August 2015 – Monthly Income Report

What a month!

This month was one of the most productive months I’ve ever had. Not only did I reveal my authority website (which posted $39.68 in earnings from two weeks of being live) but I also finished my first book!  Beyond that, I made quite a bit of money in consulting and also other income streams continued to climb.

While I’m not sure exactly what the future holds, I’m extremely encouraged by what I’ve been seeing recently. It looks as if my new authority website is poised to be a winner and my business, and guest posting opportunities, are continuing to grow.

If you want to watch and learn some lessons along the way with me, I highly recommend that you sign-up for my email list.

Before I begin 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) and the time I spent working 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. Unfortunately the “make money online” industry is full of scammers that make ridiculous promises like “Work 10 minutes and make $5,000!” The reality couldn’t be further from the truth, this online business gig is a lot of hard work and these reports show you how much time I put into my business and how much income I make from that effort.

2) These reports help me keep track of my own progress. By creating these reports every month, I’m able to see where I’m spending money and how much time I’m spending doing various tasks.

3) These reports hold me accountable. Each month I list goals I have for the following month and my hope is that my audience will hold me accountable.

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

How much time did I work this month?

Discussing this month’s time worked

I’m not going to lie, it was definitely a month of hard work. As you can see from my time report, I logged just over 45 hours and contracted out 43 hours of work. The fact that I put in (collectively) 88 hours of work this month goes to show that a lot of things got done.

One of the biggest things that I’ve been preaching lately is the idea of sharing your content. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve created an in-depth blog post that I thought was truly great, but after I posted it I heard crickets. The reason for this is simple, I didn’t share it with anyone.

Yeah, I posted it to social media, but the truth is that I don’t have a huge social media following and when I post there, I don’t get a lot of traction anyway.

I covered how I’ve been sharing my content with the authority website in my eighth post of the authority website series and it’s been going really well.

After I got done with that post, it was time to reveal my authority website URL. I’d be lying to you if I said that this didn’t make me nervous. I contemplated the idea of never sharing my authority website URL, but then I realized that I have put in at least 200 hours between myself and my contractors for this website and if someone wanted to try to do what I was doing, they are going to have to work around the clock to make it happen.

In other words, I’m confident that I’ve created a quality resource and I know other people will have a very hard time replicating it, so I don’t mind sharing the URL.

In addition to that, I had a pretty good month in July and had a nice income report to prove it.

I also did the standard hour of social media where I simply post all of my updates for Twitter. I will say that I’m really getting into Periscope recently and didn’t include that time in this report because frankly, I forgot to log it.  But obviously I’ll try to do that in the future.

The majority of my time this month was focused on the authority website experiment. A lot of the time was simply responding to emails that my virtual assistant sent out, while another large part of my time was focused on writing my new book.

The last thing that I worked on was my general website housekeeping items. Some of this was website revisions, consulting work, and other miscellaneous pieces.

How did the income report turn out this month?

Income Breakdown by Main Channel:  I’ve decided to add this area in my income reports because I want to be able to reference how much I make on each channel that I have.  This makes sense because I anticipate that I will continue to grow and keeping track of this will be important to know what channels are really working.  Please note, I didn’t include historical data here, I just included data from August 2015 and beyond.

Discussing this month’s income

I’m not going to lie, this month was pretty cool. Not only did I get a good amount of consulting income, but I saw some of my highest earnings through my passive income streams.

Here’s how I made my money this month:

Shutterstock: To be completely honest, this was a weird amount of revenue to earn for the month. What ended up happening was someone bought a image for $20 and I guess my commission for that was $4. I’m not complaining, but it was just a little odd.

Legal Match: This is the service that connects people with lawyers for free. As of now this comes from one blog post I created, but I anticipate that this income could increase in the future with my new authority website.

Google Adsense: I saw a nice little increase here this month and anticipate that this number will continue to climb as my new authority website has pretty much doubled my earning power here.

Udemy Course Sales-Google Analytics: My first Udemy paid course continues to bring in a few bucks a month.  This course is specifically for Udemy instructors, and if you’re thinking about creating a Udemy course it’s definitely something worth snatching up.

Ninja Outreach: This platform has quickly become one of my favorite tools that I use. I focused so much on sharing my content recently and this platform is what makes my job much easier. I anticipate that the $19 of income that I made was because I rank number one in Google for “Ninja Outreach Review”.

If you’re wondering, yeah, I’m pretty thrilled about that.

Long Tail Pro: It was a nice little surprised to see this sale in the income report this month. I’m not sure how it happened, but somebody decided to take my advice and purchase Long Tail Pro. I assure you that it’s well worth your money and was happy to see someone doing the right thing.

