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May – June 2019 Income Report: eZoic Battle, Adsense Battle, Upsetting Humans πŸ˜–, My Websites Updates πŸ˜πŸ€

Welcome to my third bi-monthly income report of 2019!

I am now doing bi-monthly income reports because it saves me time ⏳ and reduces the amount of identical content in my blog πŸ’€

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 #45-46 to find out what happened in May-June 2019.

A battle with eZoic πŸ₯Š

My Pinterest strategy I’m implementing on my Mother 🐘 Website is so successful that the 🐘 Website traffic grows every day and makes it eligible to apply for a more lucrative than Adsense ad platform such as eZoic.

I applied the same second my traffic exceeded 10,000 sessions a month.Β 

This was at the beginning of May.

Then, I made a mistake that later was proven to be fatal: I added the website to their DNS 😱

Since the website was not yet approved by the platform, doing so put it down and the approval team could not verify it 😞

I saw the website got down, fixed it, and sent a message to the Ezoic support saying my website is up again.

This started a long tedious email exchange between me and the eZoic people πŸ§œπŸ»πŸ§œπŸ»β€β™‚οΈπŸ˜«

First, they reassured me that the quality team would take another look at my website.

Then, two weeks later, they apologized and said my website fell through the cracks and they re-added it to the reviewing queue πŸ˜•

Two or three more weeks later, they were claiming my website is in the queue and they β€œcan see it in the queue” πŸ€”

Then, they said my website was still in the queue 😐

Then, they said my website was still in the queue πŸ˜‘

Then, they said to contact my account manager directly 🀨

Then, I learned that I submitted my website at the bad timing since my account manager just welcomed a second child πŸ‘ΆπŸ»πŸ™„πŸ˜†

Then, a week ago, I reminded them of my existence yet again.

This time, I got a message saying my website does not have the needed 10,000 visitors a month but I could add the quality team to my GA (btw, they were added 2 months agoπŸ˜’) and request a new review 😢

I did as requested, one more time 😀

Since that, they have been quietΒ πŸ”‡

The wheel has turned full circle.

I do not know what to expect next 😠 a third child? a new dog? πŸ€”

It has been over two months I am fighting with them and I feel I’m losing this battle.

I am thinking of simply growing my traffic more and to apply for MediaVine instead and ditch the f🀬🀬🀬cking eZoic once and for all πŸ€·πŸ»β€β™€οΈ

Unbelievably bad quality of the support πŸ˜©πŸ˜–πŸ˜«

A battle with Adsense πŸ—‘

Meanwhile, I decided to monetize my πŸ€ website better.Β 

I used to use media.net but since a long time already, it was bringing me a revenue of nice round zero dollars πŸ˜‚

So, I wanted to switch to Adsense to see if it improves the situation.

Well, it turned out that Adsense has become quite demanding to new websites and does not give its approval that easily anymore.

My website got rejected right off the bat.

adsense_error_Under_construction

I did some improvements but it did not help.

Eventually, I managed to get the approval but it took me a few weeks to find and fix the problem.

Here’s how I solved Valuable inventory: Under construction error.

Got lost in my Elephants 🐘, Rats πŸ€, and other creatures? Read here to find out what the website nicknames mean

Humans are upsetting πŸ˜’

During these two months, I got quite upset with the people I was working with.

I already wrote about the unhelpful support from eZoic above and here, I will write about my β€œstaff”, my “employees”, the people to whom I outsource my work.

A fight with my editor 😑

As you should already know, I hired an editor in April.

The things with her were not cheesy-peasy already from the start. It took us a while to get adjusted to each other.

In May, I felt like everything was finally going well.

Then, I decided to take a look at the articles she edited to see if they had the proper keywords.

Well, they did not 😧😠😑

I checked the editing history and saw that the writers did add the keywords but later down the editing road, the keywords were removed πŸ’₯

I got so upset 😀

After exchanging with her some emails trying to clarify the situation, I told myself: No f🀬ckign way I will keep working with someone like her who does not understand the SEO basics! 

And I wrote to her that I was really considering letting her go.

Her answer was somehow unexpected.

The editor got clearly upset that I did not like her job and also explained to me something.Β 

Turned out that if you hire a crappy writer aaaand you pay your editor per word and not per hour, the final results might be far from ideal.

Who knew!

All the articles where she missed or edited out the keywords were not of the best quality. The editor had to do a lot of edits and, to keep her costs low, she spent less time on the other aspects of the texts.

