My thought process is that one of the best ways to find out what your page should be designed like is to look at your top competitors for keywords that you’re targeting.

If I pair these tweaks with what I already have on the website pages, I’m hoping that Google will reward me and begin to send more traffic my way and increase my rankings.

As of now, I’m still focused on a small guest posting campaign for this website in an effort to get additional links.

But, it should be noted, I pulled back on this a little bit because I did a huge link building campaign in April and I’m still waiting to see the results.

With this campaign I’m typically doing a deep link to specific pages that  I’m trying to rank for on the website and though I did see some increases in ranking, the amount of pages linking to my deep pages FAR exceeds the competitors in the SERP.

So, considering I have so many more back links on my pages than them and I’m still not outranking them, the only thing I can think of doing is making my content better and trying to cater more to what Google is looking.

We’ll see if my hunch is right.

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

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

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

Nov-18

100689

462

$2,324.75

Oct-18

118331

460

$3,135.04

Sep-18

137652

471

$3,853.20

Aug-18

145395

408

$3,266.47

Jul-18

186643

383

$4,991.15

Jun-18

247176

339

$6,858.01

May-18

237151

349

$4,288.26

Apr-18

175754

335

$2,028.65

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • This website continues to grow in the search engines and referring traffic continues to climb.
  • Linkbuilding is great, but not all that matters. Even though the back links to my pages far exceed those of my competitors, I’m still getting pushed down the SERP.  This has to be because I’m not giving Google what it expects for the search results and my aim is to fix the content to make it better.
  • I am starting to get a few completely organic backlinks to this website. It took a whole lot of time to get there, but organic links are the holy grail when it comes to websites and hopefully they keep rolling in.

Website 4 Update:

Pretty decent month for Website 4. 

I really haven’t done much in terms of work for this website in some time and it continues to yield results.

A few months back I had to revise some of the review-type affiliate posts to make sure no links were dead, but that’s been pretty much it.

I’ve been putting off the idea of creating another product to sell on Amazon related to this website because, frankly, I don’t know what the payoff will be.

At this point, I need it to be a decent amount of money each month to make it worth the effort.

I still may create this product in the future, and know exactly what I need to do, but right now it isn’t a focus for my business.

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

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

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

Nov-18

56881

233

$789.26

Oct-18

56121

201

$747.29

Sep-18

57141

184

$628.97

Aug-18

57128

176

$980.89

Jul-18

54010

162

$707.66

Jun-18

49443

157

$797.02

May-18

47806

147

$699.19

Apr-18

55862

143

$804.71

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Traffic was a little less this month than it was last month and I’m not sure if that’s a new trend or if that’s an anomaly. I’ll have to wait a few months to see if traffic is drop in on this website and then will look to fix that issue.

Website 5 Update: 

For those that have been following me the last few months, this is the problem child of the group.

As of right now, I’ve seen virtually no improvement for my rankings for posts that I actually want to rank in Google.

As I mentioned in previous months, I think that Google misclassified this website as a directory listing service and because of this, the only traffic I seemed to get was related to my directory listings.

I’ve since added no index/follow tags to all of my directory pages in hopes that Google will remove the “link juice” to these pages and instead push the “link juice” it to my review posts.

So far, that hasn’t happened. I’ve seen a small little increase in rankings, but nothing that I’m really excited about.

I’m going to give this another full month to see how Google reacts and if they don’t react favorably, I’ll try to write some guest posts that have backlinks directly to the review posts. 

Hopefully that will get them rankings and give this website the boost that it needs.

If I do that and it also doesn’t seem to work, I’m going to be at a complete loss as to what I need to do for this website.

We’ll cross that bridge if we get there.

Here are my statistics for this website so far:

Month

Pageviews

Referring Domains

Total Earnings

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

Nov-18

66606

323

$386.31

Oct-18

52613

293

$306.89

Sep-18

39651

286

$210.72

Aug-18

40756

259

$39.81

Jul-18

34117

240

$26.84

Jun-18

35544

226

$52.42

May-18

31276

216

$40.23

Apr-18

32821

206

$236.23

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • You’ll notice a huge drop in pageviews and that’s on purpose. As I said, Google was only ranking directory-style pages for this website and I was getting the wrong traffic.

Website 7 Update *NEW* 

Over the last few months I’ve discussed the fact that I’m creating a new website and I’m ready to officially add this my income reports.

So far, this website has netted exactly $0.00.  In fact, I don’t even have ads on the website yet.

How Much Have I Invested in This Website:

If I’m looking at this particular website as a business, we are very far in the red at this point. 

