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Year 2015 Results

After taking a look what the last month of 2015 was for me, let’s see the total results of the year 2015.

What I Planned To Do

According to the projections I wrote about in my first post by the end of 2015, I was supposed to:

• invest about $20,000 into acquiring 1 or 2 websites;
• start getting $900 a month from the acquired websites;
• build 2 niche websites from ground-up.

Here is how  I projected my revenue to grow over the next months comparing to the real income.

The Actual Results

Here are the results:

• “invest about $20,000 into acquiring 1 or 2 websites” – happened by 85%. I invested only $17,000
• “start getting $900” – as a consequence, this happened by 83%. So far, I am getting about $746 a month average.
• “build 2 niche websites” – happened 100% 🙂 One website was outsourced to Humans Proof Design, and another one was built (well it still needs to grow more) totally by myself.

While I did acquire 2 websites, I have invested less than intended. Why?

Well, I think the answer is simple: I simply chickened out. Instead of firmly following my plan, I kept some allocated money in the bank. I like to have some cash left on hands… and I should have known myself better! I should have put aside more money than I wanted to invest. Or push myself harder.

Are we our own worst enemies? Click To Tweet

In my case, the answer is yes! But… shoulda coulda woulda.

What am I going to do now? I think I will still invest this money – otherwise, they are simply sitting there doing nothing. And I like it when money works for me. But I do not want to buy a small website… Instead, I may start putting aside some of the income I am getting now to buy a bigger website with a higher revenue. Maybe. I have not thought it through yet – now I want to obtain more experience before investing more money. So if it happens, it will be somewhen in spring. We shall see.

And this brings us to the plans for the year 2016.

Plans for Year 2016

So! This year promises to be big!

According to my projections (see the chart above), by the end of 2016 I am supposed to be just a few hundred dollars away from my $2,500 income goal. I will achieve it by growing the websites I am building from scratch as well as by growing the acquired ones (and maybe acquiring more websites).

While my initial plan assumed  I would be putting all my efforts into growing the websites I built, the reality shows that I will spend at least the equal amount of efforts on growing the acquired websites. After all, this is my investment that I need to protect (and get my ROI).

I hope that my income will keep overcoming my expenses, and my business will be profitable – as any business should be. That means that I have to do something with the excess money. You may say – there is nothing to think about it, spend it! But this is not my way… Money should make  more money!

Making money is certainly the one addiction I cannot shake - Felix Dennis Click To Tweet

So, I plan to put some income aside to either buy yet another online business or to invest it into something else – like Kickfurther or some other exciting things. I have not thought it through yet.

The other thing I want to do is to pay myself a salary. Of course, all the income belongs to me, but I really like to separate business finances from personal ones. Paying myself an “official” salary will help me to do it – also, it may have some tax benefits (I have not investigated this yet). And this “salary”, I will just invest it in my future – will buy stocks or bonds as I have been doing so far with all other extra cash I got.

As of Kickfurther, I plan to continue backing up businesses. However, I am hesitant to invest more money apart from what I have invested already. The reason is that Kickfurther still does not have a good system to withdraw money for non-US residents (I am Canadian). Currently, it is possible to transfer funds to a US bank account (which I have) but only for the ones who has SSN (which I don’t). The only option for me is to ask for a check sent by mail, but cashing it would cost me too much. So, I am eagerly waiting when they implement a PayPal integration, which was promised a few months ago. Once it is done, it will be a total game changer for me 🙂

My main resolution for the upcoming year is “learn more.” I feel like new information is coming out every day, and I am missing out a lot. I see awesome blogs that share many useful things, but I often skip them instead of reading on and learning more.

Plans for January 2016

In January 2016, I plan to do the same things I did in December 2015: Backing up businesses, growing the acquired websites, building the PBNs, adding more content to the built websites… It does not sound super focus, but I simply feel I have work to do in all the aspects of my business, and I cannot let any of it go.

Which reminds me that I wanted to hire a VA! It should help me a lot. So, hiring and training a VA will be my priority #1 for January 2016.

Let’s do it!

What About This Blog?

And I cannot finish this post without mentioning what happened to this blog.

First of all, this blog was born! The idea behind it is simply to document my journey to the financial freedom. I do not plan to make any money from it at the moment.

During its first months, the blog has already got some pretty nice attention.

I want to sincerely thank Matthew Woodward for including me into his Income Roundup posts! Thanks to Matthew, I got an awesome exposure and even made new friends among fellow niche website bloggers!

Probably thanks to Matthew’s post, in the beginning of January my blog was featured on Reddit in /r/Entrepreneur! The post got 256 upvotes and brought me tons of new visitors. Thank you, Reddit, I love you!

This is it for now! See you soon!