If you’re curious to know why I’m sharing my online income reports, read here.
I want to open this report thanking my long-lasting readers and supporters Claudio di Bella (my spiritual guide), la Signora Ape and Maxcere. You’re supporting me and keeping me going with your offline comments and opinions!
Below the report of last month, that I’m writing as soon as possible. In fact, in the last couple of months I wrote the reports way too much towards the end of the month, so in a way I had my opinion and view already spoiled by the results of my efforts.
Income reports should be written in the first week of the new month!
One note about my personal life – August was quite sad as a lost my dear aunt Lella.
What’s going on
WP Tube 5 theme was a success!
In May I bought a website selling a WordPress Theme: freeWPtube.com It’s a theme that allows to create video websites based on WordPress.
On July 18th I released a new version of the theme as Premium, totalling 6 sales by end of the month.
In August things went pretty well. I released a minor update on the theme, version 5.1 adding some of the features that customers were asking for.
I also tried to increase the prices, from 19$ & 29$ (respectively for the version with links in footer and the link-free version) to 29$ and 39$.
This is a considerable increase but those prices are aligned with other Premium themes out there.
I had 18 sales for a total of 572$!!
This is great, considering that August is a slow month with vacations in many countries.
On August 27th I added a third selling option: Unlimited Domains for 99$. This means that for 99$ you can install the theme on all the websites you want, while other versions have license for a single domain.
After I added that option, the sales dropped down dramatically!
It seems that customers want the freedom to install the theme on multiple domains, but the price was too steep for that. And mentioning “Unlimited Domains” made implicit that the standard version has some sort of license code or limitation (that’s not the case at all!) and scared people away. Yet another good lesson 🙂
There are two other factors related to this business:
- Customer Support: when selling a cheap product, any support request can destroy the revenue. Just imagine if I had to spend 3 hours to fix a problem for a 19$ customer! Luckily the product is stable and I had really few requests, most of them pre-sales questions that made me understand what potential customers are looking for.
- Chargebacks: in this market it’s common to offer a 30 days money-back-guarantee. I got one refund request so far, from a Portuguese-speaking customer complaining that he didn’t get support but he never asked for it. There’s no point in discussing with an unhappy 19$ customer lying, so I just refund the money and move on. One refund out of 28 sales means 3.5% chargeback rate.
An update on ComoHacer e-book sales
ComoHacer.info is going really, really well (179,801 pageviews in August resulting in €418.77 from Adsense!) but the sales of the related e-book sucks.
I must admit that I didn’t try any improvement in August, ouch!, also because I published my previous income report on the 20th August realizing too late how bad July was.
The sale page got 1,076 views, converting in just 2 sales. That’s a risible 0.18% conversion rate.
New websites evaluation
I’m more and more interested in web properties related to WordPress – I understand the technicalities and I believe in it.
I found an interesting website on sale, selling themes and plugins. The asked price was pretty high and the business clearly trending down.
I made my evaluation 30% lower than asked price, but by the time I placed my offer, someone else already bought it for my estimated price!
Those things happen, but I was glad that my estimation was correct. Anyway, no new baby for this month 🙂
Income Breakdown
Time for the numbers!
- Advertising
- Adsense: €634.49 (last month €635.44)
- Feedblitz: €9.24 (last month €38.22)
- Direct Ads: €26.60 (last month €26.60)
- BuySellAds: 5.90 (last month €18)
- Job Board Services
- Premium Job posting: €9 (last month €24.1)
- Resume Access: €54.93 (last month €158.19) – I’m stopping this service
- Affiliate Programs
- Lead generation: 0
- Product affiliation: €94.39 (last month €410.21)
- Amazon program: €4.19 (last month 0)
- Guest Posting: 0
- Product Sales:
- ComoHacer ebook: €28.92 (last month €28.6)
- WP Tube theme: €420.98 (last month €135)
Total Gross: € 1,288.64 (last month € 1,474.36)
Expenses Breakdown
Note: some links to products and services may have affiliation. This means that if you’ll buy I’ll get a commission. Never the less, I’m only mentioning here services that I use myself to operate my websites.
- Hosting
- Site5: €19
- This is the hosting I’m using since a few months and totally happy with. They have servers in Amsterdam too, so I use it for my European websites.
- 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.
- Site5: €19
- Mailing List services
- FlipFilter: €10
- This is a very useful service for website buyers, crunching big data from multiple marketplaces for you.
- Outsourcing: 0
- Software: €22.37
- I bought a WordPress plugin for freeWPtube
Total Expenses: € 155.93 (last month € 133.56)
Net Total August 2014: € 1,132.71 (last month 1,340.8)
Lessons Learned in August
August is a low & slow month in the online World, so I’m satisfied with the results.
I’m looking forward to dedicate more time to my online portfolio in September!
Considering that I could have stayed close to my family in a difficult moment, I keep the lesson that the freedom given by running an online business has no price.
Happy September to my readers!
Well Done! Remember before do something that sucks….ask me for advise!!! Advise are free for you!!!
Thanks Maxcere, I’ll keep it in mind when I’ll have bad ideas 🙂
Adsense dropped almost 1€. I’ll be worried about that
Will always support you, as long as you never forget your last conclusion posted in this report 🙂