If you’re curious to know why I’m sharing my online income reports, read here.
I finished May report exceptionally late as I’m traveling the Balkan region… After the surprising Kosovo and the familiar Albania, I’m currently in Montenegro.
So let me share what happened in May.
What’s going on
Sell in May and go away
This is an investment strategy that my brother uses a lot.
Maybe was just a coincidence, maybe not, but in May for the first time I sold one of my websites, and on the aftermath of the operation I sold a second one!
The first was Salsa Travel Advisor. I started this project with my good friends Gianluca and Stuart back in October 2012. After a great start, things slowed down and we realized that the website needed more work we were willing to put it.
So we managed to sell it for an undisclosed amount of money to someone that has bigger plans and capacity.
Did we get rich? No. But we could recover the expenses and be happy that our idea found someone willing to invest on it!
The second was Empleos, a job board targeting Colombia that I bought in December 2012 and that proved to be a very good web-investment. I already analyzed this website in this detailed case study. I got a good offer from a Spanish webmaster and I sold it for twice the original price.
This has been for long time my most profitable website, but things went down a bit in the last months and I think was a good moment to sell and capitalize the work done.
The forgotten website
In the last years I started few websites testing some ideas, sometimes with big projects never realized.
One of them was JuniperJobs, a job board collecting opportunities for Juniper Networks experts, my former employer.
I left this website running for more than a year completely on auto-pilot and almost forget it… since last month, when I received a notification that someone paid to post two jobs:
Local Route Truck Driver
Product Handlers & Fabricators/Welders
Considering that the target are network engineers and IT specialists, I found the jobs posted pretty amusing 🙂
Adsense test on this blog (part 2)
Back in April I run the ads for 1 month on danielebesana.com and noticed that the visitor behavior was negatively affected by the ads:
With Adsense
-30% Avg. Session duration
+6% bounce rate.
My guess was that having ads on a personal blog gives a very different feeling to new visitors. In fact, personally I notice that if a blogger is trying to make few bucks with ads it would affect my trust.
So I tested again in May without Adsense.
Without Adsense
+8.19% Avg. Session duration
-4.62% bounce rate
That’s not a 100% recovery, but the indicators are in the direction that supports my theory.
I have a WordPress theme!
The last day of May I closed a deal to buy a website providing a free WordPress theme.
It’s too early to say much about it, but there are side-services that should make this online business profitable.
I’ve been interested in acquiring a WordPress theme or plugin for a while, as I think I can add a lot of value to it with my WordPress and customer support experience.
Income Breakdown
Time for the numbers!
- Advertising
- Adsense: €717.24 (last month €793.25)
- Feedblitz: $80.58 (last month €65.83)
- Direct Ads: €26.60 (last month €26.60)
- Job Board Services
- Premium Job posting: €28.60 (last month 0)
- Resume Access:€52.21 (last month €86.40)
- Affiliate Programs
- Lead generation: 0 (last month 493,50€)
- Product affiliation: €118 (last month €131.19)
- Amazon program: €2 (last month €10.23)
- Guest Posting: €0 (last month 121.40€)
- Product Sales: €0 (last month €19.75)
- Websites Sales: € 4,262.8
Total Gross May 2014: € 5,288 (last month € 1,254.65)
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
- Mailing List services
- FlipFilter: €10
- This is a very useful service for website buyers, crunching big data from multiple marketplaces for you.
- Outsourcing
- Nothing
- New websites
- WordPress theme website € 880
Total Expenses May 2014: € 1,013.56
Net Total May 2014: € 4,274.44 (last month € 1,094.09)
Lessons Learned in May
This has been the most profitable month so far!
Looking at the results I can say that in May I had a nice confirmation that buying and selling websites is a viable business model.
I also realized that I’m not re-investing enough in my business. I tend to be happy if I get some more euros in my pocket rather than re-invest the profits to grow the websites I have. I have plans to invest some money in June, so stay tuned!
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