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June 2018 Income Report: Thinking of Another Acquisition, Elephant 🐘 Website Traffic Drop, Horse 🐎 Website Revival

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 also motivate me.

I tend to forget my small achievements… and posts 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 my income report #34 3️⃣4️⃣ to find out what happened in June 2018.

What happened in June 👍

June was a month with many things happening. Overall, the mood of the month can be described as disappointing 🙁 Things did not move as well and fast as I hope they would and the revenue was 😩

Going back to buying a SaaS 🏆

In June, I was again looking at SaaS-es to buy.

Given my future departure from the day job in September I announced the last month, I am thinking of expanding my online business. The best way to do it is an acquisition.

I decided that I do not want to buy niche websites anymore and instead, I want to go into “real” business with a real product. Selling physical goods also do not attract me (I’ve heard dealing with the inventory is a pain) so I want to sell digital products. Hence, a SaaS.

During the last month, I almost bought one, actually 😮 The deal did not go through because there were other buyers and I offered too little in the final bid round. The Saas had nothing to do with niche websites and could have been a nice diversification of the ways I make money online 💸

Well the deal did not go through so I will keep looking 👀

Elephant 🐘 Website Traffic Drop

Yeah, June was not very good for my bread-winner, Elephant 🐘 Website.

After two very strong months, April and May, June was like 30% down in both traffic and earnings 😱 😟 🙁 The high season of the website niche is going to the end but I still did not expect it to end that sharp… 😩

At some point, I thought it got a black hat 🎩 attack from my competition. However, the ranking has been stable during the last 3 months.

Still, I took a look at the website backlinks and discovered there a bunch of low-quality PBN sites that the website got added to without my knowledge. I was not sure if it was done with a goal to harm me or just to make the PBNs look “natural” so I disavowed all the crap 🔫 It will take Google at least several weeks to take it into account so I will only know about the effect of the removal in a few months.

<̶i̶m̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶G̶A̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶f̶f̶i̶c̶>̶

At first, I wanted to show you guys some traffic stats images to illustrate my text. But then, I decided against it. I know for sure my competitors read my blog so why giving them more info to over-compete me? So sorry, no cool GA charts here 🛑

Horse 🐎 Website revival

Horse 🐎 Website revival was again supposed to be my focus #2 in June. Well… in the middle of the month, I fired the writer and the work just stopped after that.

here to find out what the website nicknames mean 🐀🐘🐎 🐝

What I have done in June:

👍 VA started collecting potential sites for guest posting
👍 my VA continued working on the website publishing the new articles
👎  I fired the writer
👎  as a result, the website got only 1 new article that still needs to be published 🙁
👎  no more new content is expected in the foreseeable future

I do plan to hire another writer… but it won’t happen in July I think. In July, I plan to create a few infographics for the existing articles and probably to start guestographic outreach.

Website Maintenance
Type Action Frequency Notes
Security Update plugins and themes every week Some websites where I do not go often get updated every few months :bad_girl:
Performance Run P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) every 6 months This is to see which plugins slow down the websites; usually, everything is fine
Content Update year in titles and posts every 6 months Some posts have a year in titles and body so I need to update it to keep the content looking fresh
PBN check metrics every 6 months I need to know whether I can get rid of some domains; thanks to EasyBlogNetworks I use, checking the metrics is really super easy
PBN renew domains every 12 months PBN domains are not on auto renewal so I have to manually renew the ones I still want to keep

Usually, these are the least favorite activities of operating the niche website business so I tend to get late on them all the time!

In June, I did the performance and security maintenance of my niche websites… and it reminded me of old g̶o̶o̶d̶ times when I was just starting doing it all 👶

Back then, I was overly obsessed with such unimportant stuff like logos, commenting on authority blogs, and my overall approach was sporadic and lacked systematic processes. I was all over the place and thus nowhere in terms of growing the websites. Now, 2 years later, I know that the most important thing for growing any website is dofollow backlinks! And everything should rotate around a goal of getting as many of them as possible.

And here comes my advice 🗣

Don't waste your energy on listening to all that bullshit of #growingWebsite without #buildingBacklinks! Just spend it on getting these #links Share on X

Go, do it now! 😉

GDPR compliance continues 😒

I think you all guys already heard of GDPR by now – if not, you can read about it here.  Those of you who have online business or blogs, did you get prepared?

On my side, I did some work the last month and I continued in June.

Yes, I am located in Canada and serve mostly Americans 🌎 on all my websites but I still decided to get compliant with GDPR just in case.

👁 better later than never 👁

In June, I disabled ads on my blog. Turns out that in order to show AdSense ads, I still need to collect and store visitors’ consents even if the ads are not personalized. As I already mentioned, EU citizens 🌍 are not frequent readers of my blog but I still have some tiny traffic from these countries so I simply removed ads. They were not bringing in much anyway.

Also, thrivethemes.com fixed the updates for the FocusBlog theme I am using on my blog. Now, the comments have a consent checkbox that asks a permission to store the commentator’s email and name in the browser.

I think this will be all I do for now for GDPR. I do not see a reason to invest more when the EU traffic 🌍 is almost non-existent.

