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September – October 2020 Income Report: My Team Expanded👬, New Challenges 😅, Website Updates📈

In September-October, the world kinda got back to normal while waiting for the important date: November 3 when the US elections were held ❎

Amazon ran its Prime Day in October that smoothly shifted into Holiday Dash that will probably transform into Black Friday just as smoothly 😏

How did you do during this period? My September was so-so but October was good 👍

That’s said…

Welcome to my fifth 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 #61-62 to find out what happened in September-October 2020.

Moved to a new hosting 🎉

In September, I moved to new hosting on CloudWays 👍 I like CloudWays because of the control it gives over the hosting machines. 

Thanks to that, I was able to find problems with the speed of my Mother 🐘 Website and fix it. What I did was so-called de-Thrivizing. It is a process removing the ThriveArchitect formatting plugin and converting the posts to Gutenberg (the default WP editor).

Meanwhile, with CloudWays, my hosting expenses have increased by about a few hundred dollars… 🤣 JK, it has gone up by approximately 3.5 times. I think that it’s a very fair price for the speed and convenience 👍

I’ve written a CloudWays review – check it out here ✅

Sold my 🐀 Website

In October, I sold my 🐀 Website 🎉 Now, I am have “only” five niche websites 😅 

The sale was done on Flippa, an Ebay-like platform for trading digital assets. I went with an auction and that allowed me to get a whopping $2,700 for a website that was making from -$10 to $15 a month 😜

You can read all about the sale in my post.

Aaand right after I sold 🐀 Website, my hosting on BlueHost expired 😅 The sale was timed just right 😅⏳

Kinda did Prime Day 😒

Did you do anything for Prime Day that was held by Amazon on October 13-14?

At first, I did not want to do anything… After Amazon cuth the affiliate rates, it’s become much less interesting to play this game 🥱

However, on Prime Day itself, I saw that my site was making sales from the Deals pages that had nothing to do with Prime Day 😮

So on the October 13 afternoon, I jumped on the bandwagon and spent two hours on putting up a landing page and setting up a pop-up directing to that page 👷‍♀️💪⚒

Such a great planning and a total lack of impulsiveness 🙈🤣

What do you think – how much did I make as a result of my efforts? 🤔

It brought me one sale. One! And that sale even never got completed…😭 so, the next year (if nothing changes) I will definitely be not playing this game again 😤

Invested into my education👩‍🎓

In October, I bought an Instagram course 🙈😒

I am addicted to Instagram and I see that people who I follow make so much money there… So I decided to invest a part of my September revenue into investigating this sales channel.

The course was interactive meaning that in addition to the written material, I also had a coach who was verifying my homework. Because of that, the course had a start, an end, and a schedule.

After the course finished, I understood one important thing: Instagram requires a lot of work ☹ I repeat for you Nadya: Instagram requires a lot of work!

Moreover, this work cannot be automated 🤷‍♀️ it can only be outsourced to another human 😣

Still, all this knowledge did not stop me from trying 🤷‍♀️

I am obsessed with Instagram… We shall see for how long I manage to survive it before burning out… 😫

Started preparing for Black Friday

I have started preparing for the biggest shopping event of the year early.

Very early.

In September! 🙈🤣

I created a few landing pages in advance so that they had a chance to rank properly.

Then, I have started collecting emails with promises to send exclusive Black Friday deals. This time, I decided to try to run email marketing based on the Authority Hacker Pro course. 

I have also run a few experiments to increase my CTR rate for affiliate products. Based on the results, I made some adjustments. I will soon write a post about these adjustments – stay tuned 🎵

How are you preparing for Black Friday?

BTW, if you are not familiar with Authority Hacker Pro, check out my review.

Website updates 🎈

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

Unicorn 🦄 Website

This is the site I bought in April. It is the biggest website in my fleet as well as the most expensive among the sites I have ever bought 🙈😅

Given that, no wonder it is my prime focus. I have been actively improving it trying to increase revenue.

For this site, I am investing a lot of time and resources into producing high quality content like videos 🎥 and images 🖼

The images are getting created for Instagram slides. After I took the Instagram course, I decided to try it out with this website – it can definitely appreciate having a new sales channel 😬

Mother 🐘 Website

This website has now become my second focus. I keep working on increasing traffic and pumping money into the content 💸

In September, the website got moved to a new hosting with CloudWays ☁

As I mentioned earlier, thanks to that, I was able to find and fix problems with the website speed. 

