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October 2017 Income Report: Name of The Course, OneLink From Amazon, Hiring on Upwork 👷✍️

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 on my income report #26 to find out what happened in October 2017.

What happened in October

October was a good month with earnings slightly lower and spendings somehow higher than in September. I am glad to see that comparing to the earnings from a year ago, in October 2016, this October was almost 40% more profitable 🙂 It means my efforts are paying back.

Let’s take a closer look 👀

Name of the course I bought in June

I decided to reveal the secret and tell you what course I bought in June. It’s Authority Hacker Pro (AH Pro) by guys from authorityhacker.com.

They say that they do not mind if the course is bought by a small team of 2-3 people and shared among them. I visited their last webinar in October and they confirmed this information again. I spoke with my course partner with whom I shared the cost and he did not mind if I reveal the name.

So here it is 🙂

OneLink Amazon Affiliate

Totally forgot to tell you that in September, I finally came to set up OneLink Amazon Affiliate for Canada and UK.

In October, I saw the fruits of OneLink.

My Canadian account brought in a few sales on Elephant 🐘 Website. This is very exciting because its Canadian traffic is not that great. If I work on it, there should be more sales flowing in. The UK account meanwhile has not made any sales yet.

Since the money numbers I post here are in US dollars💸, I will be converting the CDN revenue to USD using Google.

Hiring writers on Upwork

As planned, in October, I got back to hiring writers ✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻

Despite the fact I followed the process described in the AH Pro course I bought in June, I still had little success in the beginning.

The freelancers clearly filter job offers by money offered (duuhhh).

First, I put in the job description a weekly payment and a weekly number of articles I want to write. I got maybe 4 responses. I increased the price by 80%… still just a handful of responses. None of the applicants even called me by name despite the fact I put my name in the first line of the job description (and of course, it’s in my profile.)

Ok… then, I decided to put a monthly payment based on the same rate. Basically, I multiplied the previous number by four and mentioned in the text that this was per month.

This time, I got 3 times more responses than before!

A third of applicants called me by name. I quickly sent them test articles to write, got the results, and chose the one that followed the instructions the closest.

Now I have one good writer 🎉🎉🎉 And she is already producing a lot of work.

Hiring VAs on Upwork

As planned, in October, I got back to hiring a VA 👷

While it was not easy to find good writers on Upwork, it was even harder to find VAs. The quality of the candidates was quite low despite their high rates.

After posting the job, I saw almost no good candidates applied… Out of desperation (yeah it is the word I use often next to the word Upwork), I manually invited several suggested candidates.

Eventually, I shortlisted 3 candidates and sent them the tests.

The results were still not good.

One VA disappeared for 2 days during testing without giving any warning. It is a big red flag 🛑 for me so I rejected her almost immediately. Another one added some weird creativity to my tests tasks. I asked her to write comments and she added some misleading information there.

Rejection!

So, after that, only one VA was left. She was ok… she did the tests… she was from Canada meaning our working hours 🕣 would match… but she had no experience related to this kind of work. Which is kinda not good.

Out of desperation again, I decided to go through a voice interview with her…

And bingo! After the voice interview, I liked her so much that I hired her almost on the spot 🎉🎉🎉 She sounded reasonable, responsible, reliable, and a few more extra 🇷s – exactly what I needed 🙂

Yes, she does not have experience related to this particular work… but if she is a half as good as I imagine, I will find her something else to do. Something that suits her better. At the moment, I am pretty excited and hopeful!

Soooo I wonder… Is Upwork dying?

I am seriously considering other options for my next VA hire.

Diversifying the revenue streams

In October, I got a nice opportunity to diversify my income streams.

I got approached by LeadsBasket to try out their ads on Elephant 🐘 Website. LeadsBasket is an online marketplace for buying and selling high-quality leads. I think it is similar to AdSense but with a better targeting for ad buyers.

It sounds promising but I have not yet a chance to try it out.

Weird problems with guest emails

I have a guest post form on Elephant 🐘 Website and I started receiving guest posts proposals. I reply to the most of them…

And that is where weirdness sometimes happens.

