I’m just back in Amsterdam after six weeks spent traveling across Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam and a bit of Thailand.
Most of the people I talk to have the misconception that I was on holidays, or that I had to come back to make some money. That’s absolutely wrong!
As you’ll read below, traveling and working is possible and thanks to Internet the World is our office…
Let’s get down to business with the report from November 2014.
What’s going on
WP Tube 5 theme update
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.
November has been the best month ever and I’m very happy about it after the quiet last months.
I had 17 sales for a total of $663, with 0 refunds.
Where are the customers coming from? I check and re-check on Google Analytics, 12 sales came from referral traffic, meaning visitors coming from another website (not from Google or social media), but the referral is my own URL so it makes no sense! I’ll have to investigate this because it’s very important to understand where the visitors that converts into customers are coming from.
Which product is top selling? One interesting thing is that of the copies sold last month, 100% where the 39$ version (without links in the footer). Nobody choose the 29$ version (with links in the footer pointing back to freeWPtube). That’s cool because giving two options let customers see the advantages of paying a little more, and they do!
Improvements: Last month I invested in a kick-ass extension to the excellent EasyDigitalDownloads plugin: the Cross Sell & Upsell.
What does it mean cross-sell?
Cross-selling is suggesting additional products to your customers that complement what they have already added to their shopping cart. These suggested cross-sell products are shown on the checkout page.
This is the resulting checkout page with the new services: hosting and theme setup. So far it didn’t bring any additional sale but let’s give it some time.
Returning the investment: in November I reached break-even with WP Tube! Basically, I recovered all the initial investment (I paid 1200$ for the website, plus 300$ for a developer helping coding the new version). This is great material for another success case study that I’ll try to write soon…
New project coming up!
Last month I announced a new project: the Italian version of ComoHacer, my Spanish blog about manual projects and DIY.
ComoHacer has around 100.000 unique visitors a month and very positive comments from the visitors. People love the content of the articles and the vintage style of the pictures, so I’ll give a try with the Italian market.
I’m getting more optimistic about this idea, because even if the Italian market is much smaller than the Spanish one, the Adsense CPC (cost-per-click) is higher. This means that advertisers pay more for traffic in Italy than in Latin America, and this is normal considering the different economies and markets.
To be more even more clear: on average one click on RouterFreak pays four times the price of one click on ComoHacer’s banners. The difference is in the country of visitors (Spanish vs English speaking countries) and market (home improvement vs IT).
Melissa, the professional translator I hired via oDesk, is doing an excellent job and I got more than 20 articles ready to go. I count on launching the new website in December and give some time for Google & co. to index it properly.
This is an investment that so far costed around 220$.
An update on ComoHacer e-book sales
Last month I changed the WordPress plugin used for the webshop, tweaked the sale page and reduced the price to 9$.
The result was 4 sales for a total of 45$ – same as two months ago!
If I continue like this, I’ll recover the money I spent on Rocco sale page redesign in few more months… not really a success 🙁
Joining The Dyamite Circle
I said few months ago that I should not be too shy reinvesting money in my biz, so I took some actions.
Beside the new project I mentioned above I decided to join a private community of web entrepreneurs called The Dynamite Circle. All details at this page.
I was suggested this group by James Clark aka NomadicNotes, a cool Aussie I met here in Amsterdam few months ago. James runs a successful online business, is based in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) and he’s definitely a nomadic soul.
I decided to pay the DC (Dynamite Circle) membership of $147/quarter and test the advantages myself.
Well, you know the quote “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” and all the lullaby about connect with people that already did what you want to do, right?
Joining this community has been one of the best ideas of my entrepreneurial journey!
In fact, now that I visited Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) and Bangkok I could meet some of the DC folks, a cool gang of like-minded people and eminent bloggers.
With them I can have meaningful conversations about conversion optimization, backlink profiles, website acquisitions and that sort of geek stuff.
The value of this private community is definitely in the quality of its members: the price set a barrier to attract only people really interested, and there’s an approval process to further filter who’s in.
Income Breakdown
Enough updates for this month, time for the numbers!
- Advertising
- Adsense: €598.70 (last month €713.58) – this was the worst month of 2014!
- Feedblitz: €59 (last month €42.76)
- Direct Ads:€26.60 (last month €26.60)
- BuySellAds: €20.81 (last month €18)
- Job Board Services
- Premium Job posting: €31.45 (was €100)
- Resume Access: €28.50 (last month €39.13) – I’m stopping this service
- Affiliate Programs
- Lead generation: €300 – another apartment sold in Amsterdam
- Product affiliation: €151.78 (last month €159.06)
- Amazon program: €0 (last month €2)
- Sales:
- ComoHacer ebook: €36.28 (last month €7.63)
- WP Tube theme: €534.57 (last month €171.54) – best month ever!
- Website sales: €48.38 – long story short, I sold the website files of the expired domain puesto.com.pe, on the excellent Spanish marketplace VenderMiWeb. The domain renewal was higher than the yearly profit, so I quit but still nice to get a little money for a working website.
Total Gross: € 1.836.07 (last month 1,280.33)
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: €169.32 – translation
- The Dynamite Circle community: €120.14 – three months subscription
- Paypal refunds: 0 (last month 30€)
Total Expenses: € 433.15 (last month 163.56)
Net Total November 2014: € 1,402.92 (last month 1,116.77)
Good to read things are going well! Maybe turn your success story on WP Tube into a short white paper? Sure it will help some others…and you’ll be turning into an online guru yourself (and more geek :p)
Thanks Vicky, I’ll definitely prepare a post presenting the case study!
About gurus, I think there are already too many online… 😉