Another month in the books and a pretty decent one at that.

It’s kind of weird because in July it didn’t seem like I got much done, but when I look back on the months I actually did just fine.

I think the most success I had this month was from building backlinks to my Jobs authority website and I’m definitely excited to see what that’s going to bring in the future.

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.

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 much time did I work this month?

How did the income report turn out this month?

Discussing this month’s income

This month’s income was a little bit less than last month, but my expenses were also a little bit less.

Overall, this meant that my net income after expenses was slightly higher than last month.

However, it was only an increase of about $50 so it’s definitely nothing to go crazy over.

I was surprised by some of the numbers in my income report this month because the income by channel changed quite a bit.

Specifically, I had a few affiliate sales from my Ultimate Thrive Themes Tutorial post that I did some time ago.

This is really encouraging and I don’t know if it’s because Thrive Themes is advertising more, or more people are hearing about Thrive Themes, but it really is a great product and that’s why spent so many hours creating the tutorial.

So far that bad boy has made me almost $1000, so I’m obviously psyched about that.

Discussing this month’s expenses

Again this month I had high expenses, but they weren’t as high as last month.

As usual, the majority of my expenses this month were from my team of writers who are consistently creating content that will continue to serve my website for years to come.

I feel like it’s important to mention that if you’re thinking about outsourcing something, the best thing that you can do from a return on investment perspective is to hire a writer.

Think about it, if you get a good writer who creates quality articles and your website gets ranked for that particular term, the sky is the limit in terms of how much money you can make from that particular page and how much traffic it will bring your website.

I’ve taken this approach and outsourced a ton of writing and even though oftentimes the articles that my writers create don’t rank on the first page of Google, when they do it really pays off.

Project Updates

Website 1 Update: It was another good month for my job webste and I think that it will grow in the next few months even more because of all of the link building I’m doing.

My writer is still working on completing a new database and we only have seven more states until that thing is done.

Once this entire database is created, I’m going to include it in the navigation of the website and also include it in the email auto responder.

This is going to do a lot in terms of getting views from my website visitors and I’m also going to reach out to try to get a few links from other website owners as well.

As I mentioned in my introduction, a lot of success that I’ve had this month is getting links to the website.

I assure you that this is no easy task, but I found a pretty awesome “hack” that seems to be really effective.  The entire blog post about it is available here,  but to sum everything up, it comes down to using your own email list to get links.

I’ve found a way to export my email list, run it through an Excel file to eliminate all of the common email service providers (Such as emails from gmail, yahoo, etc.) and then I send a broadcast to that list asking them if they’re interested in partnering.

I’m still working on fine-tuning this method and I plan to eventually outsourcing it, but here are some of the early results from this method:

• In the month of July I was able to get 38 total links back to the website. Some of these are from duplicate domains and some of them are no follow links, but overall it looks like about 25 of those links are “do follow” and from good sources.
• I’ve been completely ignoring the domain authority score for the websites that I’m trying to get a link from. The reason for this is because it takes minimal work for me to reach out to these people and usually only requires a few emails back and forth to get a link, so any link is worth the small time investment.
• You might be wondering, how did this increase in links impact the traffic of my website? Well, as of now I can’t really determine because it’s too early. However, as you can see in the screenshot below, for the month of July I had a 16% increase in organic traffic and I think this is from the links I built in June.  I think once the Google realizes I have about 25 new links, I’ll see a nice jump in ranking as well.

I’m going to continue to build out the links for Jobs website in the next few months and once we get the current database completed, there will be a lot less work to get done.  As of now I have my blogger doing two articles per week, I think I’ll ask him to do three articles each week to increase the new content being written.

In the future, I believe that I’m going to hire someone to proofread these articles, find an image, and post them on the website.

In addition to that, I believe I’ll have someone complete the link building every month as well.

Once I get these two pieces in place and I’ve trained someone to complete them, this website will be 100% passive income.

However, I won’t be comfortable doing all of this until I’ve done it numerous times myself and have figured out any possible shortcuts to increase efficiency.

Right now my goal with this website is to build enough links to increase my position for my core search term (Not disclosing the term here for privacy).  As of now, I am ranked 3.7 in the last 7 days and was ranked 4.0 a week prior to that, so we’re increasing my rank on that term pretty quickly.

If I can get to position #1 or #2, it’s going to be a huge increase in earnings.

In fact, I’m thinking I could hit $5000+/month so I’ll keep building links to make that happen.

Consulting Update:  There was a pretty big drop in consulting income for the month of July and although I don’t like the fact that it was reduced, I can tell you confidently that this isn’t where my heart is anyway.

At this point, I have one consulting agreement in place and I work as needed.

I’m not actively seeking out additional consulting agreements and it would be completely fine with me if this income eventually disappeared from my portfolio.

I do have a new project for this client in the next two months that I’ll be working on that should increase my hours, but it’s not 100% passive and that isn’t ideal.

Udemy Update: I was a little disappointed by the amount of money that I made on Udemy in July, but at the same time I can’t complain too much because a lot of this was passive income.

