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July – August 2020 Income Report: My Team Expanded👬, New Challenges 😅, Website Updates📈

In July-August, the world was still crazy but a bit less compared to May – June 😅

The turmoil in the US went down a bit – or at least, it became less acute. Instead, the recession has begun and I am feeling its effect on my online business 😟

That’s said…

Welcome to my fourth 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 #59-60 to find out what happened in July-August 2020.

My team has grown 👬👬

Now, I have 6 people on my team!

In August, I hired a graphic designer 👨‍🎨 (in addition to 3 writers, an editor, and a virtual assistant) to do graphic design and videos. I found him on onlinejobs.com, a platform for hiring freelancers from the Philippines.

Hiring new people is always stressful for me. 

First of all, it takes a lot of time 😒 I need to write a job posting, come up with tests, review the applicants, send the tests, review the tests, conduct voice interviews, choose the best candidate… 

Second of all, it’s just tiring. All parts of this task involve critical thinking and consume a lot of mental energy 😫

In order to track the hiring process, I even created a spreadsheet. I keep everything there, from applicants to test results to voice interviews and I even assign scores to the candidates. It greatly helps with the cognitive load 😄

For this position, I processed 24 applications 🤯 before choosing who to hire.

So far, I am happy with my new team member 👨‍🎨 He’s a professional designer and his day job is also creating graphic design 👍👍👍

Planning for a new hosting

My current BlueHost plan expires in October and I have been wanting to move to some better hosting for a while.

I’ve spent quite some time researching various WordPress hosting solutions to find the one that suits me the best. And I did find it! 🎉

I plan to write a blog post about it so stay tuned! ✅

Website updates 🎈

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

Unicorn 🦄 Website

This is the site I bought in April. It is the biggest website in my fleet as well as the most expensive among the sites I have ever bought 🙈

Given that, no wonder it is my prime focus. I have been actively improving it trying to increase revenue.

The site is starting to require less and less of my attention when it comes to content making. It now needs less babysitting compared to the previous period of May – June.

However, instead, I am spending a lot of time on producing high-quality original video content 🎥🙄 I am working very closely with my designer on it. Video making is a new area for both of us so we are learning on the go and thus it’s moving quite slowly 🐌😒

During this period, I also updated the server to the latest PHP 7.4 and Maria DB 10.3. 

It was easy to do thanks to the CloudWays hosting. It offers a very convenient way of deploying a new server with a carbon copy of the website. This allowed me to test all the new changes without touching the live website.

It does cost money but the cost is super manageable since they offer an hourly rate 👍 The testing cost me only about five bucks to keep the test server alive for a couple of days 😏

All this was possible thanks to CloudWays that is now my official favorite hosting 🙂 I will write a review soon, stay tuned!

Mother 🐘 Website

This website has now become my second focus. I keep working on increasing traffic and pumping money into the content 💸

In July, the website got under a black-hat attack and it was flooded with spammy backlinks. I noticed it only when my ranking dropped 😭

In hopes to mitigate the lack of action on the 🎩 attack, I did a lot of internal SEO that I have been postponing due to my laziness 😒 such as disallowing thin pages, nofollowing non-essential stuff, and more. But it did not help… 🤷‍♀️

The ranking has started recovering only recently, after about 4-5 weeks after I submitted the last disavow file (I made three of them 😬😆 because I kept finding new spammy backlinks again and again 😣).

In total, I disavowed 800+ backlinks and domains 🤯 But thanks to my approach of manual disavow, it took me just a few hours 👍

The hosting for this website also needs to be updated to the latest PHP version. But since it’s BlueHost, I could not test the upgrade safely without affecting the live site. So, I postponed the upgrade until moving to a new hosting.

Baby 🐘 Website

Despite its name (Baby 👶), this site has been a mature adult that brings a steady hefty paycheck every month without any babysitting 👍 (not like some other horn-owning sites 😑😆)

It did Ok during July – August. Given that its main income comes from ads and ad rates were not doing super well, its income went down 😔

Baby 🐘 Website 2

Meanwhile, I got yet another Baby 🐘 Website 🙈😆😂

It is in the same niche as the first Baby 🐘 Website but with a narrower focus. I pumped some money into its content using the same strategy as for its sibling (a convenient way to scale!)

