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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.

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.

As for the traffic and income, June was average so I clearly need to build more backlinks in order to grow the site ☝

Website maintenance and my advice 🗣

Every six months or so, I perform certain maintenance tasks on each of my websites and my PBN.

Here is what I do:

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 Click To Tweet

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:

• A free edition of a privacy management platform to operationalize privacy programs for GDPR compliance
• A solution to make your website cookies comply with GDPR with a free tier

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 🤣 🤣 🤣

Sam and I also switched genders for a bit 😉

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!

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

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) 🌞🌞🌞

 

 

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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! 🤗