YouTube Channel: Another thing that climbed quite a bit this month was my YouTube channel earnings. What I’ve been doing is every single Periscope that I complete, I’m then posting here and if you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend that you do, there’s a lot of great information here for you.

Indeed.com: A huge contributor to my passive income this month was from the Indeed job search engine and this is all because of my new authority website. Quite honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if next month this one source made me over $100 in passive income. We’ll see what happens, but I’m very excited to see what this next month brings.

Consulting: As mentioned earlier, I didn’t get any new clients but I did have some clients who I’ve worked with for a while ask for some work to be done.  I’m really liking this consulting thing and think I’m going to write a few blog posts soon to help you understand more about what I do.

Aweber: I continue to collect recurring commissions on AWeber and one cool thing was that I got another person to sign up this month. I don’t think I saw any revenue from that because they get the first month for free, but I imagine that this will kick in next month.

Discussing this month’s expenses

Expenses this month were a little bit higher than last month, but that’s because I’m still working on my authority website and had to purchase access to some pretty amazing tools.

Aweber: Even though I made money with this platform, I still have my monthly fee that I have to pay for.

Ring Central: I needed a fax line in order to have one of my contractors do research and this was the service I used. It’s pretty cool because if somebody sends you a fax, it comes straight through as an email and you don’t even have to have a fax machine.

Hostgator: This is my recurring hosting fee.

Hootsuite: Everyone talks about social media and how important it is, but have you taken the time to look in your analytics to see how many email sign-ups or purchases social media is accounting for? In most cases, the answer is none. This is why I use HootSuite.  At $10 a month and auto scheduling my posts, it’s well worth it.  Here’s a video showing my strategy.

Ahrefs: I did a lot of research and found out that this is the most reliable tool to see what websites are linking to specific articles. This is extremely important for my outreach efforts and I’ll probably use this tool for quite some time.

Call Rail: This is the platform that I’ve been using to record my client calls for my consulting gig. I realize that I haven’t been disclosing this in my income reports and didn’t even think about the fact that it should be included, so I’ll do so moving forward.

Elance.com:  My expenses for Elance were pretty high this month, but I’m pretty sure that they’re going to continue to climb. This is because I don’t want to work on tasks that I can hire other people to do for less than $10 per hour. My hourly wage is worth much more than that and if I have mundane tasks, I always outsource them.

Did I Meet my Goals for August?

1) Complete my E-book

YES!  I literally just finished it a few days ago, but I’m happy to report that my e-book is complete. I think I’m going to put it on Amazon eventually, but I released the first edition and so far it’s gotten some pretty awesome responses. Specifically, I was asked by an organization in Texas if they could email it out to their entire list and include an announcement on their homepage that it was available.  How cool is that?!?! 

2) Disclose my Authority Website

This was my second goal for the month and obviously I did this as well.

3) Get my content shared by more people

I didn’t have control over this one necessarily, but I was able to get my authority website reveal post shared by few people. Specifically, Spencer Haws who owns Long Tail Pro and Justin Cooke with Empire Flippers.

An interesting thing that’s happening with all of my outreach is that I’m getting a lot of connections and even some guest posting opportunities which I’ll announce once I’ve completed them and they go live.

BOOM!  Trifecta, I hit all of my goals this month.  Woop woop!

Goals for September:

1) Write, write, write.

One of the things that I haven’t been doing enough of lately is writing. I need to write more for the OneHourProfessor.com website, I need to write more for my authority website, and I need to do more guest blogs. I’m going to try to do more writing this month than I ever have before and it should pay off.

My goal is to publish 6 blog posts on OHP, 4 blog posts on Website 1UB, and at least 2 guest posts.

2) Setup my own course area in OneHourProfessor.com

I’ve been relying on Udemy to host my courses for some time and although I have over 5,000 students on the platform, about 99% of those are from my free course. While I’m happy that the free course is there and it’s definitely providing me with some exposure, I realize that in order to fully control my own destiny I need to have a course area on the OneHourProfessor.com website. So, this month I want to build out an area of my website that has all of my courses listed.

3) Begin creating my new course

I’m actually extremely excited about this one.

If you don’t already know, I am creating the authority website based on all of your feedback and after being featured on the 1-day business breakthrough podcast. You all mentioned that you wanted me to create a course that explained how to create a profitable website, how to blog, and basically an all-encompassing course that will walk you through all the steps of getting this done.

Well, the authority website experiment was just that, and now I’m going to make this new course into a living and breathing case study for you to follow.  It’s going to be really cool because I’ll walk you through everything I did up to this point and will continue to update the course each month with something else.

I’m super excited about this and intend on making it my flagship course for the OneHourProfessor.com website.  If you want to have access to the early release of the course, you need to sign up here.

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