Greetings from Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, where I’m traveling this month. I apologize with my zillions readers for being late in publishing the online income report of October, but I put myself officially on vacation for two weeks – first time in more than three years! But analyzing my online businesses and write this report is too much fun so here it is.
What’s Going On
DCBKK
Last month I participated to the DCBKK conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Dynamite Circle (DC) is a community of location independent entrepreneurs and I’ve been part of that for an year now. It’s a great community and the yearly conference didn’t disappoint. It was all about meeting people and do networking with the other 299 attendants, that was pretty cool. It was great to talk with others that understand the beauty of building an online business while working in exotic locations! Here my three main takeaways from the event:
- My prices are too low: that’s true for a lot of contractors/consultants/freelancers.
- Don’t let your past limit your future: there were people with amazing stories, it’s never too late to get great in something!
- Your network is your net worth: old quote, but really having access to experts in any field is invaluable.
For a glimpse on what’s about, here is the vlog about the MasterMind sessions from my friend Martijn Reintjes from Testing Agency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REVBeBoyndU
eBook Promotion
My first eBook Get That Network Engineer Job!, written with my partner in crime Valerio, has been available since September but last month we officially launched it to RouterFreak’s newsletter of over 8500 network engineers. I thought that people in the newsletter were already network engineers, hence not interested in the eBook… But I was wrong! We sent two emails:
- Email 1: announcing the eBook with a promotional price of $9 till end of the week.
- Email 2: a friendly reminder that the promotion was about to expire.
With this campaign we sold a total of 24 copies.
Where I’ve been
I know that this is an income report, but I think is fun to share where I’ve been last month considering that I met so many other digital nomads that are constantly or very often on the move. So this is where I’ve been in October: 1-7: Albiate, Italy 8-13: Muscat, Oman 14-26: Bangkok, Thailand 27-31: Jakarta, Indonesia I really want to write some travel reports this time, so I’ll reserve time for that later this month.
The Numbers
Income Breakdown
Let’s get down with the numbers!
- Advertising
- Adsense: €425.29 (was €338.64)
- Feedblitz: €10.57 (was €25.66) – a ‘trick’ I use to monetize newsletters
- Direct Ads: €111.75 (was €137.09) – directly negotiated advertising campaigns
- Sponsored posts: 0 (was €1056.38) – after the biggest sponsored post ever, I got nothing to do last month
- BuySellAds: €11.12 (was €20)
- Job Board Services
- Job posting: €36.62 (was €69.42) – Premium job posting on AidBoard
- Affiliate Programs
- Lead generation: 0
- Product affiliation: €161.85 (was €375.18) – Clickbank, SEMrush, DPD and others affiliate programs
- Amazon program: €604.59 (was €554.10) – the Amazon affiliate site in the drone niche keeps providing
- Sales:
- ComoHacer ebook: €16.90 (was €39.62) – slowly but steady, this eBook is contributing as passive income
- RouterFreak eBook: €228.20 – new entry!
- WP Tube theme: €146.50 (was €103) – my WordPress theme, running on auto-pilot
- Website sale: 0 – Nothing to sell at the moment!
- WP-OK services: €493 (was €196) – my WordPress management service for Italian market
Total Gross: € 2,246.39 (previous month 2,915.09)
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 services that I use myself to operate my websites.
- Hosting
- Site5: €126.59
- This is the hosting I’m using and happy with. I recently switched to a VPS4 solution. They have servers in Amsterdam too, perfect for my websites with European audience.
- 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, but their support is getting worse and worse!
- Site5: €126.59
- Mailing List services
- FlipFilter: €10 – very useful service for website buyers, crunching big data from multiple marketplaces for you
- Outsourcing
- Articles: €37.56 (was €35.15)
- Partnerships: €787,41 (was €399.91) – sharing of profits in projects where I operate with a partner
- Memberships
- The Dynamite Circle: €138.05 – great community of online entrepreneurs, quarterly payment
- SEMrush: €59 – PRO membership of this excellent tool to analyze search engine results and competition
- Ahrefs: €18.68 – This is a great tool for backlink analysis
- Boomerang for Gmail: €13.47 – Excellent tool for email management
- Website acquisition: 0 (was €530)
- Domain renewal: €40,35 (was €8.13) – expenses related to domains registered at Godaddy
- Advertising
- Adwords: €11.96 (was €19.83)
- Facebook Ads: 0 (was €2.66)
Total Expenses: € 1,366.27 (was 1,347.62)
Net Total October 2015: € 880.12 (last month 1,567.47)
Conclusion
October was the worst month (in terms of net profit) in a looong time! Having few websites is good to spread the risk but it’s also true that they fluctuate quite a lot from one month and another, so it’s enough that a couple of things under-perform to have quite of a hit in the bottom-line profit. As always I hope to connect with other location independent entrepreneurs, so if you’re reading this and you have an online business do drop a comment!
