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October 2016 Income Report: Elephant 🐘 Website In Trouble And 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 #14 to find out what happened in October 2016.

What Happened In October

Elephant 🐘 Website In Trouble

As you already know, I have updated its ad units to responsive in September. It took me a while to figure out that the new ad units were somehow buggy. Eventually, I fixed that and also decided to run split tests in order to figure out the best responsive format.

The tests are still running and it seems to be affecting my income.

Apart from that, the overall website traffic seems to be decreasing. It actually dropped by 35% comparing to the last year 😨

There can be multiple reasons for that:

  • latest Panda update – seems like it did affect my poor Elephant
  • increased competition that is stealing some of the visitors
  • the website lost sitelinks that used to be shown along with the website preview on the Google search page under the snippets

An analysis of what’s going on with the website is out of the scope of this post so I may write another separate post with the details.

In general, it all sucks not even because the dropping revenue sucks but because the website has still paid off only 75% of the price I forked out for it.

While the challenge does provide me with great learnings and experience… I still want my money! 😀 😀 😀

Blog News

I guess my blog is growing and this is awesome 🙂

In October, I got contacted by a few businesses interested to appear on my blog. I accepted only one of the inquiries – from somebody how has an awesome expired domain search tool! – and I cannot wait to share my tool review with you 🙂

Kickfurther

I backed just two businesses in October:

  • Glamour Dolls Makeup with their pre-sold inventory for Lisa Frank
    I have backed Glamour Dolls twice in the past. The first consignment went super well and they paid waaaay ahead of the schedule.
    The second time they felt behind the schedule by 4 months. However, they paid extra in order to compensate backers for the lost profit. I have to say it was an impressive move. So far, they have been the only company I backed who did that. No wonder I decided to support them again 🙂
  • Silikids, Inc with their silicone cup production for their busiest quarters
    I have backed them once before and was happy with their performance and on-time payments

Apart from that, I got a reward for winning the weekly referral contest.  It was a mere $1.67 but I hope to get more at some point! According to the referral leaderboard I see in my account, the referrals can reach up to $150.00!

Expenses

October expenses were low. I only paid regular fees for services and tools I am using every day. I decided to not hire a VA for now since I do not have much of  mundane work to outsource.

I kept working on my PBN and bought a couple of expired domains.  My approach to finding expired domains is changing and I will write a separate post about it soon.

Expenses
Expense Amount Notes
Outsourced writing $0.00 Did not order any new articles
Outsourced VA $0.00 Did not outsource any work to a VA
E-marketing and tools $37.00 Paid for LuckyOrange (a heat map / stats solution) – 2 accounts and a social sharing plugin for Rat Website
PBN domain registration $18.09 Register a few new domains for PBN
PBN hosting $55.50 Paid for Easy Blog Networks, an awesome solution for PBNs (read my review) and Bulk Buy Hosting (here's my review)
KickFurther $151.30 Re-invested the paybacks received before
Domain registration $12.45 Renewed some of my non-PBN domains
Total $274.34

Income

Elephant 🐘 Website is still suffering from converting its ad units to responsive ones. I found out that the ad units had a bug and I continue running a split testing in order to determine the best responsive format.

Rat 🐀 Website revenue was ok given that fall is the end of its niche season. I started exploring other ways of monetization apart from Amazon Affiliate. Currently, I am working with Media.net ads – hence the tiny-teeny record in my Income report =) I got a personal account manager (wow!) who’s also very interested in increasing my revenue. We even had a phone chat about my website! The manager suggested a few improvements and we should get in contact again soon for a review.

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

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

Income
Income Amount Notes
Amazon by Elephant Website $176.29 Revenue from the 1st website I bought
AdSense by Elephant & Horse Websites $409.31 Revenue from the 1st & 2nd websites I bought
Amazon by Rat Website $32.61 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 $1.80 I have started monetizing Rat Website through media.net
Amazon by Honeybee Website $0.00 Revenue from the website I am building myself
ClickBank $58.23 Referral and new sales for Easy Blog Networks – read my Easy Blog Networks review
KickFurther $85.56 Online investments paid back plus $1.67 I got after winning a referral context; read more in my post about Kickfurther
Interest $4.26 Stashed extra money from fat summer months on a high earning saving account and earned interest
Misc $33.52 I have been charged extra for Easy Blog Networks' Mini plan during previous months so I got a reimbursement
Total $788.85

Totals

Here are my totals for October 2016.

Total income $787.18 minus total expenses $274.34 makes a net profit of $512.84.

This month, the profit is low due to the problems with Elephant 🐘 Website. However, the expenses were also low and it pushed the net revenue higher. At least, it is higher that the September one! hehe

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.

October 2016 income report chart

November 2016 Plans

I have many for November – as usual 🙂

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 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 planned to become an analytics freak in October. It is happening and I am running even more experiments and gathering even more data. This won’t change in November, I am sure 🙂

Amazon Affiliate is currently promoting their native ads for US residents. Since my Amazon revenue goes to a U.S. account I seem to be eligible for the promotion. I plan to test it out extensively in November to see how the ads fit with my websites.

And of course, I will be writing about my experience in the blog!

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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!

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