If I want to do more in the future, I would look into these solutions:

Personal life 👩

June was great in terms of weather! I spent a lot of time outside doing various fun activities.

At work, we had a team building event and I tried to play Fairground Striker and failed 🤣 🤣 🤣

June 2018 Income Report: Fairground Striker

Sam and I also switched genders for a bit 😉

June 2018 Income Report: Sam and I

It was my birthday in June. I celebrated it with Sam and my colleagues;  that was Monday but I ate pizza (or more precisely a calzone), ice cream (we went to a place that makes ice cream with nitrogen), and fruits – and nothing else! Also, I drank quite a lot of wine!

June 2018 Income Report: BD pizza

June 2018 Income Report: BD ice cream

June 2018 Income Report: BD Wine

In the nearby park along the Saint-Lawrence river, June is the time when Canadian geese have offspring. Just look at these green cuties!

June 2018 Income Report: Geese

At the end of June, we went to Charlotte, NC. Sam had to go on a business trip and I took a week off and followed him. While Charlotte does not sound like a vacation destination, I did have a lot of fun in our hotel’s swimming pool and a public one with the weather going close to and beyond +35C (95F) 🌞🌞🌞

june 2018 income report - hotel pool

 

june 2018 income report - public pool

 

Ok, now let’s go back to the business🕴️‍♀️

Expenses➖

In June, the expenses were very high. Despite firing a writer for Horse 🐎 Website, I still spent more money on content outsourcing, more than usual because now I have 2 writers working on Elephant 🐘 Website.

here to find out what the website nicknames mean 🐀🐘🐎 🐝

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

Expense Amount Notes
Outsourced writing $527.79 Ordered new articles
Outsourced work $162.36 Paid a VA for doing some stuff
Outsourced images $0.00 Ordered zero image designs on Fiverr
E-marketing tools $64.01 Paid for SERP tracking, MailShake, a cheap access to AhRef tool, MailShake, etc
PBN domain registration $0.00 Did not renew or buy any PBN domains
PBN hosting $42.90 Paid for Easy Blog Networks, an awesome solution for PBNs (read my review), Bulk Buy Hosting (here's my review), and more
Hosting $96.30 Paid for regular hosting
Domain registration $0.00 No domain renewals
KickFurther $0.00 No activity on the platform
Total $893.36

Income➕

The income in June dropped a lot compared to May because Elephant 🐘 Website traffic plummeted 📉 🙁 Its high season is going to the end but I still did not expect it to end that sharp… Hopefully, it’s just an anomaly in the traffic and July will be better. Also, I disabled ads on my blog due to trying to be compliant with GDPR. It was not bringing in much money anyway.

here to find out what the website nicknames mean 🐀🐘🐎 🐝

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

Income Amount Notes
AdSense by Elephant Websites $257.10 Revenue from the 1st websites I bought + 2 others in the same niche
Amazon by Elephant Website $674.60 Revenue from the 1st website I bought + 2 others in the same niche)
AdSense by Horse Websites $101.42 Revenue from the 2nd websites I bought
Amazon by Horse Websites $0.00 Revenue from the 2nd websites I bought
Amazon by Rat Website $8.31 Revenue from the website built by Human Proof Designs; check their website to see if you can get a ready-made niche website for yourself
Ads by Rat Website $0.22 I monetize Rat Website through media.net
Amazon by Honeybee Website $0.00 Revenue from the website I am building myself with a PBN
Ads by the blog $1.10 I monetize my LOC blog with AdSense (apart from affiliate links)
ClickBank $32.59 Recurring and new affiliate sales for Easy Blog Networks, a solution for PBN hosting
Bulk BuyHosting $39.40 Recurring and new affiliate sales for Buy Bulk Hosting, another solution for PBN hosting
Kickfurther $2.16 Online investments paid back; read more in my post about Kickfurther
Interest $1.40 Interest earned on a saving account
Total $1,118.30

Totals📊

Here are my totals for June 2018.

Total income $1,118.30 minus total expenses $893.36makes a net profit of $224.94.

Here is the chart with my revenue vs expenses history for the last 13 months. I use 13-month timeline instead of the 12-month one in order to show you how the current month performed compared to the last year.

June 2018 income report chart

July 2018 Plans📅

In July 2018, my focus should stay the same as for June.

👉 Elephant 🐘 Website will again be my focus #1.

👉 👉 Guest posting ✍ will continue. This is pretty much a default activity for me now. Maybe, I will slow down a bit in July since it costs me a lot at the moment 💰

👉 👉 In June, I continued working on sky-scraping 🏙 outreach and prepared almost everything to start it. In early July, I plan to launch the campaign  🎬

👉 Rescuing Horse 🐎 Website will be again the focus #2.

👉 👉 I will prepare a few infographics based on the existing posts

👉 👉 I will try to do guestographics (when a site is offered to publish an infographic instead of a guest post)

👉 I will review my expenses. This month, the expenses were way too high and I need to do an optimization ✂

As of my LOC blog, I also plan to continue writing about my experience.  Since I am not sure about my posting schedule… you should stay tuned by subscribing to my emails!

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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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