Since I arrived back to Amsterdam, at the beginning of May, I focused on work and run.
Being back to a more regular routine helps with the productivity, and to balance the time spent at the desk I started a personal challenge: run every day for 30 days.
I’ll write about it once the challenge is over, for now let’s focus on the online income report.
Ah… the online income reports! I have a love/hate relationship with them. I did April’s financial calculation in the first days of May, but I let two weeks pass by before actually taking the time to sit down (actually, laid down on the couch) and write this post.
Last month I asked for feedback about the format, only to get very different opinions. Hanny said she finds the updates more interesting than the numbers, while Cloudio said exactly the opposite: to report the numbers and forget about the rest.
Thank you very much! 🙂
So I’ll keep the status quo.
What’s Going On
Where I’ve been
Let’s start with the usual quick travel update.
April started in Saigon, Vietnam. Meeting some friends from the DC community and enjoying good Vietnamese coffee.
Then I visited for my first time Singapore, where a friend recently moved to live with his girlfriend.
From there back to Indonesia for a week in Jakarta (I really struggle to like that place) and two weeks in my dear Bali.
And btw, I published the article one month in Ubud.
Firing a customer
This has been a hard decision, but a decision that every entrepreneur sooner or later has to face.
The services I provide with WP-OK are quite defined: it’s a support & maintenance service for WordPress websites, and being a productized service it’s very specific on what’s included – and what’s not included.
This is how I can keep it affordable and manageable.
This specific customer wasn’t playing by the rules and I don’t blame him. He was looking for a different type of service, something closer to the traditional consultancy.
I realized I could not make him happy within my rules, and that making exceptions for him would have made me not happy either… so after a sleepless night (well OK, just few hours) I decided to terminate the collaboration, deliver the work done up to that moment and return the money.
The moment I sent that email I was soooo relieved. All the thoughts disappeared, but one: I was afraid of his reaction.
He replied that the service wasn’t working for him either, and we parted away in a professional and respectful way.
Building a Team: from ‘I’ to ‘WE’.
I finally feel ready to step up the game and build a network of collaborators. It’s clear that I’ve to be the boss and work on the business and not in the business: something I heard 82453231231 times but never applied.
Or maybe I wasn’t in a position where I was confident in delegating and managing people.
Last year I was looking for a business partner, and I got one for RouterFreak. That has been a bliss and helped me a lot. It changed how I work because I’ve someone to confront ideas with and share tasks.
Now and for the next months (this is also a goal, actually) I’m focusing on building a team that can replace me in the operational part of the business.
In April, I started two collaborations.
One is with Jonathan, a great WordPress developer and nomadic soul that is helping with WP-OK support requests. This pushed me to write down SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and record some videos so he could get started and be independent as fast as possible. Quite happy with that and how we’re working together!
The second of is with…. my cousin. Yep, she was in-between-jobs so I asked her help reaching out potential advertisers for RouterFreak. She dedicated just few hours on this (and eventually stopped as she got a proper full-time job) but it worked very well because she got in contact with the VP of a startup that we turned into a great customer.
I’m finally entitled to say ‘we’ when I talk to someone without feeling like I’m pretending.
We do this, we work this way, we’ll take care of your site… way to go!
The Numbers
Income Breakdown
Let’s get down with the numbers!
- Advertising
- Adsense: €232.99 (was €261.58) – Adsense performances are on a decline…
- Feedblitz: 0 (was €2.05) – I’ll remove this voice since I’m not using this monetization method anymore
- Direct Ads: €320.17 (was €323) – directly negotiated advertising campaigns
- Sponsored posts: €1214.75 (was €263.31)
- BuySellAds: 0 – happily replaced by direct ads
- Job Board Services
- Job posting: €33.83 (was €69.34) – Premium job posting on AidBoard
- Affiliate Programs
- Lead generation: €394.19 (was 0)
- Product affiliation: €37.86 (was €66.11) – Clickbank, SEMrush, DPD and others affiliate programs
- Amazon program: €76.26 (was €108.85) – on a terrible terrible decline!
- Sales:
- RouterFreak eBooks: €164.08 (was €308.95)
- ComoHacer ebook: €7.81 (was €23.7) – slowly but steady, this eBook is contributing to my passive income
- WP Tube theme: €270.79 (was €102.69) – my WordPress theme, running on auto-pilot
- Website sale: 0 – Nothing to sell at the moment!
- WP-OK services: €1,537 (was €1383.53) – my bespoken WordPress management & support service, this doesn’t take into account the refund for the client I fired (that will be in next report)
Total Gross: € 4,290 (last month € 2,913.11)
Expenses Breakdown
Note: some links to products and services may are affiliates. This means that if you’ll buy I’ll get a commission. Never the less, I’m only mentioning services that I use myself to operate my websites.
- Hosting & Domains & Websites
- Site5: €126.59
- This is the hosting I’m using and happy with. I recently switched to a VPS4 solution. They have servers in Amsterdam too, perfect for my websites with European audience.
- HostGator: €18
- This is a popular cheap hosting provider with servers in US. I still use it for some websites with majority of traffic from Americas, but their support is getting worse and worse!
- Domain renewal: €20.98 (was €13.13) – expenses related to domains registered at Godaddy
- Website acquisition: 0
- Site5: €126.59
- Mailing List services
- Outsourcing
- Articles: 0
- Contractors: 0
- Partnerships: €539.93 – revenue sharing
- Memberships
- The Dynamite Circle: €127.53 (was 0) – great community of online entrepreneurs, quarterly paid
- SEMrush: €29.5 – PRO membership of this excellent tool to analyze search engine results and competition
- Ahrefs: €18.68 – This is a great tool for backlink analysis
- Boomerang for Gmail: €13.47 – Excellent tool for email management
- HelpScout: €13.17 – helpdesk software used for customer support
- Advertising
- Adwords: €68.01 (was €47.37)
- Facebook Ads: 0
- Paypal Payment Fees
- Paypal Fees: €143.99 (was €100.14) – the price to pay for receiving Paypal payments!
- Software Licenses
- Software: 0 (was €350.19)
Total Expenses: € 1,151.71 (was € 837.43)
Net Total March 2016: € 3,138 (last month € 2,075.68)
Conclusions & Goals
Very happy with the results of last month!
Now the goal is to continue building a team.
This is a big change and a big challenge!
It means stepping up the game and moving from being a one-man show to an actual entrepreneur.
As usual, I hope to read your reflections in the comments.
Awesome D! Such a great next step..
Thanks! It’s fun to deal with real people after some time spend inside the internet 🙂