Online Income Report – June 2014

comprare casa olanda stats

If you’re curious to know why I’m sharing my online income reports, read here.

In June I’ve been traveling 6 countries: Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia and Italy where I’m now, spending time with my family. An interesting Balkan Tour I already wrote about.

It has been an intense month and I alternate days of hard work with days of exploration and fun. Let’s see what happened back in June.

What’s going on

Last month I realized that I’m ont re-investing enough in my business. I tend to be happy when I see some cash coming in but, beside acquiring more websites, I do everything myself. Even things I’m terrible at… In June I decided to open the wallet and hire two contractors for specific tasks.

Sale page for ComoHacer

I hired Rocco via oDesk to rethink the sale page of my Spanish DIY blog. This blog came with an e-book with all the articles in an easy to read and print format and I believe this is an untapped source of income.

The original sale page, visible here, was using the long-letter format and not very effective. With Rocco’s analysis and advise we built a new, shorter sale page visible here. The new page is highlighting the product features (270 projects, 849 pages, 1141 images) and also the benefits of the product (impressing the family, saving money, the satisfaction of saying “I made it myself”, etc.).

Did it boost the sales? Not yet, but let’s give it some time and next month I’ll share the results!

New version for my WordPress Theme

Last month I bought a website selling a WordPress Theme: freeWPtube.com It’s a theme that allows to create video websites based on WordPress.

It gets an average of 20 downloads a day and it’s very well positioned in the search engine results. I hired the developer that built version 4.0, to create version 5.0 that adds important features like responsive support for mobile devices.

It didn’t go as smooth as I wanted… I was disappointed by the quality of the code and the poor communication, so I had to rewrite most of the theme myself that was a lot of geek-fun for me, but to be honest not what I hired the developer for.

Selling an house in Netherlands… from Kosovo

I was in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, when I received the email from the house agent in Amsterdam informing me that he sold another house to one of my leads.

Yeah! That makes two houses in four months, making this blog an unexpected money-making asset. In fact as I explained in the past, I’m using this blog post about how to buy an house in Amsterdam to send potential customers to my trusted house agent and get a commission if the sale process goes through.

comprare casa olanda stats
Traffic stats on that article for the last 12 months

And this take me to the next point…

Cómo comprar casa en Holanda

My article about buying houses in Netherlands got quite some popularity, in the English version and especially in the Italian version. There’s no SEO or backlink building at all, it’s just a good informative article that people like… and if you think about it that’s exactly what Google is after.

So I decided to try to replicate the success translating the article in the third most-spoken language in the World: Spanish.

I bartered a WordPress consultancy with a professional translation and the result is the piece Cómo comprar casa en Holanda. I did a soft promotion and at the moment the article ranks #1 on page 2 of Google Spain…. hopefully will enter page 1 soon so I can start seeing some traffic.

 

Income Breakdown

Time for the numbers!

  • Advertising
    • Adsense: €687.46 (last month €717.24)
    • Feedblitz: €64.52 (last month €62)
    • Direct Ads: €26.60 (last month €26.60)
  • Job Board Services
    • Premium Job posting: €234.25 (last month €28.60)
    • Resume Access:€105.57 (last month €52.21)
  • Affiliate Programs
    • Lead generation: €525 (last month 0)
    • Product affiliation: €225.57 (last month €118)
    • Amazon program: €3.84 (last month €2)
  • Guest Posting: €0 (last month 0€)
  • Product Sales: €13 (last month €0)
  • Websites Sales: €0 (last month € 4,262.8)

Total Gross June 2014: € 1,885.81 (last month € 5,288)

 

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.
    • HostGator: €18
  • Mailing List services
  • FlipFilter: €10
    • This is a very useful service for website buyers, crunching big data from multiple marketplaces for you.
  • Outsourcing
    • Developer per WP theme: €237
    • Sale page expert: €148.34

Total Expenses June 2014: € 508.9 (last month € 1,013.56)

Net Total June 2014: € 1,376.91 (last month 4,274.44)

 

Lessons Learned in June

June has been another cool month. It’s funny that I’m the first one surprised by the results when I do the math… without those income reports, I would have a vague idea about how I’m doing financially!

As I invested hiring top professionals, I expect in July to see some results so the lesson of June has been try, and then try harder 🙂

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Di Daniele

Hi, I’m Daniele! A human being from planet earth. I founded WP-OK.it and I like dancing Salsa, running, and living a location independent lifestyle.

4 commenti

  1. Glad to have found your blog from Niche Pursuits….I liked your question about buying big or sticking with smaller purchases. Seems as though with all the google sandbox time these days it makes more sense to buy vs. build….what do you think?

    1. Hello Massman, great to have you here!
      I’m into buying for different reasons. I’m only interested in more-than-1-year-old websites that already have a profit. Those websites already passed two critical stages that every new website must go through:
      1) they got traffic
      2) the traffic generated a profit
      And acquiring them I acquire also the valuable historic information that (should)help me understanding what works and what doesn’t.
      If I had to start websites from 0, I can imagine that it would take months (and the time is getting longer) to get decent traffic (unless is paid of course) and make money.
      Last but not least, I have savings to invest to kick start my online business and buying website is still a great investment.

      Hope it helps, are you into buying or building?

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