May 2015 – Monthly Income Report

Hello all and thank you for checking out my May 2015 income report.

I’m not going to lie, it hurt to put together this income report a little bit because I knew I was going to have a loss. However, it isn’t all doom and gloom and there is very good reason for the loss of income this month which I’ll explain below. If you want to always see these income reports when they come out (and get some other cool stuff) make sure to sign-up for my email list.

Before I begin, 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

In total, I worked just under 42 hours this month and there were some good reasons for that. First off, I launched my new course and took a lot of time creating a early bird sign-up list that also incorporated about ten different emails through an autoresponder.

Quite honestly, this course didn’t do nearly as well as I was hoping and I think that the main reason for that is that I chose the wrong subject to focus on. Even though that may be true, I did get an amazing review on the course and I was really happy to see that. With that being said, this was a really good exercise for my future course which will be focused on showing people how to create their own successful blog.

In addition to that, I also spent a ton of time focused on my new project which is the authority website experiment. This entire experiment came into my head after I was featured on the 1 day business breakthrough podcast and after surveying all of you on what my next course should be.

There were a lot of things that Chris Ducker and Pat Flynn said in the podcast episode, but to sum it up they stated that I should completely abandon the OneHourProfessor.com website and instead focus on a authority site to prove that I know how to create a profitable online business.

That just didn’t sit right with me, so instead I decided to create the authority website experiment and I plan on documenting every step I take when creating the website. By doing so, I’m hoping that you all can follow along and learn a thing or two about creating your own authority website/blog.

In case you missed it, my first post in the authority website project is about choosing a website niche or topic. There’s been some great feedback from this article so far, so I recommend you give it a look.

How did the income report turn out this month?

Discussing this month’s income

Ouch.

Compared to the last few months, this particular month was definitely a downer. But why? Well, let me welcome you to the world of consulting. I’ll admit that I absolutely love the freedom that consulting gives me, but sometimes you can have months that aren’t paying the bills. Luckily I still have my teaching gigs and consulting outside of what I report on these income reports, but if we are talking about income specifically made from this website it was definitely a down month.

With that being said, there were definitely some very encouraging things that I saw this month.

First was Indeed.com which brought in $0.34. I know, it’s not even enough to buy a candy bar but this is a positive sign because this income came from my outsourced niche website experiment that I did about 6 months ago.

Even more exciting than the paltry earnings from indeed it is that I also received just over nine dollars from Google AdSense. Let it be known that I haven’t done anything for this site and six months and to see $10 come into my account is pretty encouraging. In fact, it’s encouraging enough that I’m going to look into hiring another writer for the website as I think I abandoned a little too early.

LegalMatch had a nice spike of activity this month and contributed 10 total dollars to my account. Again, this isn’t a ton of money. but it was also completely passive.

My YouTube Channel also had an increase this month of overall earnings and though I’m not sure exactly why, I’m happy to see that it’s numbers are rising as well.

As mentioned previously, I finally launched my first Udemy course and although I’ll admit that $15 is pretty bad for a launch, I actually knew this would happen. I illustrated why that is in this blog post but mainly it was because of the fact that I haven’t been focusing on creating courses that are going to be helpful to my following at OneHourProfessor.com. It’s okay though, my authority website experiment will eventually end up being a course about creating a successful blog which is exactly what you all voted for.

Again I saw some income as a result of my Ninja Outreach review. I’ve already mentioned many times why I like the software, but it can really help you find places to do some guest blog posting and I highly recommend that you check it out.

One thing to note, I’m now accepting guest blog posts on this website. I’m doing this mainly because I want to make sure I expose my readers to good content and if you’d like to post something that you think would be good for my readers, feel free to send me an email.

Next, which is a common contributor to my income reports is Shutterstock. I highly recommend them because their prices are very cheap and they offer pretty much the same images as everyone else.

Lastly, I made a few extra bucks from Aweber because someone out there continues to use them as an email provider.

Discussing this month’s expenses

Expenses this month were higher than they have been in previous months, but it’s for good reason.

First I have the usual recurring expenses in my Hostgator account and HootSuite. These are the types of expenses that are going to continue because I consider both of these platforms vital to my business.

Next we have some expenses that aren’t all that common.

First we have a WordPress theme from Themeforest. Although I haven’t written about this yet in the blog, I’ve already chosen a theme for my authority website and that’s what this purchase was.

Beyond that, I’m still signed up with SEMRush and this is mainly because I want to make sure that I create a really good tutorial for you guys to understand the value of this tool and I also need to use it for my authority website. I said it in my last income report, but this is by far one of the most valuable tools I’ve ever found to do competitive analysis.

Next is something new to my expenses and that is a one-time fee of $97 from Thrive Leads conversion software. I’m not sure if you noticed it yet, but while reading this report I’ve already tried to get you to opt into my email list twice. There’s also one more often at the bottom of the page that you’ll see which tells you to sign up to continue to get my income reports emailed to you.  Over time I’ve realized that ConvertBox seems to be a better solution though.

What this means is that I have used Thrive Leads to create opt ins for every category of my blog posts. So, what has this done for my conversion rate? It’s still a little early, but my conversion rate used to be under 1% for people coming to the blog that ended up opting into my email list, and now it’s jumped to over 3%.

Simply put, this is unbelievable and the reason why it’s happening is because the posts are so much more specific to the content of what the reader is reading. Again, I’m going to do a tutorial on this software as well to show you the value but I highly recommend that you consider purchasing this product if you want to get more opt ins for your email list.

Also, just you know, once you sign up they give you a special offer to get a thrive leads annual membership and I also highly recommend that as it includes additional support and products that are helpful such as the thrive content builder.

The last expense for this month was because of Elance.com. These charges were scattered among my developer, video editor, and a lot of it was paying a new virtual assistant that I hired to handle much of the research for my new authority website.

Did I Meet my Goals for May?

1) Survey my readers to find out what course THEY want me to make an decide on something.

Many of you in my email list will recall that I did it ping you earlier this month to try to find out what type of course you’d like for me to make. The two most popular answers were a course about selecting a niche, and a course about creating a successful blog. Again, with my new authority website experiment I’m confident that I’ll give you all the information that you need to be successful and I’ll eventually put that all into a course as well.

2) Use mind-mapping to figure out what my new course will be and begin the initial build out.

I did mind mapping to determine what my new course is going to be about, but in that brainstorm I realize that I should just take you all on my journey while I create a new authority website and that’s exactly what I’ll be doing.

3) Increase my profit month-over-month

Nope, not even close. I was a little nervous going into the month knowing that my consulting fees wouldn’t be paid until June, but this month definitely was less than stellar.

Share your goals for May below, I’d love to hear them!

Goals for June:

1) Get my entire authority website experiment underway and have all of the main content completed.

When I say main content, I mean that I want to have all of the pages that are in the navigation successfully built out. I know that there will be ongoing blogging that I will be doing with this website, but if I can get the main content created I can officially launch the website and begin to get traffic

2) Create the lead magnet for my authority website experiment

The second thing on my list for goals in June is to figure out what opt and I want to use for my authority website experiment. I want to make sure that I am creating an email list from the beginning with this website and I think that having a solid lead magnet from the beginning will ensure that I do that. With that being said, I’m not sure exactly what this lead magnet will be so it might be really difficult to get this done if it’s substantial.

3) Get back into the green with my revenue

Looking ahead, I anticipate that June will be much better than May in terms of income. In fact, I personally believe that it might be possible that June could be my highest month yet. We’ll see what happens, but I got to make sure that I keep the revenue positive if I want to succeed.

What do you think of these goals? Do they seem achievable? Do you have goals for June?