I didn’t actually do anything aside from send two emails the entire month and I was still able to see almost $200 for my efforts.

As I mentioned in my last income report, I absolutely refuse to spend any more time creating a Udemy course until the previous course has paid for itself.

In June and July, Udemy made me $465.19.

As I mentioned last month, my last course cost me $950 to make, so I still have to make $484.81 to be able to make another course.

I already know that my next course is going to be focused on outsourcing and I also think it’ll cost me a lot less to create because there’ll be a whole lot less video editing expenses, but I won’t start it until my last course is paid for.

OHP Website Update:  I mentioned last month how my goal for the One Hour Professor website was to create a full funnel for my courses and integrate Thrive Ultimatum as well as Convertkit.

The good news is that I got ALL of that done, but the bad news is that there seems to be some technical issues.

It’s kind of hard to explain why, but at this point in time my funnel isn’t working as I had designed it and I’m still tweaking it to try to get it fixed.

This really sucks and I haven’t sold a single course on One Hour Professor yet, but I’m not going to give up yet.

I need to make sure that I have this full funnel in place and spend time and money to get people through the funnel to see how well it actually converts.

This is really hard for me because this is been one of the most time-consuming tasks and I’ve seen almost no revenue from it, but I know that it will work if I do things correctly.

For now I’m going to focus on getting the funnel correct and once I’ve confirmed that it’s working as planned, I’ll then try some more Facebook advertising to get people into the funnel.

Website 2 Update: Probably one of the more fun things I worked on this month was a redesign of the TranscriptionJobsHQ.com website.

It’s taken me quite a bit of time to get this where I wanted to be, but I’m very close to launching the redesigned website and when I do, I’m confident that it’s going to increase the overall revenue.

In addition to that, I’ve also hired a writer who is creating some excellent content that will be used in the autoresponder to bring people back to the website over and over again which should increase my earnings.

At the end of the auto responder I’ll find a way to pitch and affiliate product to try to maximize earnings.

My hope is that I will increase the website to over $100 in earnings every single month and then I can use those earnings to keep reinvesting in content for the website.

I’m really not sure what this website is going to end up being yet.

There’s a chance that I’ll end up selling it for a few thousand dollars, but there’s also a chance that I’ll keep it and continually reinvest to make it the number one place for those looking for a job in transcription for years to come.

Either way, it’s great to see it progressing and I look forward to what the future holds for this one.

New Authority Website Update: I’d be lying to you if I said that the buildout of this website has been smooth.

I’ve already gone through two different developers and I’m on my third to complete a project within the website that I’m looking for.

Long story short, I’m trying to filter some content on the website and it’s harder than I thought it would be.

However, I have no doubt that in time all of these issues will be fixed and I’ll be able to get a ton of traffic to the website and increase earnings significantly.

One thing that’s pretty cool about the website is that in the month of July I saw around 100 people come to the website organically, so I hope that this continues to grow as I’ve done no link building yet.

YouTube Channel Update:  There was a small decrease in earnings on YouTube this month and I personally have no plans to work harder in my YouTube channel.

Once I get cracking on my next course, I’ll throw some new videos up there, but until then I’m going to leave it as is.

Did I Meet my Goals for June?

1) Move to ConvertKit (COMPLETED)

The conversion to ConvertKit was painful, but I was able to get it all done in the month of July. It took me quite a bit of time, but overall I’m really happy with the platform and absolutely love it compared to the capabilities of Aweber.

2) Rework the OHP Funnel (COMPLETED)

This is done, but not without some tweaks still needed.  It really sucks because I rewrote all the emails and made a really sophisticated funnel that I thought would do really well, and then I came to find out that it wasn’t work as expected due to a few software components not working together. I’m going to get this fixed soon though.

3) Get 10 Backlinks for Website 1ub (COMPLETED)

Absolutely crushed this goal and I’m already seeing some great results due to some of the links that I got in the past. One thing that I’ve noticed for this website is basically every single blog post that I publish gets ranked on the front page of Google in a day or two. This is because the domain authority is really high and I think it’s going to continue to increase with all of the other links I’m getting as well.

Goals for July:

1) Launch new version of Website 2 and its Autoresponder

I’m just about done with the redesign of TranscriptionJobsHQ and anticipate it being completed in the month of August. As of right now I’m waiting for a developer to finish designing a specific page and then will be ready to go.  Once that’s done, I plan on launching and updated the autoresponder as well.

2) Get the new Authority Website project done with developer

I still have a lot to do with the new authority website, but the main thing that I want to get done is to make sure that my developer gets all of the pieces in place so that me and a few virtual assistants can begin filling in the content.

3) Get 20 Backlinks for Website 1ub and launch housing database

I’m going to up the ante this month for my work on Website 1ub and push myself to get more back links and launch the housing database for the website.

I think once the housing database is in place, I’ll do additional backlink outreach to try to get links to the housing area and if I’m able to rank that page then it’s going to be really interesting to see how far this website can go.

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