What I did was so-called de-Thrivizing. It is a process of removing the ThriveArchitect formatting plugin and converting the posts that used it to Gutenberg (the default WP editor).

Apart from that, I intensively worked on internal SEO such as removing thin and irrelevant content, internal lining, experimenting with caching plugins, etc.

Thanks to that, the organic traffic in October grew by 22% compared to September 🤗

The bounce rate, which has been my pain since a long time, also jumped down 😋

I have also kept working on restoring the Pinterest traffic. It is growing but not as fast as I would like to 😫

Baby 🐘 Website

Despite its name (Baby 👶), this site has been a mature adult that brings a steady hefty paycheck every month without any babysitting 👍 (not like some other horn-owning sites 😑😆)

In September – October, it did Ok. Given that its main income comes from ads and ad rates were not doing super well, its income is a bit down 😔

Baby 🐘 Website 2

Meanwhile, I got yet another Baby 🐘 Website 🙈😆😂

It is in the same niche as the first Baby 🐘 Website but with a narrower focus. I pumped some money into its content using the same strategy as for its sibling (a convenient way to scale!)

It has been growing a bit but its income is still very small.

In September, I added it to Ezoic and The Baby 👶 #2 made its first steps in the world of ads 👍😂

If you do not know what Ezoic is, read my post about it.

LivingOfCloud (this blog)

In this blog, I have not been not very active. All my focus has been on my niche websites 🙄 However, I hope that thanks to the things I am doing, I will have more material than ever for this blog! I only need time to write it 😆

This is what I posted here:

👉 September 2020 News Roundup📰: What’s New In SEO & Affiliate Marketing
👉 9 Of The Best Managed WordPress Hosting Review: Give Your Site A Great Home 🏡
👉  Selling Websites on Flippa: How I Made A Mind-Blowing Sale 🤯 (🐀 Website Is Sold)
👉  October 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 or at the very beginning of the growth, or the ones that have just been acquired.

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

Personal life 👩🏻

Ah? Personal life? What personal life? 🤔🤣

In September-October, I was again working hard non-stop 😣 Especially in October since I started preparing for the Black Friday period.

In October, Quebec (the Canadian province where I live) got shut down for a semi-quarantine. Because of that, all my socializing was happening online (and I managed to work during the online parties 😲)

Meanwhile, nature was incredibly generous for good weather 🤗 It gave us quite a few sunny warm days in September and October 🌞

Before Quebec went into the second COVID lock-down, we jumped on the opportunity to be yet  allowed to visit public places and went for apple picking 🍎🍏

Apart from apples, we also picked up some pears 😏🍐😋

And took photos of rural houses of Quebec.

Despite being busy, I keep working out religiously because it gives me so much needed rest and stress relief. Here’s my selfie after running 10 km 😝 

Apart from that, I was not willing to do anything during my rest time. I did not want to even capture the beautiful fall we’ve had here. Here’s a photo from a few years ago that represents our fall well:

Now, back to business!

Revenue➕

The revenue in September-October was not bad. The ad rates started going up since this is the period when the ad spending is re-activating in anticipation of the upcoming festive period.

The direct sales on Amazon and other affiliate programs went up, also because of the approaching holidays.

September was not so good but October was much better 👍 Overall, the revenue numbers were on par with the previous July – August period.

Here, I did not include the money I got for selling 🐀 Website. The reason is that it’s not a part of my recurring monthly revenue that I report here. Thus, it should not cloud my regular income picture 😀

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. Other ad platforms and affiliates (this is mostly for 🦄 Website)
3. Amazon Affiliate (still 🤷‍♀️)

Income proof

Now that I have reached a certain level of income, I feel like I should also post 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.

Amazon US:

Amazon Canada:

Expenses➖

In September-October, the expenses were a bit higher compared to the expenses during the previous period. 

It’s because I bought an Instagram course. Also, my hosting expenses went up due to moving to CloudWays and I bought Thrive Leads for some of my websites.

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.

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! My last VA hire was 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 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 September-October 2020.

💵 All numbers are in USD 💵

Total revenue $11,462.11 minus general expenses $1,715.10 minus content expenses $2,133.20 makes a net profit of $7,613.82. This number should be divided by two since it’s for both September and October.

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 exceeded 🎉

In my 2019 review, I set the revenue goal for 2020 at $40,000. If you take a look where I am now, you can see that I have already exceeded that number by about $12,000 🤯😜

Again, I did not include the money I got for selling 🐀 Website. It is because it is not a part of my regular monthly revenue and should not cloud the picture here.

💵 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! 🤗