Hi folks,
this is my second income report, I want to share my earnings for August 2013 with you. Quickly said, I earned 150% the revenue I earned in last month.
When was the last time you got a 50% raise in salary? This question should show you, why I'm pretty happy with this result even though it's still little money.
The August was pretty busy for me, I was working lots of long-term projects.
Instead of focussing on making money quickly, I want to build sustainable streams of passive income. I probably could have achieved even more growth when I had focussed on short-term strategies, but for me it's not about earning lots of money now.
I want to generate stable and reliable streams of passive income for my future.
Of course I'd be pissed when it takes me a year to reach my chosen goal of $1,000 per month, but I'm confident that my strategy can generate this level of revenue within the next two or three months.
And that would be f*cking awesome if you ask me! My friend Navid Moazzez did an awesome interview with Rasmus Lindgren (from RetireMyAss) about building a lifestyle business. I strongly recommend that you take a few minutes and listen to this to understand what kind of business I'm building.
Of course there are people out there who make more money in a shorter time period. But I chose to go my own way and don't compare myself to those. There will always be some people who earn more money than you, have the bigger car, wear more expensive clothes, you get the idea.
In the end, internet business isn't about money but about the journey in growing yourself, extending your network and spending time doing things you love.
I won't use strategies where others made decent amounts of money in short-term when those methods aren't earning money in the long-term view. If you know such a method, please shoot me an email!
Niche Sites
Ok, let's get to it. My biggest focus was a project of creating my first REAL niche sites.
The shin support niche site won't earn any money because I relied on the broad keyword research. I planned to use that site as an example why to use the exact match keyword search only, but after the update of Long Tail Pro, the exact match keyword search is the only option you have.
The new niche sites definitely will - at least I'm confident that they will make more than $1,000 per month after some time.
Long Tail Pro says, that the keywords have monthly search volumes between 20k and 60k in the US, going along with a pretty low competition. I paid close attention to my criteria for niche websites and thus I'm quite sure that those sites will start ranking soon.
The niche sites will be monetized in two different ways. I'm using Google Adsense as this is pretty much the standard for niche websites. My theme allows to test different page layouts to find the one layout that converts best, which comes in pretty handy if you ask me.
As a second way to make some money I'll include Amazon Associates products on my niche sites. They are all in the jewelry niche, which makes them predestined to sell jewelry via Amazon Associates.
An example for a working niche site with Amazon Associates products is the http://www.bestsurvivalknifeguide.com/ from Spencer Haws. Spencer builds niche sites for years and he shares the income from his survival knife site publicly. In July 2013 he made $649.78 with Amazon Associates, so this can definitely work for me as well.
I'm pretty excited about the new niche sites!
Affiliate Marketing
Relying on one income stream would be pretty dumb and far away from save income.
That's why I started building blogs especially for affiliate products. You might know that affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money online and I believe that you can make by far more money with affiliate marketing as with advertising.
My good friend Sergio Felix is releasing a WordPress training program called Authority Blog Profits. I already have access to that program before it's even launched and with that access I'm creating the Authority Blog Profits Review blog. On that page you'll find an interview with Sergio where he explains the details of Authority Blog Profits, I'm sharing exclusive insider knowledge and I'll offer bonusses once the program has launched.
Creating affiliate sites for upcoming products is pretty popular right now, my good friend Navid Moazzez is creating a similar blog called Business In A Weekend Review. He's reviewing a mentoring program from global acting entrepreneur Jesse Krieger.
Another affiliate product that Navid and me are going to promote together is Freedom Business Blueprint. It's a training program created by Jason van Orden and Jeremy Frandsen, who also created Internet Business Mastery Academy - the training program that got me (and Pat Flynn) started in internet business.
Since Jeremy and Jason have 10+ years in internet business and their Internet Business Mastery Academy simply ROCKS, Navid and I decided to promote their new program that'll help members to find their single motivating purpose and build a business around their passions. It's going to be low-priced, which makes it especially interesting for those of you who are new to internet business and don't quite know where to start.
I'm sure that those two programs can play a big role in my income streams when I manage to create the review blogs in an effective way.
You might wonder why I'm sharing those sites with you whereas I could easily keep them secret and just share the earnings with you. Well, there are two reasons for me to share the sites.
The first reason is, that I obviously need some backlinks and traffic to that sites to start generating awareness. Please don't understand this as a approach to sell you those programs, they aren't even live to the time I'm writing this income report. I'm rather trying to get the sites out in the world and spread them as far as I can.
But the second and more important reason is, that I want to enable you to replicate what I'm doing. That's why I want you to take a look at those sites and see what kinds of content I'm promoting there. Decide for yourself whether this is a way that could work for you as well.
There are several people following the approach I just outlined and they are making pretty good money with it.
Other Projects
Niche sites and affiliate marketing where the main topics in the August, but I had some side projects as well.
You might know that I'm working on a mentoring platform for young entrepreneurs, together with a friend of mine in the UK. Unfortunately that project suffers under the workload both of us have.
We did some interviews with awesome entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk or Caleb Wojcik, but we missed the launch date planned for August 23rd. In fact, that site won't most likely launch in September as well.
Anyway, the content will be great and I want you to sign up to the mailing list to get further notifications on our progress! Please ignore the countdown and the progress bar, the site isn't up-to-date. I can assure you that we're only working with the greatest entrepreneurs for that program and that you'll recieve high quality training once it launches. And yes(s), it will be priced in a way that especially beginning entrepreneurs can afford it!
My second side project is an app that I want to create to control procrastination. I purchased Keynotopia, a prototyping framework for Keynote, Powerpoint or Impress. I recently interviewed Sam Ovens, the founder of SnapInspect, an software company that offers an app for property inspections. Sam created the app prototype using Keynotopia without knowing how to write a single line of code and managed to get enough presales to pay 50% of the development costs. Isn't that awesome stuff?
That app is going to evolve over time and I'll share the progress with you here!
My Income
Enough of the talking, let's get to the numbers:
MyGreatOnlineBusiness.com
Google Adsense: $ 208.46
Affiliate Sales (Long Tail Pro): $ 30,49
Total: $ 238,95
eBook - The Entrepreneurial Lifestyle
Total: $ 0
jkoch.me
Affiliate Sales: $ 0
Total: $ 0
TOTAL: $ 238,95
Conclusion
As you see I almost made $100 more than in July 2013! I increased my revenue to almost 150% of the revenue in last month.
It's clear that I managed to increase Adsense earnings. The reasons are that I found a layout for the ads that converts pretty good and that I started doing more keyword research to target keywords with high CPC in my new posts.
But what really makes me happy is my first affiliate sale ever! I sold Long Tail Pro, the keyword tool that I'm using literally anytime before I publish content or start a new niche site.
This is the proof that people start trusting me and this trust excites me. The amount of earned money is pretty small, but the trust I'm gaining over time is priceless! Now I just need to make $70 more in Clickbank sales to get my payout 😉
If you made it this far to the end of this income report, I'd like to ask you to leave a comment with your thoughts. I'm still learning and I think this growth shows a pretty good progress.
The future is shining bright and I hope that my content inspires you to take action yourself! If you don't know where to start, please leave a comment or connect with me on Facebook, G+ or Twitter and I promise I'll get back to you!
All the best,
Jan
