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November – December 2020 Income Report: Back Friday 🖤, Changes In My Team 👬, Website Updates📈

Happy New Year 🎉 Hope you’ve had a good beginning of the year despite all the craziness happening around 😅

I am kicking off the new year with a new income report – the last one for 2020.

November-December is usually the most lucrative period of the year thanks to Black Friday and the holiday time  when everybody and their dog intensively shops to buy presents and to hunt down deals 🏪🛒🛍

How did you do during this period? On my side, it went pretty well, though I’d hoped it would be better 😩

That’s said…

Welcome to my sixth bi-monthly income report of 2020!

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

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 #63-64 to find out what happened in November-December 2020.

Back Friday 🖤

During this Black Friday, I decided to test new sales channels: email and social media.

Both were a flop since I started warming them up too late 🤦‍♀️

On the plus side, the Black Friday pages I created on my sites got ranked quite well! 

I learned from the mistakes in the previous year and prepared the pages waaay in advance, like 6 months in advance 🤯 They brought only about $100 in affiliate sales… but it’s about 100 times more compared to the previous year 😂😅

So, my advice to you about Black Friday – start preparing early! Like, right now 😂

What hindered a bit my BF income was that Ezoic, the ad platform I monetize my sites with, was down on one of my sites during Nov 25 – Nov 30 😭😭😭 It cost me about $100 😒

Also, one of the non-Amazon affiliate programs I had big hopes for suddenly went offline 😮 Their affiliate links did not work for 45 days 😱 from the beginning of November till the middle of December. I definitely missed some of the sales, not sure how much though.

Changes In My Team 👬

Somewhen in October, right in the midst of preparing for Black Friday, my VA announced that she no long wanted to work for me and thus, she gave me her two-week notice 😦😧🤯😩

Losing a key person during one of the busiest periods would not be just bad… it would be catastrophic 😫

“No, no, no no… you cannot quit now! Noooo!” 🙏

I begged her to stay at least till December. She was very kind to agree to stay till the end of the year 😌😅 

Deep down, I was hoping that by December, she’d change her mind.. But alas, it did not happen and I started looking for a new VA in the end of December.

I ended up hiring two people instead of one 😅 

I figured that it’s better if people would specialize in different types of work. So now, I have one VA handling post formatting and the other one who takes care of everything else 🙂

Started Email Reviews 📧

In November, thinking of how else I can improve my websites, I realized that I had not looked at the most extensive niche website course among all courses I have: Authority Hacker Pro!

It has tons of useful information… 

And I thought that while I am through the modules, I may also want to give my email subscribers a glimpse on what’s inside and how well it works.

Here are the results so far:

👉 In November, I tried out one module about email marketing and wrote an email about it in December. 

👉 In December, I tried out a module about affiliate marketing and sent an update to my subscribers just a few days ago.

👉 Now, I am trying the module about acquiring backlinks and I plan to release an email somewhen in February.

If you want to read these emails as well, sign up for my newsletter 👇👇👇

Website updates 🎈

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

Unicorn 🦄 Website

Right before Black Friday, my Unicorn 🦄 Website made an important achievement: it got approved for the Amazon UK Affiliate program 🎉

I applied three times to Amazon UK! Three times!!! 😱

The reason why I got rejected was that, well, the site was not compliant 😬

I did not verify carefully this important aspect during the due diligence process when I was buying it and it came biting me in the ass 😒🍑

The Amazon UK Affiliate program itself was not such a big deal 🤷‍♀️ 

What was much more important was the fact that because of that, I was risking to get my whole Amazon account banned. 

As I said earlier, getting approved to Amazon Affiliate programs of other countries is a good test to see if your website(s) where you already run Amazon is still compliant.

So, after being rejected twice, I finally fixed everything needed aaand… I got approved 🎉🎉🎉 Right before Black Friday 👍

I plan to write a post about that – stay tuned! Don’t miss any of my posts by subscribing to my newsletter:

Mother 🐘 Website

It was a very good period for this website 🤗

In December, Google released a massive core update that affected many websites. My Mother 🐘 Website got affected too but in a positive way – read all about it in this post.

Also, it finally, finally, FINALLY recovered from the Pinterest penalty that it got hit by in May 🎉💃🕺👯‍♂️

LivingOfCloud (this blog)

I was quite active in this blog and shared many pieces of my experience. 

This is what I posted here:

👉 How Google Core Update In December 2020 Affected My Sites? Here’s My Analysis
👉 9 Tips About How To Increase Amazon Affiliate Earnings By Increasing The Conversion Rate: Tip #4 Is My Favorite 🤗
👉 Cloudways Hosting Review: Read About My Experience
👉 December 2020 News Roundup📰: What’s New In SEO & Affiliate Marketing

Other websites

What’s included in this part are the sites that are currently either on hold, at the very beginning of the growth, or the ones that I did not work on during this period.

