Before I dive too deeply into 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) 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.

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 three items that jumped out to me this month:

• Website 1: There was a big jump this month in traffic and earnings for this website and I’ve also noticed that I am ranking#1 for all of my main target keywords.  It’s interesting mostly because I haven’t done any additional link building or anything.  I feel like at this point, the website is so old and has so much authority that Google feels anything we write should hit page 1 within 24 hours.  I wish Google felt this way about all my other websites, but that isn’t the case at this moment unfortunately. 
• Website 3: It’s unfortunate to see, but for the fourth month in a row, I’ve seen a traffic drop to this website.  Of course, earnings have a direct correlation to that and they’ve dropped as well.  I’m doing quite a bit of link building at the moment and I also have a huge project underway to make some of the resources on the website much better.  My hope is that with the additional link building and the revisions to some of the main functions of the website, we can push it to a better place on Google’s search results. 
• Website 4: I mentioned last month how I saw a pretty significant decline in earnings to this website and luckily, I was able to figure out why that was and how to remedy it. The thing with this website is that we have a HUGE Facebook group that continues to grow by 50-100 people every single day.  What I’ve been doing is posting various articles and content into that group with Amazon affiliate links.  The ultimate goal here is to drop the Amazon cookie into the browsers of users so that if they buy anything in the next 24 hours, we get out commission.  I discovered near the end of the month that the tool I use to post to the group wasn’t working at all, and actually hadn’t been working for 3 weeks prior.  After I noticed, we fixed the issue and put the articles back in the Facebook group.  There was an almost immediate bump that started to increase commissions, so I think this will help us in the months to come.

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 were two items that jumped out to me this month:

• Calendar Printing Services: There was a very large printing cost that I only incur once a year, and that’s when I make the calendar.  At about $750, this was a cost that was significant. 
• Labor Costs: My writing/editing and research/labor costs are also higher than usual and that’s because when I make more, I invest more. Probably 80-90% of this is to create additional content to my various web properties. 

Website 3 Update:  I am a little frustrated by this website, but what else is new?  I started this one in November of 2016 so we’re almost two years in and although things aren’t ideal, I shouldn’t be too upset considering how much money it’s making each month.

But the reason I’m not too pumped about that is pretty simple…

It can do better and be bigger than Website 1 and I know this.

The market is at least double the size and with the right exposure on Google, this one will be an absolute beast for earnings.

As of now I am trying to fix this with three methods.

1. I’m revising a main component of the website to make it more useful. I can’t give away all details here as it would expose the type of website it is, but this is a crucial part of the website that needs to get improved and is a function that almost all website visitors use.
2. Backlinking continues. I have consultants helping find link targets and consistently message 30-50 contacts a day seeking backlinks.  While my current backlinks are okay, they need to grow and that’s what I’m working towards.
3. New content. Beyond these strategies, I’m also having a writer post two pieces of content each week.  The problem with this content is that it’s very competitive and already has quality results, but I’m hoping we can out-write the competition and get ranked beyond them. 

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

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Earnings fell by about $700 for the month and while that stinks, I’m surprisingly okay with it. This is because I still haven’t lost faith in this website and strongly believe it can still rebound from this and be even bigger than before. 
• Referring domains fell by 12 for the month and I’m thinking this is more because the tool reporting the information isn’t correct. While I can’t say for certain, it seems strange that the backlinks dropped by 12 in a single month considering I’m still link building as well.
• One of the main issues with this website is that some of the functionality is lacking. This is the exact functionality that I’m having my developer work on this month and I hope once it’s fixed, I’ll stop getting complaints about the issue.  This same issue is also the main reason why people don’t backlink to me as they feel like I don’t have a good enough option for their situation.  This update will (hopefully) fix it.

Website 4 Update: Another decent month in October and I already mentioned how I was able to fix the affiliate income issue I was having related to Facebook postings not being published in the website’s Facebook group.  Now that I’ve fixed it, it looks like my income is steadily rising now and I’m obviously happy about that. 