It has been growing a bit but its income is still very small.

LivingOfCloud (this blog)

In this blog, I was not very active recently. All my focus has been on my niche websites 🙄 However, I hope that thanks to the things I am doing, I will have more material than ever for this blog! I only need time to write it 😆

This is what I posted here:

👉 Frase: Your New Secret Content Research Tool (The AppSumo Deal Is Closed, Alas 😢)
👉 August 2020 News Roundup📰: What’s New In SEO & Affiliate Marketing
👉 July 2020 News Roundup📰: What’s New In SEO & Affiliate Marketing

In August, I managed to score a handsome AppSumo deal 😏 I bought Frase, a content tool that helps you to create new content based on low-competition keywords and to optimize old content by analyzing your competition and the keywords you already rank for 🤩.

I have been using it for a few weeks and I quite like it. I even wrote a short preliminary review – read it here!

Other websites

What’s included in this part are the sites that are currently either on hold or at the very beginning of the growth, or the ones that have just been acquired.

It makes no sense to write about them every month so I won’t! 😛

Personal life 👩🏻

In July-August, I was getting back to my regular routine of working hard non-stop 😣

July weather was still nice and we spent quite some time eating out outside and doing kayaking on the St-Lawrence river 🛶

In August, the weather got worse so I had less motivation to go outside and more reasons to stay inside.. and do work… and do work-outs! 🏋️‍♀️

I have started doing some serious handstand training and even bought 3 weeks of live online training sessions 🤸‍♀️👍

Thanks to that, my shoulders have been growing like crazy 💪🙈😅 And I like it! 😂 Having strong shoulder muscles came very handy when we did kayaking 😉🛶

Revenue➕

The revenue was not bad but could have been definitely better. The ad rates dropped because of the pandemic and recession in the US. Amazon affiliate sales went down as well because my 🐘1 Website lost ranking. 

However, in August, my 🦄 Website had the best revenue since I bought it so it made the overall revenue picture less gloomy 🙂

Overall, the revenue numbers were on par with the previous May-June period.

Numbers

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

💵 All numbers are in USD 💵

My top three income sources (in the revenue order):

1. Ezoic, which is great for display ads 🤗 (read my review)
2. Amazon Affiliate (still 🤷‍♀️)
3. Other ad platforms and affiliates (this is mostly for 🦄 Website)

Income proof

Now that I have reached a certain level of income, I feel like I should also post proof of it. I am myself having a hard time believing these numbers!

Here’s the proof from Ezoic:

Here’s the stats chart from Amazon.

Amazon US:

Amazon Canada:

Expenses➖

In July-August, the expenses were also on par with the expenses during the previous period.

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

The hosting expense is high “thanks” to my 🦄 Website that has dedicated hosting on CloudWays.

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:

• AAWP to insert Amazon Affiliate links and create comparison tables; read my review
• Ad Inserter Pro to insert ads into pages
• 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 was from onlinejobs.com.

I’ve also got a graphic designer, from onlinejobs.com as well. The graphic designer creates Pinterest images and makes video content.

Content

Given the nature of our business, content is an investment in the business. I decided to track it separately since it’s an important part of future success.

Here, I will give you a breakdown for (almost) each website. Each content expense includes content editing and management.

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

If you want to try them out, I have a promo code for you: LOCPROMO10. The code will give you a 10% word bonus for the same price for new customers.

Totals 💵

Here are my totals for July-August 2020.

💵 All numbers are in USD 💵

Total revenue $11,181.70 minus general expenses $1,500.50 minus content expenses $1,910.04 makes a net profit of $7,771.16. This number should be divided by two since it’s for both July and August.

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 to the last year (click on the image to enlarge):

My financial goal of 2020 has been reached 🎉

In my 2019 review, I set the revenue goal for 2020 at $40,000. If you take a look where I am now, you can see that I have already exceeded that number by $984.33 😜

💵 All numbers are in USD 💵

Yes, partially, it’s happened thanks to the incredibly good April. But even if I subtract the $6,000 I made in April, my progress would still look good 😉🤑

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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! 🤗