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January – February 2020 Income Report: Biggest Revenue Ever 🤑, Biggest F***k-Up (Also) Ever 🤦‍♀️, New Team 🤗

How’s the new year been treating you so far?☃✨

On my side, these first two months were amazing! Not only I hit the highest revenue number since ever – I also updated my team with some great new members! 

Well, amazing except for one thing…

I also paid the biggest amount for a piece of content I had ever had (and hopefully I will have ever to pay) 🤯😱 and it was one the biggest mistakes since ever 🙈

That’s said…

Welcome to my first bi-monthly income report of 2020!

I am now doing bi-monthly income reports because it saves me time ⏳ and reduces the amount of identical content in my blog 💤

Rather than creating yet another boring IR, I better spend time on writing other posts that are hopefully more interesting than money reports 🤞🏻

So read my income report #53-54 to find out what happened in January-February 2020.

My biggest f***k-up up to the date 🤦‍♀️

So I wanted to hire new writers and I posted a job on Problogger.

The candidates started sending their proposals and rates.

And the thing is that some of them sent a rate per 100 words and some sent a rate per 1 word. It was quite confusing and in order to track the applicants and their rates properly, I made a spreadsheet.

Everything was going well…

Until something got totally skewed in my mind.

I bet you already guessed, didn’t you? 😉

I mixed up a 100-word rate with a 1-word rate!☠

I made a mistake and sent a test article to a writer who was changing per word and her rate was $0.32…. $320 per 100 words! 🤯😱

Meanwhile, in my mind, her rate was per 100 words. All I was thinking about what a great deal I was getting 🤦‍♀️

We exchanged emails, talked about the rate 😬, set up the deadline…

We even had a Skype meeting 😮 Back then, it surprised me a lot but now I understand why she did it. For her price, I wonder it was only one meeting 😅

Then, she sent me the article…

And then… She sent me the invoice💥

😕😦😧😧😨🤯😱😱😱

I saw the price and first, I thought it was a mistake.

I kept believing in it for about 2 more minutes 😆

Then, my heart finally skipped a bit.

Then, I saw it all! 👁👁👁

😵

I saw the rate how it was supposed to be and I laughed for about 30 min 😂

The writer was very transparent and very clear about her rate from the very beginning.

But somehow, I kept not seeing it.

It was purely my mistake and I had nothing else to do but to pay 🤷‍♀️

This is how I spent $560+ on an 1700-word article…

And the thing is the article was not even that great 😒 

The writer did not follow the brief properly and the formatting was weird. Even the color of her doc page background was not standard 🙄

My editor also did not like her attitude towards the comment (but I was like – yeah but she’s cheap! Let’s hire her! 🤦‍♀️)

The moral of the story: Price does not define quality 😬

The lesson learned: Verify the price before placing the order 🙄

Team update 👫👩‍🤝‍👩🏾

Writers

But all well what ends well 😅

On Problogger, I managed to find a good writer who is relatively inexpensive and does a great job. 

Also, my last apprentice who I hired in October on Acadia and who finished his apprenticeship at the beginning of January got transformed into a writer!

When I hired him for the apprenticeship, I was very excited. The guy is super intelligent, very hard-working, and happens to love the topic of one of my websites! 🤗 It was a perfect match made in heaven 🤣

The apprenticeship passed very quickly. We liked working together and it was a mutual desire to continue working. 

And bingo!

Turned out the guy loves writing and was dreaming of having a freelance writing career 🎉

And I was in a need of writers 😉

I hired him on the spot 🤩 

Now, he writes awesome well-researched articles about the topic he loves and I am very happy 🤝

Virtual assistant

Another position where I wanted to “update” in my team was a virtual assistant (VA).

My VA at the time was totally slacking off. She was not giving me enough time and it was hard to communicate with her.

I was quite fed up and decided to find a new VA.

I headed over to onlinejobs.com in a search for a perfect assistant.

I ended up interviewing 17 candidates 😮 and found one I liked 👍

It’s so good to finally work with reliable people 😅

HTTPS migration 🔒

I know I know…

Everybody did the HTTPS switch in 2014 when Google announced:

[…] we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.

Me, 6 years later, finally switching to HTTPS 😅

In January, I migrated 3 out of 4 websites – and guess what? It was easier than I was imagining all these years 😆 

As a byproduct of the migration, I created a fully functioning staging environment where I now test my websites and work on resolving plugin conflicts without jeopardizing my production websites. 

This was on my TODO list since a while so I managed to kill two 🦃🦃 with one 💎😛

Website updates 🎈

To refresh your memory about what the website nicknames mean, read here.

Mother 🐘 Website

This website is my prime focus. I keep working on increasing traffic and pumping money into the content 💸

In January-February, I did a huuuuge thing that I had been planning to do for a long time!

Along with migrating the website to HTTPS, I also… migrated it to a new domain 💥

The reason for this drastic move was to better reflect the topics the website is about. Yes, that’s the price I had to pay eventually due to a domain name being too specific 😒 

After coming up with this idea, I waited for about 6 months because I wanted to do the migration during the low season to minimize the revenue loss.

