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.
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.
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.
here to find out what the website nicknames mean.
LivingOfCloud (this blog)
In this blog, I was moderately active and published just a handful of posts:
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 😍
here to find out what the website nicknames mean.
Let’s look at the income numbers in the details.
All numbers are in USD.
Website
Amount
Mother Elephant
$1,649.95
Baby Elephant
$3,541.27
Rat
$6.23
LivingOffCloud
$577.62
Other websites
$5.28
Total
$5,780.35
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.
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.
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.
Website
Amount
Mother Elephant Website
$2,199.45
Baby Elephant Website
$707.53
Rat Website
$0.00
LivingOffCloud
$0.00
Total
$2,906.98
For content, I have in-house writers who I found myself on various platforms including ProBlogger and Upwork.
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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Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. I will receive a small fee if you choose to buy after clicking on any of these links. Thank you if you do! 🤗
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