Slowly but surely we reached the last online income report of 2014.
December has been a very busy month! It started in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) and continued in Bangkok before heading back to Amsterdam, where I stayed for 10 days as I spent the Christmas time with my family in Italia.
And this is only the logistic part – business-wise I added two new websites to my little empire…
Here the report from December 2014.
What’s going on
I got a new website!
I Saigon I finally met Joe from EmpireFlippers. I’ve been follow their podcast and blog for the last three years and I saw their website marketplace growth. Nowadays they run a well-controlled marketplace with selected sellers, pre-vetted websites and serious seller.
I’ve been trying to be their customer for a while but honestly I never found anything that really interested me.
Having lunch with Joe and his colleague Mike proven to be great and rewarding and they proposed me an interesting website, a blog specialized in drones and monetized via Amazon affiliates.
This website required a bigger investment than my previous ones, so I took some days to analyze things carefully and decided to ask experts opinion.
I had Travis from Supremacy SEO analyzing the backlink profile to make sure that the website is healthy and not at risk of Google penalties. In a nutshell, this means checking the pages having links to the website to make sure they are not spammy or low-quality as Google is going after those type of artificial backlinks (built to ‘trick’ Google and rank higher) and regularly penalizing the websites using them.
I also had Centurica performing a website analysis and providing a very, very useful report that helped me a great deal in taking the buying decision.
I’m not going to disclose the name of the website I bought, but being this a financial report I disclose the buying price: €13.146.
The whole buying process went very smooth and I can definitely see the advantages of buying from the EmpireFlippers. Mike organized the Skype calls with the seller, Joe followed up to make sure I was comfortable with the information provided and their technical team took care of the migration part.
We even agreed on one week of inspection period, that is a phase during an acquisition used by the buyer to verify the website dynamics and performances (traffic, earnings, and make sure you’re getting what expected).
Acquiring a web property is very very exciting but also very very stressful because you want to make sure everything is in order and be as much confident as possible before putting any money in!
Maybe I should take time to write more about the whole process since I got a fair amount of experience in the last years.
Back to the new baby… it performed very well in December, but that was easy to expect as drones were high on the wish lists for Christmas.
It will take more time to see how this blog will perform and I’m working on the next steps.
And I launched a new website!
Last months I mentioned a new project: the Italian version of ComoHacer, my Spanish blog about manual works and DIY.
December the 12th I soft-launched the new website: ComeCostruire.info
The blog has the same simple design of its big brother and I focused on the content. It has 40 articles (out of the almost 500 of the Spanish one!) that were professionally translated – a total investment of ca. €360.
I’m happy to report that in few days ComeCostruire started getting organic traffic from search engines without any marketing effort and closed December with 439 page views and €2.36 earned from Adsense! 🙂
WP Tube 5 theme update
After the great month of November (17 sales), the WordPress Theme WPtube kept generating a nice revenue.
I had 7 sales for a total of $253, with 1 refund.
I started the development of the new version 5.2 with some features on high demand. This project has definitely potential to do more.
The free version of the theme got 647 downloads and I believe that with some marketing improvements I can sell much more Premium versions.
Last thing to brag about: in November I reached break-even, recovering the initial investment in just six months.
Now I’m into pure profit mode and the value of the asset (the website) growth as it’s now generating much more earnings then when I bought it.
Based on the earnings of the last 3 months I reckon the website could be worth $6800 USD.
An update on ComoHacer e-book sales
December was the best month ever for the e-book sales, even if I put 0 work on that.
The result was 7 sales for a total of $63 – OMG I’m getting rich!
I special thank to Rocco that back in June charged me €150 for a sale page redesign that improved nothing, and Cloudio for not warning me about those marketing ‘experts’.
Income Breakdown
Enough talking, let’s get to the numbers!
By the way, I’m doing the calculation as I write the report. So, until this point I wrote all the above but I still don’t know exactly how the month did go.
- Advertising
- Adsense: €664.44 (last month €598.70) – the new drone website contributed for almost €100
- Feedblitz: €70.9 (last month €59) – nice rebound from the last poor months
- Direct Ads: €110 (last month €26.60)
- BuySellAds: €21.77 (was €20.81)
- Job Board Services
- Premium Job posting: €232.35 (was €31.45)
- Resume Access: €43.25 (was €28.50) – maybe I’m not rally stopping this service
- Affiliate Programs
- Lead generation: 0 (was €300)
- Product affiliation: €97.94 (was €151.78)
- Hosting affiliation: €42
- Amazon program: €688.47 (was 0) – yep, this is the new website about drones!
- Sales:
- ComoHacer ebook: €53.42 (was €36.28)
- WP Tube theme: €214.54 (was €534.57)
Total Gross: € 2,239.08 (last month 1.836.07)
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 – very useful service for website buyers, crunching big data from multiple marketplaces for you
- Outsourcing
- Translation: €169.32 – for ComeCostruire
- Articles: €25
- Memberships
- The Dynamite Circle: 0 – great community of online entrepreneurs, already paid three months subscription
- SEMrush: €59 – PRO membership of this excellent tool to analyze search engine results and competition
- Website acquisition: €13.146 – ouch!
Total Expenses without website acquisition: € 397.01 (was € 433.15)
Total Expenses with website acquisition: € 13,543.01 (was € 433.15)
Net Total November 2014 without website acquisition: € 1,842.07 (last month € 1,402.92)
Net Total November 2014 with website acquisition: € -11303.93
Conclusion
I presented the totals with and without website acquisition for two reasons.
Without the website acquisition, the numbers look really good and this is motivating!
With website acquisition, I feel more honest as I do consider an acquisition as expense as well as in the past I considered a website sale as an income (right Maxcere?).
How was your month?
Any remark about this report?
Thanks for reading!
