If you’re curious to know why I’m sharing my online income reports, check here.
With a huge delay, here is the last month income report, from February 2014.
I’m simplifying the report format, so below there will be three main sections: “What’s going on” with highlights of what I’ve done during the month, “Income Breakdown” with the crunchy numbers and “Lesson Learned” is the take away lesson from the month.
I’m currently in Laos, in one of the 4.000 islands on the Mekong river. Internet connection is sloooow but there’s really nothing else to do than read, write and relax!
What’s going on
I left the 5th February for this two months road trip in Thailand and Laos. So the month was spent working while traveling, a challenging mix but also a bliss.
AidBoard.com: a strange experiment
Few months ago I started collaborating with the Facebook group “International Development Jobs for Young Professionals“, with more than 33.000 members to date, promoting the entry level jobs from AidBoard.
It’s a very active group and people there are really hunting for jobs, looking for the best resources online.
So I published on AidBoard a new post: List of International Development Job Websites.
In this post I’m actually listing the best job websites for International Development job seekers.
It’s a strange experiment because people reaching this page are most likely to click away to one of the competitors.
To my surprise, the page got more than 1.000 views in two days, and as today it totalized more than 12.000 views, mainly traffic coming from Facebook and Twitter!
The bounce rate (% of people leaving the website after visiting this single page) is 63%, meaning that there still a 37% of visitors are checking other pages of AidBoard.
Also, AidBoard newsletter got twice the subscribers of the previous month.
Those are nice benefits!
ComoHacer.info: new old posts
My last website acquisition is still going strong and I’m totally happy with it.
One of the last things I implemented is the Old Post Promoter (OPP) WordPress Plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/old-post-promoter/). It’s a pity that this plugin hasn’t been updated in years, because it’s a very simple and powerful one. It just picks up random old posts and update the publish date to show them as just published.
For a blog like ComoHacer it’s perfect, because the content is always valid.
With a news website or a technology website (like my RouterFreak) this would not work because the content tends to become old quickly.
Promoting old posts means that e-mail and RSS feed subscribers, as well as social media followers get notified about the new (old) content and this gives a nice extra traffic from returning visitors.
Buying websites: we cancelled a deal
Last month I announced that I was about to buy a bigger website with a partner. After lots of due diligence and analysis, we decided on a very late stage of the deal to back off, and cancel the negotiation.
The problem was that the website earnings were considerably lower than what we were paying for. Nothing much we can do… we learnt a lesson and move on. I still think is better to loose time on a due diligence than loose money on a bad deal.
But, never the less I got my hands on a new small website that will require lovely attentions… more on that in the future.
Income Breakdown
Time for the numbers!
Adsense: €913.82 (last month €862.70) +5.9%
Feedblitz: €63.07 (last month €76.28)
Premium Job posting: €145.44 (last month €65.70)
Resume Access: €90.61 (last month €93.97)
Two new subscriptions this month, and one cancelled. Total active subscription: 8.
Affiliate Programs: €85.99 (last month €1)
Moved back to the old affiliate programs. They take forever to transfer the payout, but at least there is one!
Direct Advertising: €30.54 (last month €1)
An order coming through BuySellAds, and a renewal of a minor advertising on RouterFreak.
Product Sales: €7.27 (new entry!)
ComoHacer gives option to buy an ebook with DIY instructions. This is a possible big area of growth, but I haven’t done much work on it yet. So there was only one sale.
Total February 2014: €1336.75 (last month 893.36)
Lessons Learned in February
I have to admit that between traveling and freelancing for my WordPress customers I haven’t spent that much time on my websites, but at the same time keeping up the maintenance and the email workload was enough to generate a nice passive revenue.
I don’t generally consider my online revenues as passive, because I know well that it requires time and work and passive is such a misleading concept…. but after a month like February I have to admit that the ratio of revenue-per-hour worked is pretty good.
Anyway the biggest lesson came from publishing the list of competitors on AidBoard: not all the traffic is good, but traffic is never bad!
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