I don’t know the exact number, but after a brief review it looks like my expenses are right around – $3,500 total.

The majority of this was content costs, but there are also some development costs in there.

I’m actually not worried about revenue/profit at this point. I don’t see this is money wasted, I see it as money invested into a new project that could eventually far exceed the cost.

How Much Content is on the Website:

190 Informational pages on the website

2 Informational Blog Posts

This website is really focused on informational content and not the “review” stuff that most people are used to.  This is on purpose and by design as I’ve had more luck with this business model.

As of now the total number of backlinks to the website are:

0.

I don’t have any backlinks yet because I’m still working on creating content. I do intend on creating a backlink campaign in the future for this website, but that isn’t a focus right now.

When did the website officially launch?

My first article was published on 3/26 and the website was first submitted to the Google index on 4/8/2019.

Assuming that’s when Google really sees this as the start of my website, I have roughly another five months until we really start to see momentum.  So, somewhere around September/October we should see some positive things happening.

My plan is to monetize this website with Google AdSense and also find a way to use email marketing and affiliate opportunities to generate a significant income.

This is a little nerve-racking because I have no idea how much money I’ll be able to make with Google Adsense.  But, there is a lot of traffic potential for this website so even if I don’t make a lot per click, it could definitely add up over time.

That said, I see the real money of this website coming from affiliate content and courses I intend to create.

We’ll see how it works out, but for now we are just in investment mode.

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.

  • Always Look for New Affiliate Opportunities: As I mentioned in this report, I found a new affiliate opportunity that could pay me $400 when I send a qualified phone call.  This is a pretty big win and I never would’ve discovered it if I assumed that I already had all of my affiliate programs figured out. My point is, if you have your own website, always be willing to consider new affiliates. Revenue stacking from multiple sources is how you really grow.
  • Content Revisions are a Requirement: I increased the traffic to my Website 1 simply because I revised a handful of articles. That said, if you aren’t doing content revisions, it’s time to do them. It takes a minimal amount of work and the rewards are significant. I think moving forward the beginning of every year I’ll consider revising content on my websites that need it.
  • Cater to Google: I can’t say that this is something completely new, but I’ve come to the realization (and this thought has been echoed on many podcasts) that it’s a good idea to look at the top search results in Google to determine what type of content you should make on your website. I can’t say that I’m definitely going to succeed with this strategy, but I think it makes sense and I’ll be testing it on Website 3 to see how successful it is.

Did I Meet my Goals for April?

Revise 50 Pieces of Content on Website 1 (FAIL)

I was able to revise 34 pieces of content in the month of April. This definitely isn’t too bad, but it didn’t meet my goal.  That’s okay though, I’ve made significant strides with this and 50 was a pretty lofty goal anyway.

Finish Design of Website 7 (SUCCESS)

I was able to finish the design of this website and I’ve officially launched it. It’s definitely the MVP (minimum viable product) for what I want it to eventually be, but it looks pretty decent and so far, people like the idea. I actually just posted a job to find someone to create a logo for me today, so that will be the final step to this. Then, once I begin to get traffic and it really starts to grow, I’ll look at adding more to it and monetizing.

Make My Guest Post Outreach Better (SUCCESS)

I’d say this one is a booming success, but I’m really not too sure yet. I took the time to revamp the entire outreach process and put something in place for my outreach coordinator, but this new process takes more time and she ended up quitting because of it. Which is okay, it isn’t for everyone and this is exactly why I document all of my processes. So, as of right now I’m going to let her finish the outreach that she’s been doing and I’ll be looking into hiring a new outreach coordinator soon.

What Are my Goals for May?

Revise 40 Pieces of Content on Website 1

I think this is a more realistic goal and one that I’ll try to do in the month of May. It’s not easy to revise this content because I have so many other things going on, but I’m also working with a writer to get things done now so the scale of revising the content should increase.

Get 5 Links to Website 7

My writer is submitting 10 pieces of content to this website every single week and I need to make sure that I do a little bit of link building in the beginning to try to give signals to Google that the website is reputable. That said, I don’t want to repeat the issue that I had with Website 5 so I’m purposely going to throttle my efforts and just try to get a few different links in the beginning slowly.

Figure Out How to Fix Website 3

As I said in the report, Website 3 has more back links than most of my competitors but isn’t ranking where I think it should on the SERPS. The only answer I can think of is that I haven’t created pages that Google’s really looking for with the queries that people are searching. So, I’m going to have to revise some of the main pages on the website and though I already have a plan of what I need to do, I need to implement it.

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

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