Online Income Report – September 2014

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

I’m just back from a week in the Balkans (second time this year) where I visited Skopje, Macedonia for a wedding and re-visited Pristina, Kosovo. The travel coach Claudio di Bella didn’t like it but never the less I think there are some good reasons to visit Pristina and Kosovo.

Last month I got quite busy with WordPress consultancies, not included in this report as it’s the offline part of my business that requires in general my presence in Amsterdam. Doing WordPress related work is quite profitable and enjoyable, so I’m glad about it even if leaves me less time to grow my online empire.

Let’s get down to business with the report from September.

 

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.
On July 18th I released a new version of the theme as Premium, and in August I had 18 sales for a total of 572$. No need to say, I had high expectations for September, with the end of the holidays season.

Well, things went well but surprisingly not as great as in August.

I had 11 sales for a total of $359.

One thing to notice is that the traffic on the website was pretty stable, with actually a small increase:

So basically the sales decrease is not caused by a decrease of traffic, but rather by less conversions.
I haven’t changed anything in the page, so I’m afraid that the novelty effect of the new theme version 5 is fading away.

 

An update on ComoHacer e-book sales

ComoHacer.info keeps monetizing very well with Adsense (409€ in September!) but I got few e-book sales.
I must admit that I didn’t try any improvement in September, shame on me.

The sale page got 1,102 views, converting in 3 sales. That’s a risible 0.27% conversion rate.

 

Mentioned in “How much do bloggers made”

Dave from Start Grow Profit contacted me thanks to those very online income reports, and featured me in his article How much do bloggers made.
Interesting consequences of sharing the income reports & lessons publicly. The list includes my heroes such as Pat Flynn and Justin & Joe so hey, that’s something to brag about c’mon!

 

Advertising rulez

After the last quiet months for AidBoard (my website about jobs on International Development) I had few paid job listings.
But more than that, I had a University that contacted me for another 5-months advertising campaign. That’s a recurring customer, meaning that they were happy with AidBoard and came back for more promotion of their study program.

This is how I approach a potential direct advertiser.
The point is that you never know their budget. So I create three different options for them to choose from:

• Option #1:
  • Banner placement at the top of all pages
  • Short text message to be included in the weekly newsletter
• Option #2: same as option #1 plus
  • Dedicated post in our blog section with an extended presentation of the course
  • Sponsored promotion in our social networks
• Option #3: same as option #2 plus:
  • Extra banner placement at the bottom of all pages

The three options have a price factor of 1x, 2x and 3x – so far all the advertisers had chosen the option #2.

 

 

Income Breakdown

Time for the numbers!

• Advertising
  • Adsense: €638.66 (last month €634.49)
  • Feedblitz: €42.71 (last month €9.24)
  • Direct Ads: €422.14 (last month €26.60)
  • BuySellAds: €2 (last month €5.90)
• Job Board Services
  • Premium Job posting: €125 (last month €9)
  • Resume Access: €15.83 (last month €54.93) – I’m stopping this service
• Affiliate Programs
  • Lead generation: 0
  • Product affiliation: €51.68 (last month €94.39)
  • Amazon program: €2 (last month €4.19)
• Guest Posting: 0
• Product Sales:
  • ComoHacer ebook: €45 (last month €28.92)
  • WP Tube theme: €283.82 (last month €420.98)

Total Gross: € 1,628.84 (last month 1,288.64)

 

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.
• Mailing List services
  • Aweber: €49.76
  • Mailchimp: € 36.80
• FlipFilter: €10
  • This is a very useful service for website buyers, crunching big data from multiple marketplaces for you.
• Outsourcing: 0
• Paypal refunds: 30€

Total Expenses: € 163.56 (last month 155.93)

Net Total September 2014: € 1,465.28 (last month € 1,132.71)

 

Lessons Learned in September

As I said in the opening, last month I spent a considerable amount of time on the WordPress consultancy business. I was going to a customer office two times a week, I had an unexpected gig for which I had to work on a Sunday and some smaller projects.

The take away from September is that growing my consultancy business is much easier than growing my online businesses.

But I want to keep both and keep looking for good investments for my online portfolio. I think that with one or two more good websites I can cross the 2.000€ mark and that would be really great. I know is not much in Netherlands (a good reason to maintain the consultancy activities) but in other countries, that are accidentally warmer, they would be enough to rent an apartment and have a decent lifestyle, much better than the austere conditions reported here.

 

Did you find this report useful? And why?