I’ve also noticed that my traffic is almost the exact same every single month for the last three months which is a pretty awesome considering I haven’t published anything in a year.

At some point it’s going to make sense for me to review this website for additional ways to optimize for income, but I don’t think that’ll be happening before the end of the year. 

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

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Referring domains had a decent jump and I did absolutely nothing to make that happen. This is now growing with backlinks organically and if it keeps going, this website will be a safe income platform for years to come.

Website 5 Update:  This was a great month for CK and not only did the pageviews increase, but so did the revenue and referring domains.  I’m pretty psyched up about the fact that the referring domains only jumped by 7 backlinks because I know for a fact I had at least 25 more backlinks added to the website.

I think at this point that Google just hasn’t seen all of the backlinks yet and as time goes on, Google will begin to realize how many links are actually pointing to the website and reward me accordingly. 

It’ll take some time, but it’s encouraging and I still have really high hopes for this website.

Beyond these positive signs I was also able to get a few review-type posts ranked recently.  The rankings weren’t very high and they went from a position over 100 to positions 43 and 62.  Or, in layman’s terms, pages 4 and 6 of Google search. 

While this is only moderately encouraging, it’s something to get excited about.

Here are my statistics for this website so far:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Time will grow this website and I will make a killing with it once it grows to the point that I think it can. It’s not easy and it’s taking a ton of time, but I really think I’ll do incredibly well with this one because it’s most than Adsense and affiliate.  As I’ve said before, this one will end up making a full brand and I will sell my own products on Amazon, which I think will be incredibly lucrative. 

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.

• Documentation is Key: When I was training my editor, I documented all of my work and direction so that when a new editor came on, I could seamlessly plug them in.  Well, that day happened as my current editor decided to leave and I had to find a new one.  While it was a bit of a headache, the new editor seems like a solid worker and hopefully she’ll grow with the brands.  Though I didn’t like seeing her leave, all of the documentation I did in the past paid off on this one.  Training was minimal and though I still have some training to do with her, it’s overall going very well thus far.
• Life Gets in the Way: This month was brutal as I had an abundance of work to do and even more distractions.  Sometimes this happens and the only way to get through it is to keep working.  That happened this month and though I had crazy distractions, I’d say things went pretty well all things considered. 
• Passive Income is Amazing:  Okay, I didn’t just learn this, but I think it’s a nice reminder.  There were plenty of days this month where I didn’t check my earnings at all and then a few days later I saw I was making $500+ dollars per day.  If my income wasn’t passive, this wouldn’t be possible and I’d be a pretty broke guy at the moment.

Did I Meet my Goals for October?

Send Website 4 Calendar to Printer (SUCCESS)

I did this on October 31^st and though the house purchase and immigration paperwork really slowed me down, I did get it done.  It feels good to be completed with it and we’ll see how it does on Amazon. 

Start a New Database For CK (SUCCESS)

I started the research for this new database and we’re pretty far into it thus far.  My VA will still have to build all of the pages and build out the content on them, but this database continues to evolve and I think by the end of the year she’ll start actually building out the pages.

Better Understand Pinterest (FAIL)

I meant to learn Pinterest this month and I did 0% of that.  I do intend on doing it still, but things came up that stopped me, so we’ll have to push this into November.

What Are My Goals for November?

Get BBC Calendar for Sale on Amazon

I plan on getting the new 2019 calendar up for sale on Amazon in November.  The cool thing about this is that if you search the calendar type in Google, I have a blog post that relays them to my own product.  Now I’ll just need to swap that link of the 2018 calendar with the 2019 one and we’ll see how well it does along with Amazon’s organic ranking once I send sales to the listing.

Brainstorm

It sounds like a weird goal, but this month I want to take a step back and THINK about my businesses.  I’ve noticed that since I’ve been working so hard the last few months, I have been focused on working in my businesses, and not actually on them.  I need to take time to reflect on what I’m doing and analyzing to find room for improvement.

Better Understand Pinterest

I completely missed the boat on this one, but my wife will be leaving on the 8^th this month and my house will close on the 30^th, so I think I’ll have time to dive in.

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