She suggested a few things to improve our collaboration:

πŸ‘‰πŸ» Fire the bad writers and hire good expensive ones 🀣
πŸ‘‰πŸ»
Stop using the project management tool (Asana) for chatting and find something better πŸ€”
πŸ‘‰πŸ»
Pay her more 🀣 Give her more time to adjust

She was so honest with her feedback that I decided to give this thing another chance.

I did not fire my writers but instead, I improved our collaboration by setting up Slack (the free tier πŸ˜‰), which we almost do not use 🀣

This incident made me think of the price I pay for the low-quality content.Β 

It may seem that I save money but at the end, I end up paying more with my time and my energy… 😩

An intern flop πŸ’€

Outsource all the things continued πŸ€ΈπŸ»β€β™€οΈ and in June, I hired an intern via a platform called GenM.com πŸŽ‰

My intern lasted for only about 10 days πŸ˜†Β The guy firstly said that he liked my all tasks and tools… and then ghosted me for a week.Β 

I lost my patience and was thinking about firing him… and turned out he wanted to leave too! So we ended our short and bitter relationship quickly and painlessly πŸ˜…

If you want to find out more about the platform, check out my GenM.co review πŸ‘ˆπŸ‘ˆπŸ‘ˆ

MeetAnders, an unlimited graphics design πŸ‘©πŸ»β€πŸŽ¨

In June, I tried out another unlimited graphics design service called MeetAnders.

The owner stumbled upon my Kapa99 review and offered to try out their thing.

I agreed and got a free trial of 14 days, which I quite enjoyed.

I will write a review post about them soon as well.

Website updates 🎈

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

Mother 🐘 website

This website is my prime focus. As I mentioned above, I am trying to get it approved on other ad platforms that are not Adsense.Β 

For that, I need traffic.

The website is already getting very good traffic from Pinterest and I am double downing on it.

In May-June, I added 4 Pinterest-optimized articles with the total number of 6,000+words and 90+ images 🀯 More posts are currently in progress.

The traffic is growing and I am just a few thousands of sessions shy from being eligible to apply to the MediaVine ad platform πŸ‘πŸ»

Baby 🐘 website

To remind you what it is: I created it by pretty much copying the Mother 🐘 Website. I used the same keywords and the same growth approach. It seemed to be working so far πŸ˜…

This website has become the main breadwinner, actually.

In May-June, I pushed heavily on its SEO content by publishing 13,000+ words in total 🀯😡

After that, I decided to put it on pause to see how it will behave.Β 

πŸ€ website

As you may already know, I am reviving my old πŸ€ Website.

In May and June, I focused on doing skyscraper outreach.Β 

I created 2 huge posts of 5,000 words and 6,000 words.Β 

Then, I did an email outreach. Well, it is still in progress but I already managed to pick up some backlinks πŸ‘πŸ»

I also set up Tailwind (as I mentioned in my recent Tailwind post) and started working on the Pinterest traffic.

Thanks to all of the above, the website rankings and traffic continued going up:

rat_website_position_clicks_last_3_months

And the revenue went up, too. From zero to $20 🀣🀣🀣

LivingOfCloud (this blog)

In this blog, I was less active during this period. However, many posts are currently in the draft state and will be published soon, hopefully.

Here are the posts I wrote:

πŸ‘‰πŸ» 2 posts of SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundups: May and June.

πŸ‘‰πŸ» a post about Tailwind that answers a question about whether Tailwind is worth it and shares some tactics that work for me

πŸ‘‰πŸ» a mini case study post about a featured snippet I came across in the Google search

Personal life πŸ‘©πŸ»

In May, we went to Boston. Sam had to go to his quarterly business offsite to the head office and I tagged along. I am glad I did! Boston in spring is magic!

may june 2019 income report boston 1

In June, I celebrated my birthday! We went to eat out my favorite meals: Pizza and ice cream 🀣

may june 2019 income report my bd meal 2

may june 2019 income report my bd meal 1

Also, we attended a wedding of two of my dear friends. I enjoyed life by drinking red wine from a bottle outside in the forest 😝

May June 2019 income report me drinking at wedding

Sam and I with the newlyweds! 😍

wedding

At the end of June, we got a jazz festival in our neighborhood #jazzVerdun. It was a lot of fun!

may june 2019 income report jazz fest 1

Β And of course, I kept working out to stay in shape πŸ‹πŸ»β€β™€οΈπŸƒπŸ»β€β™€οΈπŸ§˜πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ

may june 2019 income report me after workout

 

Ok, now let’s go back to the business! ‍

Expensesβž–

In May-June, the expenses were very high and even mind-blowing 🀯 in a bit of sick sense 😷 However, my decision to spend the money was very conscious and was considered as an investment.