It makes no sense to write about them every month so I won’t! 😛

Personal life 👩🏻

In November, our neighborhood got dressed for the holidays. We went on a local tour to see how our neighbours decorated their houses.

Here is a couple of most impressive decors:

In December, we travelled! 😦😧🤯😂

But not too far 😆 We went to Montreal downtown, which is just 20 min away from our home by public transportation 😂

I got soooo burned out during the Black Friday preparations that I desperately needed a change of scenery. Since we couldn’t travel for real due to the pandemic, we went on a one-night staycation to a hotel in the downtown.

In the hotel, we got a nice room with a view over the city. We also properly enjoyed the pool and hot bathtub that were still open, though, with some restrictions 👍

It was a great getaway and I managed to recharge my batteries a bit 😅

Here’s a photo of a morning view from the bed that I saw when I woke up 🤩

Now, back to business!

Revenue➕

The revenue in November-December was the best in the second half of 2020. However, it still did not beat the revenue in April and May when the first wave of pandemic hit the world. 

The ad rates were the highest of the year but they still did not compensate for the slashed Amazon affiliate rates 😭

Numbers

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

💵 All numbers are in USD 💵

My top three income sources (in the revenue order):

1. Ezoic, which is great for display ads 🤗 (read my review)
2. Amazon Affiliate (still 🤷‍♀️)
3. Other ad platforms and affiliates (this is mostly for 🦄 Website)

Income proof

Now that I have reached a certain level of income, I feel like I should also post a proof of it.I am myself having a hard time believing these numbers!

Here’s the proof from Ezoic:

Here’s the stats chart from Amazon; I used a new Consolidated Summary report showing the earnings from all the amazon stores in a chosen currency (USD):

Expenses➖

In November-December, the expenses were on par compared to the expenses during the previous period. 

I sold my 🐀 Website in October and cancelled some of the tools it was using. However, at the same time, I stacked up on new tools during Black Friday and paid for job announcements on onlinejobs.com and ProBlogger.

I pay for many services on an annual basis. However in my income reports, I spread these expenses on a per monthly basis as if I were paying for them every month. It should give a better understanding of my expenses each month.

💵 All numbers are in USD 💵

Expenses minus content

The hosting expense is high “thanks” to my 🦄 Website that has a dedicated hosting on CloudWays. Read my review of CloudWays here.

Tailwind (an app for Pinterest and Instagram) has been crucial to growing my revenue. If you wonder how I do Pinterest marketing, go ahead and read my post about it.

I use MailShake for cold email outreach. When you are building white-hat links in an efficient way, it’s a must to use a tool for that (and GSuite to avoid your emails going directly into spam 😱).

On the WordPress setup side, I use a premium WP theme GeneratePress since it’s fast and highly configurable.

I also use a few premium WP plugins:

• AAWP to insert Amazon Affiliate links and create comparison tables; read my review
• Ad Inserter Pro to insert ads into pages
• Perfmatters for the website speed

My virtual assistant (VA) is my right hand. My business would simply die if I didn’t have one! All my VA hires came from onlinejobs.com.

I’ve also got a graphic designer, from onlinejobs.com as well. The graphic designer creates Pinterest images and makes video content.

Content

Given the nature of our business, content is an investment in the business. I decided to track it separately since it’s an important part of future success.

Here, I will give you a breakdown for (almost) each website. Each content expense includes content editing and management.

For content, I have in-house writers who I found myself on various platforms including ProBlogger and Upwork.

Also, once in a while, I use the services of a writing agency called ContentPit. If you want to try them out, I have a promo code for you: LOCPROMO10 👈👈👈 The code will give you a 10% word bonus for the same price for new customers 🤗

Totals 💵

Here are my totals for November-December 2020.

💵 All numbers are in USD 💵

Total revenue $12,441.36 minus general expenses $2,065.96 minus content expenses $1,880.80 makes a net profit of $8,494.60. This number should be divided by two since it’s for both November and December.

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 to show you how these months performed compared to to the last year (click on the image to enlarge):

My financial goal of 2020 has been achieved 🎉

In my 2019 review, I set the revenue goal for 2020 at $40,000. If you take a look where I am now, at the end of the year, you can see that I exceeded that number by $24,853.81 🤯😜

💵 All numbers are in USD 💵

Yes, partially, it’s happened thanks to the incredibly good April. But even if I subtract the $6,000 I made in April, my progress would still look good 😉🤑

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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! 🤗