It’s that time again, IncomeBully Income Report time! February came and went, seems like this year time is going by faster than before. I guess older people were right, as you get older the time goes by faster.
Anyway…
Income reports are something that bloggers have been doing fairly often and for some time now. I’m not the first and definitely won’t be the last.
The reason I publish income reports is to transparently track everything I do and see how it performs. This has helped me motivate some of you, but honestly, many of you have motivated me! This allows me to also try new things and analyze what works and what doesn’t when it comes to running a blog, and generating purely online income without client work.
It’s also a fun type of post, to analyze, reflect, and think about how things can improve.
The income reported here is made 100% from the blog and “internet marketing”. It does not include business consulting income, offline income or traditional investment income.
What Happened In February
February was an interesting month. Despite producing only 4 posts including January’s income report, I wrote a LOT of content to prepare for the upcoming months. I also spent more time on promotion and a few other projects that I would like to track in this blog.
Almost Launched my Affiliate Site
This was one of the things I really wanted to have launched by the end of February but it just didn’t happen. I was focused on planning and making preparations for a large growth push for this blog in the upcoming months which took priority.
However, I’m very close to launching it and I’m excited to reveal what it is and how well it is doing, or how poorly it is doing. Of course, I won’t be revealing it until I’ve done a bit more work after the launch, as I don’t want to give away the keywords right away. I can say, that it is in the very competitive, hosting affiliate market.
I really don’t know what to expect in terms of how difficult it will be. Most people I’ve talked to that are great affiliate marketers are telling me that it’s not going to generate a dime. Even though I respect most of them, these were the same people that said I would never generate more than $1,000 from my Ultimate Blueprint to Start a Web Agency unless I had affiliates!
Contributed to an Expert Round Up
I’ve done expert round-ups in the past and typically jump at the opportunity because it exposes me to a new audience, it also allows me to piggy back off of the more followed contributors and their efforts to promote a post.
So when someone approaches me with a pitch to do an expert round up, I usually do it, and am thankful for the opportunity. It brings traffic and subscribers.
This one was a post on Biznessapps.com about how to generate leads for local businesses.
Worst performing round up thus far. Seems that the amount of social shares it received on their end was pretty low as well.
I didn’t receive a single visitor from the roundup.
Looking at the data, or lack of data I should say, it was a waste of time to contribute. I guess I still received a backlink, but I don’t try to build backlinks, I try to get traffic. I’m a firm believer in building backlinks that generate traffic.
Oh well, I am thankful for the opportunity.
Found a Hosting Offer I can Actually Promote
One of the things that has been killing me in terms of producing decent affiliate income, is lack of affiliate offers I want to promote. That is still an issue for me, so I need to start breaking it down by areas/purposes.
One of the areas that I needed to figure out is hosting affiliate offers. They typically pay decent commissions, but they usually suck in terms of service and reliability.
NameHost is the winner. I wrote a post about it in February, after trying out numerous companies to try and find out which one I would feel most confident in recommending.
This should help me in future months!
Started Exploring “Coaching” Income
Never thought I would explore the possibilities of “coaching”. To keep things simple and not confuse, I am not considering coaching income as consulting income with these reports. When I think of consulting, I think about things outside of this blog, with real, offline businesses.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. One of the readers here and members of the private skype mastermind group, Andrea, has been asking me about it and pretty much talked me into letting him pay me money for a skype call.
My concern was, I never did any coaching. I never even considered it. I figured, my blog posts are good enough, I’m thankful for my readers and don’t want to push some expensive coaching session down their throats.
After Andrea, I also had someone else interested in coaching, and we already have the date scheduled.
This is something I’m going to continue exploring, but in a very limited way. I haven’t sent a single email about it, and there’s not even a page on this blog you can go to that will give you any details on it.
I went back and forth with myself about pricing. I figured I need to keep it low enough at least while I’m in the experimental phase, so I decided on $275/hour. I hate trading hours for dollars, but I guess that’s ultimately what it comes down to anyway, there’s just no way to legitimately scale that unless there’s some sort of cloning machine you guys know about.
Will keep you all posted on any progress or updates on that front.
Posts I published in February
Haven’t been here in a while? Here are some of the posts I’ve published in February.
January 2016 Income & Traffic Report
The ULTIMATE Guide to Using Parasites for SEO and MORE
5 Things to Know About Local SEO in 2016
Awesome BlueHost & HostGator Alternative: NameHero Hosting Review
Top 5 Most Popular Posts in February
In the top 5, I include all posts from the start of the blog, not just posts published in January.
