If you’re curious to know why I’m sharing my online income reports, check here.
This month I wanted to publish the report during the first week, and as I’m writing I’m still in Bangkok about to fly back to Amsterdam.
In February I simplified the report format, but I realized that I’m a charlatan if I don’t start including the expenses in my reports! 🙂
Making 1500$ with 100$ or 1000$ expenses makes a big difference, right?
So let me share how March went.
What’s going on
March was a full month working while traveling, as real digital nomadic experience!
Selling an house in Netherlands… from Thailand
The top post of this blog – danielebesana.com a life lover – is not about my travels, not about my online activity, not about Salsa, it’s an how-to about buying an house in Netherlands. That’s so random that some months ago I started collaborating with an house agent using the blog as a lead generator: I refer potential customers to him in exchange of a fee if they buy.
Last month the house agent sold an apartment to one of my leads so I got a nice commission fee!
Considering that my job consists in keeping the article updated and doing little email work, this is a very interesting revenue stream.
Mailing Lists: bigger or more active?
As you’ll see in the new expenses report below, the top expense is the Aweber email service that I use to run the RouterFreak newsletter.
RouterFreak had around 10.000 subscribers and while this is a great asset for a web property, it costs more than 100€/month to host such a list.
For a few months I kept the number of subscribers below 10.000, the Aweber threshold between spending 50$ or 130$ per month.
But more often than not, when the bill arrived I was just above the 10k mark also because of the strange Aweber policy of including unsubscribed users in the list size.
So this month I decided to do some cleaning as recommended and described by Aweber itself in this article, and remove inactive users that didn’t open the newsletter in the last 12 months.
RouterFreak list dropped from 10k to 6.7k subscribers, but now they are more valuable and this was reflected in the statistics of the last newsletter: both open rate and click rate are considerably higher than the previous ones!
Before I never considered the importance of cleaning the inactive users. I was just trying to grow and grow the number of subscribers going for the absolute numbers, without taking in consideration their value.
Income Breakdown
Time for the numbers!
- Advertising
- Adsense: €947.80 (last month €913.82) +3.7%
- Feedblitz: €115 (last month €63.07)
- Direct Ads: €100 (last month €30.54)
- Job Board Services
- Premium Job posting: €36.5 (last month €145.44)
- Resume Access: €101 (last month €90.61)
- Total active subscriptions: 9
- Affiliate Programs
- Lead generation: 493,50€
- Product affiliation: 116.61€ (last month €85.99)
- Amazon program: 1€
- Guest Posting: 73€
- Product Sales: 0 (last month €7.27)
Total Gross March 2014: €1984.41 (last month €1336.75)
Expenses Breakdown
This is new from this month, damn I’ve expenses too!
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
- Mailing List services
- FlipFilter: 10€
- This is a very useful service for website buyers, crunching big data from multiple marketplaces for you.
- Outsourcing
- Article Writing: 11€
- Data Entry via oDesk: 16€
Total Expenses March 2014: €220.47
Net Total March 2014: €1763.94
Lessons Learned in March
March has been the best month so far! And while I’ve no illusions to keep this level of earnings because the house sale referral was an exceptional event, I’m very happy as I was traveling with an income.
There were two lessons last month.
The first is that I really like what I’m doing. And I realized it when, instead of going out and travel more, I found myself at the PC in guest houses wanting to work.
The second is that I reached a point in which I could keep on traveling and working. Well, those are realizations more than lessons, but are real food for my post-travel thoughts back in Amsterdam…
Are you making money online?
What has worked or not worked lately?
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