5

November 2016 Income Report: Horse 🐎 Website Paid Off, Business Reflections, Blog News

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 motivate me. I tend to forget my small achievements… and reports 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 on my income report #15 to find out what happened in November 2016.

What Happened In November

Horse 🐎 Website Paid Off

In November 2016, I reached an important milestone. Horse 🐎 Website, the second website I bought in 2015 paid off!  Starting from the end on November, it brings in a pure profit. It took it one year to redeem the price I paid for it.

Since I bought it, it has been making $160 a month on average. The best part is that it is doing it on a total autopilot – I did nothing to increase its revenue. I plan to fix it by spring 2017 before the website will get into high season.

I bought it from EmpireFlippers. The listing price multiple was 20 meaning that EmpireFlippers expected the website to pay off in 20 months. In fact, it took only 12 months. This is a great ROI!

Reflections On My Business Processes

I think my business has recently got stuck in a reflective period. I have been doing a little bit of work here and there, all by myself without a help of a VA or even writers.

Not sure it is good.

I think there are two reasons for that.

The first one might be related to the fact that at work, I am now managing people full time. I took some management responsibilities a while ago, in summer. However, back then, I was sharing it with a colleague of mine and still had time to create stuff (namely, coding.) In October, I gradually increased my managing workload and in November, I took away the rest of work from my colleague and started doing management full time.

What I wanted to say… managing people is hard! 😀 At least for someone who is not used to do it but used to be on the creative side of the business. After dealing with people full time at work, it was simpler for me to do stuff for my sites myself rather than going through a hassle of finding/training/supervising freelancers. After all, I am a software developer and creating things is in my blood 🙂

But I know very well that this path leads to nowhere. I need to scale in order to be successful in niche websites.

The second reason is that I am currently refining my business processes.

Here is the list of the changes I have been investigating recently:

• changing the way I work with PBNs: Now I am testing acquired expired domains before investing into filling them up with content;
• changing writing guidelines for writers: I want to get a content that would be similar to the one I write;
• automating the quality management of the work produced by writers: Using tools that help to manage the test quality including readability score, grammar, etc.

This reason is a very legitimate one to not hire helpers. It is hard to give instructions to others if you yourself do not know what to do 🙂

So yeah, knowing that I need to scale, I plan to act on these reasons and hire a VA and resume working with writers.

Let the scaling begin! hehe

Blog News

As I mentioned in the last income report, my blog is growing and this is awesome 🙂 However, it is growing at expense of the rest of my business 🙁

I decided to put the blog on a mild pause and reduce a bit the amount of content I am posting here. I used to post every week but from now on, I will be posting every other week. It will give me more time to work on the niche websites. I will keep it like this for a couple of months and then we shall see!

Kickfurther

In November, I did not backup any businesses.

Frankly speaking, I feel less excited about KF than before. There are a few reasons for that:

• an uncertainty for me as a Canadian backer since I am still not sure KF will improve the service for Canadian residents
• a few of seemingly solid businesses went belly up and I am not sure anymore how to do due diligence and whether it can help at all
• KF communication with backers could be better – their stuff promises to keep us up to date and does not always deliver 🙁

I still have 21 businesses in the active state. I guess I will see how they will pan out in January and then calculate the true profit I have gotten so far.

Amazon Native Shopping Ads

In November, I went all in with Amazon native shopping ads.

I put it up on both Elephant 🐘 Website and Rat 🐀 Website in lieu of ad units.

While Elephant 🐘 Website responded very well, the  visitors of Rat 🐀 Website pretty much ignored the ads 🙁 The numbers in the Income section of this report reflect that well.

I may write about my experience with Amazon ads in a separate post.

Expenses

November expenses were low, even lower than in October. I only paid regular fees for services and tools I use every day as annual charges for domains and hosting.

In November, I wrote a review of Domain Hunter Gatherer and bought a proxy subscription for it.

I also bought a cheap subscription of AhRefs from a group-buy website. So far, I am really happy with this service and will use the group-buy for other tools, too. While using group-buy services seems to not be très fair for the tool makers, I do not use these tools very often and most of the time, my money just got wasted.

Income

Thanks to the craze of Black Friday / Cyber Monday, my November income got bumped up a bit and again hit the 4-digit zone.

I jumped on the opportunity to get 12% commission from Amazon native shopping ads and it kinda paid off.

On Elephant 🐘 Website, I replaced many AdSense ad units with Amazon native ads. The website responded well hence the bump in its Amazon income. I kept AdSense ads on some pages but of course, the ad revenue went down.

Surprisingly, Rat 🐀 Website revenue was not good despite the shopping frenzy. Amazon native shopping ads did not work for it at all 🙁 I put the Amazon ads instead of almost all Media.net ads I set up the last month. The Media ads were still showing in the sidebar and it brought me 50 cents 😂

(Read here to find out what website nicknames mean.)

On top of that, KickFurther investments have paid back a bit – as usual 🙂

Totals

Here are my totals for November 2016.

Total income $1,013.86 minus total expenses $189.74 makes a net profit of $824.12.

The November profit is not the highest one but at least, it was better than in September-October.

Here is the chart with my revenue vs expenses. It does not include my big investments I made in October 2015 when I bought Elephant 🐘 Website, November 2015, when I bought Horse 🐎 Website, and in June when I bought some cryptocurrency.

The chart shows my income history for the last 12 months.

December 2016 Plans

I plan to continue working on increasing revenue on Rat 🐀 Website. I need to put its good traffic to work! Working with Media.net looks like a promising path. I also want to explore other monetizing options like e-books.

I will continue working on a PBN for Honeybee 🐝 Website. I have changed the way I select expired domains to reduce the amount of work and increase the efficiency. I will write a post about it once I have more information to share.

I plan to create training materials and start looking for a new VA. My new business processes are getting more and more refined now and I can outsource some of the work again.

And of course, I will be writing about my experience in the blog! However, I will change the posting frequency and will go with a bi-weekly schedule rather than post every week as I am doing now.

Don’t miss a post – subscribe to my newsletters!

Disclaimer

Some of the links in this income report 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!