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July 2016 Income Report: Honeybee Website Makes Money, Testimonial For Empire Flippers, And Many Personal Bits

In this blog, I write about what I am doing to create various income streams that come from online endeavors. The monthly income reports detail my results.

Why am I sharing my income publicly? I hope to gain trustworthiness with you and to keep some degree of accountability for myself.

The reports motivate me. I tend to forget my small achievements… and reports like this one won’t let me do it 🙂 Apart from that, they help me to remember how much I have already invested. It’s a motivation to push even harder!

Read on my income report #11 to find out what happened in July 2016.

What Happened In July

It was again a quiet month and again the expenses were low.

But despite its quietness, the month prepared a couple of nice events for me.

Let’s take a closer look.

Surprise! Honeybee🐝 Website Makes Money!

Yes! It does!

Honeybee 🐝 Website is a niche website I am building myself from scratch. Absolutely all the parts of the websites are executed by me: Keyword research, articles, design, etc.

Of course, I did not write articles myself, I hired freelance writers and told them what to write about.
As of the theme, I used the Ultimate Azon theme; you can read my review here.

Here’s a snapshot of its Amazon stats for the year 2016:

As you can see, the website made its first dollar quite a while ago, in February 🙂 Even before Rat 🐀 Website did (this is the one I bought from Human Proof Designs), which got the first revenue in April.

But I did not notice!

Frankly speaking, I gave up on this website after discovering that my PBN was not very good. The website has not been showing any moving in SERP and I thought it was a flop.

As we see, it did not prevent the website from making money – and I plan to resume working on it.

Video Testimonial For Empire Flippers

Empire Flippers (EF) is an online broker I used to buy two websites, Elephant 🐘 and Horse 🐎. You can read their stories here and here.

In July, EF did a shout-out for the buyers who used their services and asked to do a video testimonial. I happily raised my hand!

The testimonial was filmed the last Saturday, July 30th.

I spent about a week preparing for it: Writing the testimonial in advance, prepping my place, prepping myself… And the shoot itself took more than 2 hours.

I felt super nervous before doing it. I am not a particularly good speaker, especially in front of a camera. I tried to make my own fashion channel on YouTube but it was a total disaster. It took too much effort to film each video and I do not even sound genuine.

This experience was different. It is much easier to talk when you are not alone and when you are asked questions about a subject that you are truly passionate about.

Well, we will see how it turned out.

Once the video gets published, I will share it with you in a separate post. Stay tuned!

Many Personal Bits

I did not do much work in July because I was very busy in my offline life.

I moved to a new place

The new place is great! You can see a part of it on the picture above from the behind the scene of the video testimonial filming.

The apt has a charm of the 60s with all its wooden closet doors, squeaky hardwood floors, wooden moldings with white walls, brass hardware, and fake crystal door knobs. Add 9 foot high ceilings and lace curtains the landlady put on the windows – and you will get the full picture. Charmant!

It has one bedroom, one bathroom, a salon, a kitchen, a laundry room plus two balconies.

Looks like a lot of room, right? Wrong! The apartment is pretty small with small closets and without a storage. Since I did have a storage at my previous place, I collected a lot of sh…t that does not fit very well in my new minimalistic life.

I sold a lot of if on Kijiji, a Canadian version of Craiglist, but a lot of it still stayed. I am still unpacking the boxes and we are currently building shelves in the laundry room to store it all.

Btu I love it living here. Apart from a nice look, another best feature of my new place is the location.

It is just 5 min by foot away from a metro station. And it is only 20 min by metro from downtown and more precisely from my work

On top of that, it is located right next to a huge park on the St-Lawrence river shore.  Almost every day, I jog through these amazing grass jungles.
And I plan ti swim in the river 🙂

I did not have the internet for two weeks

Oh, and I had no internet at my new place for two weeks! My internet provider messed up with updating my address and it took them 2 weeks to fix the mistake.

You can imagine how low my productivity was. At the same time, it forced me to spend some time outside. The Montreal downtown has a free wifi outside so we hung out there for hours. Until, the laptop batteries died hehe. Thanks to the weather gods, the weather was super nice!

