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January 2016 Income Report: Website Nicknames, Hiring a VA, Good Kickfurther Business

Here comes my first report of the year 2016!

January was somehow a controversial month. One of my acquired websites had lower earnings than expected while the other had much higher numbers. I hired my very first VA… and then fired my very first VA 🙂 The PBN building process stagnated, but blog commenting task advanced. Also, I decided to give my websites nicknames to make it easier to write about them 🙂

Now let’s look at all of this in details.

What Happened In January

Website Nicknames

So, in order to make it easier to write about my websites, I decided to give them nicknames. Well, in fact, this was an idea of my boyfriend Sam. He got lost in all these URLs and descriptions, so he suggested to simplify it. We both like animals, so it was somehow natural for us to come up with animal-related names. Original names were slightly different from the ones you see here, but they were related. I changed them because I wanted to have an emoji for each name and not all of the original ones had an emoji.

Here they go:

• The first acquired website: Elephant 🐘
  Read its story here.
• The second acquired website: Horse 🐎
  Read its story here.
• The website I got from Human Proof Designs: Rat 🐀
  I got a website with the structure in place that was filled with the content written for a group of keywords with a high potential. It is a beautiful website with beautiful pictures and an airy design. Too bad I cannot show it to you 😀
• The website I am building myself: Honeybee 🐝
  For this website, I am doing everything myself: Keyword research, articles, design, etc. I used the Ultimate Azon theme; you can read my review of it here.

The choice of the nicknames is definitely a bit bizarre 🙂 but now it is much more fun to talk about my websites :))))

Hiring a VA

So, in January, I hired my very first VA. However, the girl did not stay for long. She was a very good VA, effective and knowledgeable but unfortunately, she was also a very busy one. Our contract lasted for 2.5 weeks in total. During the fist 2 weeks, she worked barely 50% of the assigned time, which was 15 hours / week. The third week she never showed up so I fired her.

A few days ago I hired another VA. So far so good.

It is sooo amazing to have a helper!

Hiring a VA is the second best cause to spend money - after hiring a cleaning lady 🙂 Click To Tweet

Now I have both 😉

Building Backlinks

I continued building backlinks for the websites I am building myself (that is for Rat and Bee 🙂 ). The PBN building has stagnated a bit because I instead spent my time to find and hire a VA. The first VA did a bit of work of finding authority blogs to comment on, so I built some backlinks through commenting.

Also, I bought a PBN hosting package from Easy Blog Networks. It is a new approach to hosting PBNs, and I am trying it out. I will write a detailed review soon.

Adding More Amazon Product Links

Following my plan of improving my acquired websites, I added more Amazon product links to the Elephant website. You will see below that the Amazon portion of the revenue has grown compared to the previous month. However, I think it was just a fluctuation and not a result of my efforts because the total amount of orders was smaller than in December. Winter seems to affect this niche more than I thought.

Kickfurther

Kickfuther business was doing pretty good in January! I got many payouts and some of them were final and were paid way ahead of the time. I guess it happened because many businesses borrowed money for the busy Christmas & New Year season. The season sales did better than expected, and the businesses made enough money to pay back all the loans.

In total, there were 6 businesses I backed that paid off everything during January. Here are their names and the products they borrowed money for:

• Airbag (backpacks)
• Glamour Dolls Makeup (lipsticks)
• Scratch Tracks (Bluetooth speakers)
• Clarisea, Inc. (cosmetics)
• Vaportini (innovative cocktail glasses)
• Harvey Prince Organics (perfume)

Three of them came back almost immediately with the next offer. Needless to say that I gladly lent them money again 🙂

If you want to try it out, get $5 to back a business on Kickfurther through my referral!

News About This Blog

I am sooo happy to tell you that EmpireFlippers (the online broker where I bought Elephant and Horse websites) featured my blog in their podcast!

This particular episode is about FBA business, Fulfillment By Amazon. You can listen to it here: empireflippers.com/fba

I am mentioned on 59:13 🙂 Thanks, guys, I really appreciate it!

 

So, that’s what I was busy with in January. Now, let’s look at the numbers!

Expenses

The expenses in month January 2016 were on one hand somehow low and on the other hand somehow high. I planned to spend a lot of money paying to a VA, but in reality, the VA worked much less than expected. At the same time, I spent a lot of money backing up businesses on Kickfurther – about 3 times more than the last month. However, I did not put any “fresh” money and re-invested only what I got from the payouts.

In January, I hired a VA to outsource some of the mundane work. Best spent money ever! (apart from paying to a cleaning lady). Currently, I am training a second VA after I fired the first one.

I continued building the PBNs but not very actively. I registered a few more sites on expired domains I got from HammerheadDomains and DomCop and am trying out a new PBN hosting solution: Easy Blog Network. I wrote the first post about building PBNs and plan to continue to write a series of posts.

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On top of that, I continued backing up businesses on Kickfurther. If you do not know what it is, read my post. As I said, I again used only the money I got from the payouts coming from the deals I backed earlier. So, the money that was made by the initial investment are now making more money 🙂 That’s called a compound interest, totally passive and effortless 😉

Income

My January income was not bad.

I am getting a steady income from the Elephant website – however, I expected it to bring more money in January. The traffic has increased as anticipated, but the AdSence CPR has dropped comparing to the previous month. It means fewer clicks happened thus making the revenue sank.

The Horse website turned out to be a surprise. Last month it showed a steady growth, and this month it grew even more. In January, it made twice as much as projected. I even wrote a separate post about the website – you can read it here.

Also, quite a few online investments I made on KickFurther paid back.

Totals

Here are my totals for January 2016.

Total income $1,345.91 minus total expenses $862.56 makes a net profit of $483.35.

I prepared another graph that excludes all the big scary investments made in October and November (What happened in October? See the answer. What happened in November? See the answer)

Plans For February

So, what are my plans for the next month? Well, I started worrying a bit about the websites I am building myself: Rat and Bee. The traffic growth is very slow, and as you can see, none of them has started bringing revenue. I hope that with the help of a VA I will improve the situation.

Disclaimer

Some of the links in this income report 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!