I thought I would have 6 months but in reality, I had only a short window of 2 months consisted of half of December, January, and half of February 😒

The migration happened at the end of January and the organic traffic is still about 15% lower compared to the old domain during the same 5 weeks right before 😒. However, due to the seasonality of the traffic, this number should have been not even the same but about 13% higher 😣

At the same time, if I compare the organic traffic after the migration with the organic traffic during the same period a year ago, the numbers are actually up by 75% 😜

Clearly, I was not wasting my time during the last year – but I wish I thought of and did the migration back then………….. 😒

Apart from the migration, I kept pumping new content into the website. It was easy thanks to my new great team! 💗

Baby 🐘 Website

This website also runs on its own without me doing anything special to it. I did not publish any content except for some guest posts when they came my way.

It’s a great cash cow running on autopilot 🐮💰👨‍✈️ 😆 

I am having some plans on how to extend it…. Will reveal them in my next income report in 2 months 😉

🐀 Website

As of 🐀 Website, it is still on hold 😒 I decided to focus on two other websites. It seems that a tighter focus has been paying off so far.

I am thinking of selling it the same way I did with my former 🐝 Website and 🐎 Website.

LivingOfCloud (this blog)

In this blog, I was moderately active and published just a handful of posts:

👉 LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup📰: January, 2020
👉 My Business Year 2019 In Review: Successes 🎉 Struggles😣 And Plans📝
👉 Ezoic Review: How I Increased My Ad Revenue By 3
👉 LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup📰: February 2020

After doing my business year 2019 review, I realized how pivotal for me was switching from Adsense to Ezoic, a better ad publisher platform. That’s why I decided to write about it. 

If you are still thinking of switching to Ezoic, I highly recommend doing it. It’s just money left on the table (and you can apply via my affiliate link and I will get a small cut).

My peers 👨‍💻

I get to know more and more fellow niche website masters around me. 

I think only in Montreal I know (virtually) at least 5 people 🤯😆

Outside of Montreal, I know 2 or 3 more Canadians doing approximately the same things I am doing.
And this is great 🤗

We even decided to make an offline meeting! It will happen at the end of March 👍 Sooooooooo looking forward to it! 🤩

Personal life 👩🏻

In January and February, not much happened.

I was so consumed by my business that the rest of my life was just a blur. No, it was all great and fulfilling – I met with my friends, went to parties, cooked great food, did a lot of workouts…

But all my thoughts were about my business 😅

BTW speaking of cooking.

I learned how to make bread at home and have already produced 7 loaves. People loved my bread and it made it a great party gift.

Here’s one of my bread babies (it’s #8, I assign numbers to them 😁):

And some photos of me, just proof my life is not only about sitting in front of the computer! 😅

Stretching with weights:

In a resto waiting for a girlfriend of mine to have a delightful conversation about “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” 🤣

I also went to a cryptocurrency meetup, I was super tired but glad I came – they helped me with my crypto wallet 👍

Ok, now let’s go back to the business! ‍

Revenue➕

Starting from this income report, I am changing the format of how I will present my revenue. I want to optimize the time I spend on its preparation and keep it informative for you.

The income in January – February was the highest I ever had 🎉 January was the best month ever ever since I started this business and February was the second-best 😍

Let’s look at the income numbers in the details.

All numbers are in USD.

Here’s where my income is mostly coming from:

• Ezoic is great for display ads and I write about in details here
• Amazon Affiliate
• Guest posting (yes I do sell guest posts on my websites 😱)

January and February were the best months ever in terms of revenue 🎉 It is even more exciting if you think that this was the end of low season and I have a high season in front of me 😉

Expenses➖

Starting from this income report, I am changing the format of how I will present my expenses. I want to optimize the time I spend on its preparation and keep it informative for you.

In January – February, the expenses were very high because of my stupid mistake with the writer’s rate 🤦‍♀️ and because I invested sh*t loads 😧 of money into the content.

I pay for many services on an annual basis. However, in my income reports, I spread these expenses on a per monthly basis as if I were paying for them every month. It should give a better understanding of my expenses each month.

All numbers are in USD.

Expenses minus content

Tailwind (an app for Pinterest and Instagram) has been crucial to growing my revenue. If you wonder how I do Pinterest marketing, go ahead and read my post about it.

I use MailShake for cold email outreach. When you are building white-hat links in an efficient way, it’s a must to use a tool for that (and GSuite to avoid your emails going directly into spam 😱).

On the WordPress setup side, I use a premium WP theme GeneratePress since it’s fast and highly configurable.

I also use a few premium WP plugins:

• Elementor Pro to build pages on my WP websites
• AAWP to insert Amazon Affiliate links and create comparison tables; read about why you should use it in this post
• Ad Inserter Pro to insert ads
• Perfmatters for the website speed

My virtual assistant (VA) is my right hand. My business would simply die if I didn’t have one! My last VA hire is from onlinejobs.com.

Apart from having a VA, once in a while, I get a digital marketing apprentice. I find apprentices at Acadium (former GenM). If you have never heard of this service, read my post about it.

Content

Content is an investment in your business. I decided to track it separately since it’s an important part of future success.

Here, I will give you a break down for each website. Each content expense includes content editing and management.

For content, I have in-house writers who I found myself on various platforms including ProBlogger and Upwork.

Also, once in a while, I use the services of a writing agency ContentPit.

Totals 💵

All numbers are in USD.

Here are my totals for January – February 2020.

Total revenue $5,780.35 minus general expenses $1,164.54 minus content expenses $2,906.98 makes a net profit of $1,715.54. This number should be divided by two since it’s for both January and February.

Here is a chart with my revenue vs expenses history for the last 14 months. I used the 14-month timeline instead of the 12-month one to show you how these months performed compared to the last year (click on the image to enlarge):

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