1.) The Ultimate Guide to Using Parasites for SEO
2.) 5 Things to Know About Local SEO in 2016
3.) How a Vape Store Doubled Their Sales With 3 Simple Things
4.) Mobile Renegade for B2B Lead Scraping Success
5.) Ice Cold Email Gold: Key to Cold Email Marketing Mastery
Alright… Lets get into the juicy stuff
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Febuary 2016 Income and Traffic
In my income reports, I don’t display offline income or client income. There’s a couple different areas I am displaying in these reports. Course income like my Agency Blueprint, or Ice Cold Email Gold, my coaching income which may or may not be a thing in the future, and affiliate income.
Here’s the breakdown.
Self Created Income / Courses
My Ultimate Blueprint To Start a Web Agency
Ice Cold Email Gold – The Key to Cold Email Marketing Mastery
Courses : $1,915
At the end of the year, I will break down product by product, but for convenience, the total will reflect combined income from my two courses.
Coaching Income
Something new, not sure how long I will do this, after all it is just a trial run to see how it goes.
(2) One hour Sessions – $550
Affiliate Income
- Mobile Renegade – $337.95
- Clicks Magazine – $17
- NameHero Hosting – $400
TOTAL Affiliate Income – $754.95
Total Overall Income – $3219.95
February Income Reflection
First, I have to say that I’m nowhere near satisfied when it comes to the income generated by this blog. However, I must admit, this was a really good month.
Maybe there aren’t big numbers across the board but this was just $20 or so away from a record breaking month in affiliate income, despite having lower diversity of products. Finding NameHero and feeling confident enough to recommend should bring in affiliate commissions each month.
I still need to find other products, and have a plan in place that should allow for it. Overall though, nice increase in monthly income, highest since August of 2015.
OTHER METRICS FOR THE BLOG
Alexa Rank – 320,070
Twitter Followers – 1,674
Youtube Channel Subscribers – 51
Google+ Followers – 26
Aweber Email Subscribers – 1,577
More Metrics:
Unique Visitors – 4,850
Bounce Rate – 69.96%
Pages Per Session – 1.71
Average Time On Site – 2:29
Thoughts on the Metrics
It’s not only the income I’m happy with, I’m happy with the metrics this month as well. January was a good starting point for the year, and February was building upon that.
I had decent sized increases in subscribers and traffic. Traffic increased by nearly 20%, and my email subscribers increased by 200 subscribers!
Alexa Rank improved a bit, even though it really doesn’t matter, it’s a fun thing to track.
Twitter followers also increased by a good amount.
Pretty good, and all this with February being a shorter month! Hopefully I can continue to build off the traction started this year and continue beating previous months.
Here’s some data so you guys can see my progress month over month.
Month & Year | Unique Visitors | Affiliate Income | Total Revenue |
---|---|---|---|
December 2014 | N/A | $18.10 | $3528.10 |
January 2015 | 921 | $46.48 | $4062.48 |
February 2015 | 1361 | $223.65 | $3239.65 |
March 2015 | 2324 | $70.58 | $2697.58 |
April 2015 | 2528 | $400.90 | $2391.90 |
May 2015 | 6422 | $400.90 | $2829.90 |
June 2015 | 9830 | $449.96 | $3378.27 |
July 2015 | 8015 | $586 | $3621.86 |
August 2015 | 6209 | $777.93 | $8386.24 |
September 2015 | 2372 | $132.06 | $1912.06 |
October 2015 | 2249 | $267.59 | $1277.59 |
November 2015 | 2331 | $331.68 | $1757.68 |
December 2015 | 2191 | $306.56 | $1981.56 |
January 2016 | 4126 | $463.09 | $2411.09 |
February 2016 | 4850 | $754.95 | $3219.95 |
Month & Year | Unique Visitors | Bounce Rate | Pages Per Session | Time on Site |
---|---|---|---|---|
December 2014 | N/A | N/A | N/A | |
January 2015 | 921 | 51.07% | 2.93 | 4:04 |
February 2015 | 1361 | 49.74% | 2.63 | 3:22 |
March 2015 | 2324 | 54.65% | 2.65 | 3:24 |
April 2015 | 2528 | 54.36% | 2.09 | 2:06 |
May 2015 | 6422 | 58.11% | 1.89 | 1:56 |
June 2015 | 9830 | 61.4% | 1.82 | 1:58 |
July 2015 | 8015 | 67.91% | 1.68 | 1:30 |
August 2015 | 6209 | 65.03% | 1.72 | 1:57 |
September 2015 | 2372 | 74.96% | 1.63 | 1:27 |
October 2015 | 2249 | 75.94% | 1.62 | 1:30 |
November 2015 | 2331 | 73.23% | 1.75 | 2:01 |
December 2015 | 2191 | 72.71% | 1.64 | 1:53 |
January 2016 | 4126 | 69.56% | 1.75 | 2:18 |
February 2016 | 4850 | 69.96% | 1.71 | 2:29 |
Month & Year | Alexa Rank | Email Subs | Youtube | Google+ | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
