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May 2018 Income Report: Leaving Day Job 🙃, GDPR 😒, Best Revenue In 2 Years 😇

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 #33 3️⃣3️⃣ to find out what happened in May 2018.

What happened in May 👍

May was a month with mixed feelings. The revenue was great, the day job was challenging, the weather was amazing, the business was both tough and great.

My business net revenue hit the highest level in the last 2 years 🆙 but the dark shadow of burn-out was following me through the days 👤

Announcing my departure at the day job 🙃

Yay, finally! At my day job where I work as Development Team Lead 👩‍💼, I announced that I will be leaving someday in September!

I decided to let my colleagues know about my plans in advance so that they could prepare and plan accordingly. By that time, the current critical project we are working on should get delivered or at least get into a better shape. My news triggered some changes across our department… aaand it looks like I am going back to coding 👩‍🏭 after being a manager for the last two years.

Meanwhile I am making plans about all the fun stuff I will start doing in September! Giving more love to all websites I have put on back burner, posting more content on this blog

Also, I am maniacally planning my personal finances 💰 My business does not yet cover 100% of my living expenses so I plan to live off my saving for about a year or maybe two. I think I may add my personal finances to my income reports to keep a good track of it.

Yeah I am doing it! I am following my dream! 🤟

GDPR compliance 😒

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

On my side, I almost have.

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. However, deciding to do something and doing it are two different things. The procrastination hit me hard… and I started doing the preps exactly the day after the law became valid (which happened on May 25) 🤣 🤣 🤣

👁 better later than never 👁

Here are the resources I used to prepare for GDPR:

👉 The Ultimate Guide to WordPress and GDPR Compliance – Everything You Need to Know

👉 5 Actionable Steps to GDPR Compliance with Google Analytics

In order to stay on track with all my websites, I created a spreadsheet to make sure I am compliant across all my business:

It was a good opportunity to do a privacy policy check-up and I did find a few problems.

For the email subscription 📧 of the LOC blog, I use MailChimp 🐵 I was sure it was already double opt-in because duuuuh isn’t it a modern standard since long time? But apparently, MailChimp thought otherwise 🙈 🙁 Seems like at least some of emails I collected were single opt-in. I had to send a compliance email to confirm the subscription.  The ones of you who receives my newsletters by email should have got it =) Thank you the ones who have confirmed the subscription! 💖

The Privacy Policy is now also almost up to the date. I just need to add more info about AdSense and that’s it 🔚

Apart from that, I had to contact thrivethemes.com because the theme I am using here is there FocusBlog theme. Turned out the theme update got broken and I did not receive the GDPR update which contains various compliance features including a checkbox for the comments that asks a permission to store the commentator’s email and name. This is still work in progress.

Horse 🐎 Website revival

Horse 🐎 Website revival was again supposed to be my focus #2 in May. And it was! 👏 :good_girl: 😇

What I have done in May:

👍 hired a dedicated writer to produce the content
👍 my VA started working on the website publishing the new articles
👍 as a result, the website got 3 new articles published total ~4,800 words

May brought in a second and third Amazon Affiliate sales from the Amazon native ads I placed on the website 📈

In order to revive Horse 🐎 Website, I am using everything I learned so far while growing Elephant 🐘 Websites and my business is getting more and more scale-able.

LivingOffCloud blog 📓

In May, I worked on my LivingOffcloud (LOC) blog and published a post about CoinSwitch review. This post finished my series about my experience with cryptocurrency.

Apart from that, I did quite some work to be GDPR compliant as I mentioned above ☝

Personal life 👩

In May, we finally got summer! Most of the time, at least. Some days, it was super hot and the temperature went up to 30C (86F); some other days, it was cool, rainy, and below 18C (64F). Never boring 😎 🌸

At my day job, May was quite a stressful month 🙁 Even more stressful than April. As I mentioned above, I announced my plans about the departure in September and it triggered various events. Two things saved my sanity, ice cream 🍦 and sport 🧘‍♀️🚴‍♀️

And also a traditional Movie Day helped – once a year, the whole company goes to the movie theater 🎦 to watch some fresh release and eat some free popcorn 🍿 This time, we watched Solo: A Star Wars Story.

 

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

Expenses➖

In May, I had pretty high expenses. On top of the regular payments, I spent some money on hiring a writer for Horse 🐎 Website and then on paying her to write the new content.

Income➕

The income in May grew a bit compared to April  📈 Thanks to that, May 2018 has got the title of the best revenue month for the last two years! 😊 😊 😊 Not the second best like April but just ze bezt 😉

This happened because the high season for Elephant 🐘 Website and its family is in its midst. In fact, Elephant 🐘 Website (the original one that I bought) got the highest revenue since I bought it! This month even beat the luxury summer months of 2016 when I was doing nothing and still getting a sh*t load of money 😉 Golden days long gone… 😭 😭 😭

her’s the chart with the website lifetime revenue + the trend line showing its income is increasing overtime:

Horse 🐎 Website revenue slightly decreased comparing to April. I am adding more new content to it and hopefully, it will help the revenue to grow.

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

Totals📊

Here are my totals for May 2018.

Total income $1,807.51 minus total expenses $559.38 makes a net profit of $1,248.13.

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

And here’s the chart for the last 24 months that shows that May 2018 is the best month in terms of net revenue (not profit) during the last two years 😜😜😜

June 2018 Plans📅

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

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

👉 👉 Guest posting ✍ will continue.

👉 👉 In May, I have also started working on sky-scraping 🏙 outreach. I plan to move it from the planning state to execution in June 🎬

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

👉 👉 Now that I have a writer, I plan to start doing guest post outreach.

👉 👉 Also, I plan to start sky-scraping 🏙 as well.

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! 🤗