After my reply, some of the inquirers still send me a follow-up email. I send the reply to the follow-up… And get yet another email from the same people wondering why I do not want to see their cool infographic.

But I do!

Looks like my replies do not reach them. This is pretty scary since I am always afraid my emails be marked as spammy.

However, the problem seems to be on their side. If I send a test email to my day job email account, which is a good litmus test for spamminess, it successfully arrives in my Inbox. If I forward the guest post proposal from above, I never get it. Based on that, my conclusion is that it’s their domain that is marked as spam… but it’s weird that I do receive their emails and only outbound emails get blocked.

New tool: AAWP

On the last day of October, I bought a new WP plugin for Amazon affiliate links. It is called AAWP, Amazon Affiliate for WordPress. Comparing to EazyAzon I am using now, AAWP seems to be fully dynamic and does not save images to the website.

Having static images that are not coming from Amazon website is becoming more and more a pressing issue nowadays. That’s why I have stopped using EazyAzon and will go with a new solution.

PBN Update

I have not written about my PBN since a while! It’s because I do not actively work on it, just maintenance 🛠️

In October, I did something I have been thinking about since a long time: Getting rid of $1 hostings and bringing them under EasyBlogNetwork. It would help with maintenance and also reduce cost. My EBN account is less than half used soooo….. 😉

So far, I migrated only one PBN blog.

More to come.

Ah and yeah, it was super easy to with their auto-migrating feature.

Blog Misc

As I mentioned above, in October, I attended a webinar by AuthorityHacker guys. For webinars, I always try to promote my blog and choose the name “Nadya from livingoffcloud.com”.

This time, it was no exception.

Turns out my blog is quite known among some (small 😼) circle of niche webmasters. This time, there was a reader of my blog among the attendees and he recognized me:

It was sooo pleasant to see Chris’ messages 🙂 Hi Chris, maybe, you are reading this post! 👋👋👋

In my previous income report, I mentioned that I was about to do the interview with www.entrepreneurdecoded.com. Unfortunately, it did not work out. The guys got my income numbers a bit wrong and after clarifying it, I was no longer eligible for their interview 😞 Oh well.

Kickfurther

In September, I did not back up any purchase order. Just a few long-time-ago-started contracts paid a bit. If you do not know what Kickfurther is, you can read about it here.

Personal Bits

October was a fair month. I have a fair share of fun and a fair share of work.

At work, we had a Halloween party and my team got dressed up as Chinese ghosts. It was a quite spooky yet simple costume:

For the actual Halloween day, I decided to dress up like… like myself! I love flashing colors and bold patterns 🤡🤡🤡

While in the end of October I was wearing fur, the beginning of the month was so warm that I wore… shorts!

And finally… made a motivational pic from a photo of a river park during Indian Summer.

I do want to believe it does all come together.

 

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

Expenses

In October, the expenses grew because I hired a writer. In order to get good quality writers, I bumped the per word rate so now, the articles cost me more. I finally realized that better to hire a good personnel and pay them more in order to avoid headaches 😌😌😌

Income

It’s a low season for Elephant 🐘 Website and its family and they are my main breadwinner. So, the income went down. On the plus side, the Elephant 🐘 revenue this month is almost doubled compared to the last year in October. I am very happy to see it! My efforts are paying back 🙂

Thanks to that, my overall income is about 40% higher than in October 2017.

Totals

Here are my totals for October 2017.

Total income $1,094.86 minus total expenses $361.18 makes a net profit of $733.68.

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

November 2017 Plans

In November, I plan to resume guest posting with my new VA and writer. The VA needs to be trained so I will be quite busy with that. In addition, I plan to prepare for Black Friday / Cyber Monday. This should be done very soon since Black Friday 2017 will be on November, 25. Only 3 weeks left!

It will be a busy month!

Also, in November, I will try to continue writing about my money-making experience in the blog. Since I am not sure my posting schedule…

You should stay tuned by subscribing to my emails!

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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!