One of the reasons for the high expenses was that I continued investing in the content of the websites. As you can see above, the total number of words I paid for was 30,000, which is on par with the previous period! The number you will see in the corresponding line is pretty huge πŸ˜• but I have not yet posted all the articles I ordered.

I also got rid of one of the PBN hostings I was using and finally consolidated all my PBNs on a single platform, Easy Blog Networks. This reduced my expenses by about $14 a month 😝

Expense Amount Notes
Outsourced writing $1,400.35 Ordered new articles
Outsourced editing $415.89 Reviewing and editing articles
Outsourced labor $448.95 Paid a VA for doing some stuff
Outsourced images $0.00 Made all the images myself and with the help of MeetAnders
E-marketing tools $129.02 Paid for a cheap access to AhRef tool+email list cleaning+Elementor Pro plugin and tons of other semi-vital stuff
Internship platform $143.34 Paid for the Internship platform where I got my intern
PBN domain registration $0.00 Amount paid for PBN domain renewals
PBN hosting $71.90 Paid for Easy Blog Networks (read my review) and Bulk Buy Hosting (here's my review); ended Buy Bulk Hosting in June
Domain registration $0.00 Amount paid for regular domain renewals and new domains
Guest posting $0.00 Amount paid for guest posting
Enterprise registration $13.35 Paid for my business registration
Total $2,622.80

Incomeβž•

The income in May-June was very good since it was still the high season for my 🐘 websites. 

I also signed up for a new video ad platform vi.ai that embeds promotional videos into posts. It is not super lucrative but it does bring a dozen dollars or so a month.

Also, my πŸ€ website is coming back to life and is now generating a bit of money.

It all made May 2019 the best month ever in terms of revenue. It got even higher than in December 2018 when I sold one of my websites 🀯

Got lost in my Elephants 🐘, Rats πŸ€, and other creatures? Read 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 $1,054.98 Revenue from the 1st websites I bought + another one in the same niche
VigLink by Elephant Websites $148.95 VigLink revenue from the 1st websites I bought + another one in the same niche
Amazon by Elephant Websites $1,625.05 Revenue from the 1st website I bought + another one in the same niche
Video ads by Elephant Websites $24.64 Revenue from the 1st website I bought + another one in the same niche
Amazon by Rat Website $35.74 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 $0.00 I monetize Rat Website through Adsense
Amazon by Honeybee Website $6.81 Revenue from the website I am building myself with a PBN
AdSense by other websites $16.64 Revenue from the rest of my websites including this blog
Paid guest posts $0.00 Revenue received for paid guest posting
Easy Blog Networks $65.18 Recurring and new affiliate sales for Easy Blog Networks (a solution for PBN hosting)
Bulk BuyHosting $48.71 Recurring and new affiliate sales for Buy Bulk Hosting (another solution for PBN hosting)
LivingOffCloud affiliate revenue $1,069.68 Revenue from affiliate commissions I get from this blog
Kickfurther $4.53 Online investments paid back; read more in my post about Kickfurther
Interest $2.06 Interest earned on a savings account
Total $4,042.34

Totals πŸ’΅

Here are my totals for May-June 2019.

Total income$4,042.34 minus total expenses $2,622.80 makes a net profit of $1,419.54. This profit should be divided by two since it’s for both May and June.

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 in order to show you how these months performed compared to the last year.

May June 2019 income report chart

As I mentioned above, May 2019 was the best month ever, ever in terms of income. It was even better than in December 2018 when I sold my 🐎 website πŸ€—

income report chart since forever

July – August 2019 Plans πŸ“…

The high season for my websites is ending so I prepare to embrace lower (much lower) revenue while still trying to fix it πŸ˜†

For that, I plan to do the following things:

πŸ‘‰πŸ» move to a new ad platform with the Elephant 🐘 Websites whether it is eZoic or MediaVine or something else πŸ€·πŸ»β€β™€οΈ

πŸ‘‰πŸ» keep publishing new content on my LOC blog; I have several topics in progress already!

πŸ‘‰πŸ» resume working on the new πŸ¦„ project, which seems to be pushed back all the time πŸ˜’
πŸ‘‰πŸ» get a semi-proper vacation since we plan to go to a chalet 🏑 (a summer house in Quebec French) in July!Β 

Since I am not sure about my posting schedule… you should stay tuned by subscribing to my emails!

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Disclaimer:Β 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!Β πŸ€—

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