It's been a while that you've heard from me, basically because I'm pretty busy with doing business at the moment - which is a good thing, isn't it?

The October 2013 was the most profitable month I had so far and that's why I decided to quit my job. I'm building this online business for 7 months now and as I increased my earnings from month to month, it became hard for me to be employed in a regular job.

I was struggling with head aches, frustration and just being in a bad mood because I was spending time in a job instead of building my own business. That's why I decided to take the next big step and to become self-employed. From 1st of December I'll be free from working in a job! Fortunately I had so many vacation days saved that I won't need to work in November as well - so I'm free now to do whatever I want 🙂

Restarting the Niche Site Idea

Now that I'm depending on earning money, I'm rethinking all my online business ideas and the strategies how to implement them.

As you know I'm very passionate about creating residual income, so that I can spend time doing things I love. And that strategy will become more important now! As you can see in my income reports, I'm not earning good money with my niche sites right now, though I have 4 of them. And I start to see this blog as a niche site as well, since basically niche sites are sites targeting a well defined audience in a specific niche.

This being said, I won't create my second eBook as soon as I thought I would and I won't promote my first eBook more than I have until now. I want to be honest with you, I find marketing pretty hard and I need to learn more about it when I want to make a living from it.

But I have knowledge in building niche sites or blogs, web design and ranking sites high in Google, that's why I started my coaching program targeting specifically those business strategies. I believe that growing my niche sites will give me even more credibility and thus lead to more coaching clients along the way - besides earning money and taking pressure from my shoulders.

I always said that niche sites are a good way to build a business while being employed, and now I'm going to take my niche sites to another level. I have to admit that I was too distracted with all the opportunities given, but over the last weeks I understood my core competences and regained focus. That process lead to not blogging as often as usual, but now I'm back on track!

Coaching for Blogging and Residual Income

My coaching student Becky is doing a terrific job so far. Now she also joined Fizzle and uses my knowledge and the Fizzle community to grow her blog even further.  Seeing her appreciation for my advice encourages me to build a stronger brand around my coaching program.

In fact, I had my first speaking gig about corporate blogging in October, which was a lot of fun. Afterwards I had interesting discussions with a big local newspaper that's building their first blog and a local property manager who's also interested in starting a blog. So I'm getting more expertise from real world corporate blogs and I love working with those companies!

Besides offering that coaching for corporate blogs, I'm in touch a few other friends who want my help with creating residual income.

One of them is Kevin, a good friend of mine I met at the table tennis training a few years ago. I had a hard time fighting to a depression being a teenager and now in his early twenties he wants to help other teenagers overcome their depressions. What a great project 🙂 We created the German speaking website Gemeinsam-gegen-Depression.de and I'm coaching him on growing this blog, helping others and monetizing the whole thing.

Since there is so much going on with my coaching right now, I'm only taking three more students. I want to make the coaching experience as personal as possible, incl. email conversations and Skype sessions. That's why I have to set a limit with clients. If you want to get coached on creating profitable niche websites or need help ranking your blog in Google, apply by mail for my coaching program.

Income in October

Now that you've got an idea of what was going on in October, let's come to the income statement itself. I already said that this month was the most profitable month ever, and that's because I made two affiliate sales for the Internet Business Mastery coaching program.

The Adsense sales and Clickbank sales decreased in this month. In my eyes that goes hand in hand with the decreased traffic, since the click-through-rate for Adsense didn't change.

Traffic Statistics

There was a Google update in the beginning of October which dropped this blog from #2 to #4, and that lead to less visitors. The good thing is though, that I was able to decrease the bounce rate too, that's why I'm happy with the traffic stats for October 🙂

As you can see I increased the average visit duration from 01:17 to 01:39 and decreased the bounce rate from 79.34% to 75.33%.

But those aren't the only metrics I'm using to monitor this site. I also installed the GoSquared service to track my website traffic and this service shows drastically different results!

GoSquared showed in weekly reports that my bounce rate is around 50%, which leads to the question what service is right. I'm going to discuss this issue with James Gill, co-founder and CEO of GoSquared and I'll publish the results as soon as I get them!

After all, the traffic dropped in October, which also needs to be credited to less promotional activities from my site. I stopped blog commenting and I didn't do much social sharing as well - due to the orientation phase I was going through. This is about to change in November and that's why I'm confident to my site back up and hopefully break 15k pageviews!

Income Statistics

As I said, the income grew even though the traffic decreased. This is mainly because I got two new income streams that weren't there before: Hostgator and Internet Business Mastery.

Hostgator is a great webhosting company, which I promote as affiliate via my personal blog. I'm offering a 25% discount with the coupon hostgatorjk25, which makes it more attractive for my audience. If you're searching for a reliable webhost to start your blog or build niche sites, you should definitely check them out. Thank you, if you're using my coupon code via my affiliate link! This gives me a few bucks at no extra costs for you and keeps my business running!

Also I made affiliate sales for the coaching program Internet Business Mastery. They just launched the Academy 3.0, which is even greater than it was before. With their new courses Freedom Formula and Freedom Business Blueprint Jeremy and Jason really took the training to a new level, especially for those of you who had no business training before. What's great from the point of an affiliate marketer is, that they kept the 90 day money-back guarantuee. Even though I'm sure that the academy will lead everyone (!) to a successful online business, you can get your money back easily if you don't like it. If you're about to start a business online, you should consider joining this training. It would be great if you're using my affiliate link, that keeps my business running at no extra cost for you. Thanks!

I decided to modify the statistics a little bit to make them easier to understand. That's why I'm not dividing the income by referral website anymore but by sales provider.

Clickbank
$ 67.09 (Long Tail Pro)

Hostgator
$ 50

Google Adsense
$ 129.40

Internet Business Mastery Academy
$ 297

Gumroad

$ 5.90 (eBook - The Entrepreneurial Lifestyle)

TOTAL: $ 549.39

That's almost the double income of September 2013! Sure, some affiliate sales aren't paid right away, but after all, I'm very satisfied with this result!

Goals for November

The goals for November are pretty clear for me. I spent a few weeks on re-thinking my Internet business model and I decided that I'm going to focus on building residual income with niche sites and teaching others how to do so for themselves.

Besides that, I'm going to work as a freelancer for my former employer. This is a pretty comfortable situation as I'm going to create websites for him and support him in ongoing projects I was involved in. This gives security for the next coming month, so everything's fine.

Also I'm collaborating with my friend Myke Macapinlac, who wants my support for creating websites. This results in several websites I'm building for him in the moment and gives me more credibility for my coaching program in web design and WordPress.

To achieve those goals, I need to make some sacrifices to other projects. I was planning to write a second book and to code my first iOS app. I'm going to re-schedule those projects, I'll most likely won't cover those in November. Focus is important and working in too many projects at the same time held me back long enough!

I hope you liked this income report and the story I shared. It was a huge month for my, with some life changing decisions. Right now I'm trying to get used to the new situation and the new daily routine of not going to work. Knowing that the paychecks will stop coming in really sharpened my focus and I hope everything will work out 🙂

If you found this story valuable, please share it with one friend of yours who could get some inspiration or motivation out of this. And if you know someone who's interested in building niche sites or starting a blog, feel free to refer them to me - I'd be more than happy to help them out 🙂

This is it for now, keep on rocking!

Jan