My spot had a cool view with lazy tourists passing by, food trucks emitting tasty smells, and the Lachine Canal merging with the river.
Still, I would much rather stayed at home at my cozy desk – I am definitely not a digital nomad who enjoys working from all kinds of locations!

I was finally able to do many purchases I was holding until the moving (and to socialize a bit)

I have been dreaming of having a slow cooker since long, long time. Finally, after the moving, I bought a second hand one on Kijiji.

While I was seeing slow cookers in my dreams, my cleaning lady was dreaming about me buying her a new vacuum cleaner. Her dream also came true! The new vacuum cleaner is not super new but at least, it can suck the air in much better than the old one. Again, came second hand from Kijiji.

Also, I used the break from the online world as an opportunity to rack up my social skills. I went to a startup event where the company where my boyfriend works made a pitch. And after the event, I went to pick up the slow cooker 🙂

I got new responsibilities at work

Yeah, the work. I do not write often about it here and this time, it will be an exception.

I am a senior software dev in a middle sized tech company. We are specializing in providing tech support that is sold as a service by internet providers. I am a pretty much full stack developer, though recently, I have started leaning more towards the backend (written in Scala! 😉 )

Even more recently, I got new responsibilities on top of my regular work.

Our team manager left without finding a replacement for herself. It was an opportunity for someone from our team to fill the shoes. And I again raised my hand!

Frankly speaking, I am dividing the managerial responsibilities with a colleague of mine who’s also senior. But he’s our official tech lead and it keeps him super busy. He is more and more dumping his managing responsibilities on me and my chunk of work is growing.

What I do is being a key person for the team resources. I assign projects to my team members, make sure they understand the work, and that they always have something in their pipeline. This requires me to attend all sorts of meetings as well as to talk to maybe a half of company on a daily basis.  Lunches that I used to use to work on my online business are now often consumed by meetings.

Busy-busy.

But it makes me happy. Plus, my bonus and future salary should be a bit more awesome comparing to now – given that I do not fuck up heheheheeeee

Kickfurther

In July, I backed just a couple of businesses on Kickfurther. The selection of consignment contracts they have had recently is not very impressive. It is mostly clothing / fashion companies, which I avoid dealing with.

Here is the list of the businesses I backed:

• Cyclops Gear, LLC with their Cyclops Gear Waterproof Sunglasses
  I liked the concept of waterproof sunglasses that can record video. I think the product has a big market. I would buy them for myself!
• Coco Jack with their coconut opening kit
  I remember watching a Shark Tank episode with them and was enough curious to become a part of the business. They say that the Shark Tank deal with Mark Cuban did not work out for them and that’s why they came to Kickfurther.

If you want to try it out yourself, sign up with my referral to get $5 credit to start backing Kickfurther businesses.

 

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

Expenses

The expenses in July 2016 were again the lowest I have had so far. I was too busy with the offline life to spend money online.

I did not hire any freelancers 🙁 nothing new in my work on my websites 🙁 That shall change in the future!

Income

My July income was good. As good as the June one.

Both Elephant 🐘 Website and Horse 🐎 Website had an expected level of revenue given the season and the traffic.

Rat 🐀 Website went a bit up and got more sales comparing to June.

Honeybee 🐝 Website prepared a nice surprise for me and got 3 sales. All the sales were 100% relevant to what the website promotes.

(Read here to find out what website nicknames mean.)

On top of that, KickFurther investments have paid back a bit – as usual 🙂

Totals

Here are my totals for July 2016.

Total income $1,672.04 minus total expenses $127.40 makes a net profit of $1,544.64

Not bad for a slow month, in which I did not do any work. So far, it’s the highest net profit I have ever got with my online business.

Here is the graph of my revenue vs expenses (excluding all my big investments I made in October 2015 when I bought Elephant Website, November 2015 when I bought Horse Website, and in July when I bought some cryptocurrency).

Plans For August

So, what are my plans for the next month?

I have many of them!

I plan to continue working on increasing conversion on Rat 🐀 Website. I need to put its good traffic to work! Also, it needs to get more backlinks.

I plan to resume working on Honeybee 🐝 Website. This includes improving the PBN and adding some fresh content.

I have some plans for Elephant 🐘 Website and Horse 🐎 Website, mostly adding new content.

I feel my freelancers will be very busy in August!

 

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!