December 2014 | N/A | 69 | N/A | N/A | |
January 2015 | 2918591 | 212 | 72 | 0 | N/A |
February 2015 | 1492063 | 336 | 95 | 7 | N/A |
March 2015 | 997051 | 419 | 125 | 13 | N/A |
April 2015 | 786089 | 506 | 399 | 19 | 12 |
May 2015 | 537433 | 611 | 573 | 26 | 11 |
June 2015 | 377461 | 755 | 970 | 31 | 18 |
July 2015 | 290185 | 896 | 1063 | 38 | 17 |
August 2015 | 242955 | 1054 | 1339 | 40 | 19 |
September 2015 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
October 2015 | 369324 | 1162 | 1261 | 42 | 20 |
November 2015 | 372286 | 1190 | 1258 | 45 | 20 |
December 2015 | 349370 | 1236 | 1238 | 45 | 22 |
January 2016 | 350881 | 1374 | 1533 | 50 | 22 |
February 2016 | 320070 | 1577 | 1674 | 51 | 26 |
Plans and Goals For March
Looking back at the goals I had for February, I see that I really didn’t accomplish any of them. However, I did end up making progress with the blog, which is the most important thing.
I need to be more careful about accomplishing goals each month forward though, since the goals I set are going to help the development and growth of Income Bully.
Here are some plans and goals for March
Launching My Hosting Affiliate Site
This was a goal last month, and I let it slip away and fall to the back burner. This month, I’m going to launch it, and I hope to also get it ranked for one of my target keywords.
I look forward to reporting income from this affiliate site in the next Income Report.
Implement My Content Plan
A lot of work was done behind the scenes last month. In March, you will see some of the stuff being implemented. Most of it was content, preparing, planning and scheduling content.
I intend to make a big content push, not just on this blog but with other properties outside of the blog that will help me bring in additional traffic.
I’ve also started planning new types of posts. It was Joe Stewart who left a comment in a previous income report, recommending me to review products I use, even if I don’t feel confident to recommend them. The point would be to show certain pros and cons, even if I don’t particularly like the product enough to recommend it, I should be telling people why I feel that way, point out the good and the bad.
He mentioned that it would bring in search traffic, which is true, and it would let people make up their own mind about it. If they end up using my link to buy, I still generate a few bucks without sacrificing integrity. Good idea Joe!
Also, I’m going to share a once a month post on “What I’m Reading”. Usually business related books, but I’ll also share other types in different genres.
There’s a few others I have in mind as well. You’ll just have to wait and see!
Work On a New Product
Many of you have bought my Ultimate Blueprint to Start a Web Agency. I launched it as a WSO on Warrior Forum, and while it’s still selling pretty well, I wanted to take feedback from all of you and make an even better product.
I also launched Ice Cold Email Gold which is still selling pretty steadily.
There’s 2 products I want to work on right now:
- A Revamped Agency Blueprint with Video and Interviews
- A Local SEO Blueprint / Course for both business owners and agency owners/freelancers
It’s obvious to me, that a good source of income online comes from products. I’m not the type of person that’s going to pimp out a product a week or a product a month for that matter. I believe 99% of people that have bought one of my previous products, will also buy a future product because they know first hand the level of detail included, and the quality of the content.
Further Test The Waters with Coaching
I don’t know where this will lead.
I’ve never done any coaching programs before, never been in a funnel for someone offering coaching. I know I need to be able to offer insane value in a one on one session, and I think I can do that on a broad scale, but I definitely need to keep testing the waters before doing so.
Not sure if this will be successful or not, I’m hesitant about whether I really want to dedicate more time to this, but as long as it didn’t go over a few sessions a week I think it could be a valuable source of income, and great for building connections.
Final Thoughts
February was good. Great building month.
So far, 2016 has been on track and I look forward to building it up further.
Lots of things I want to accomplish this year. I really want to build up the blog income to be consistently around 5-6K/mo.. ideally, it would be at 10K+/mo, but I need to get to 5K/mo regularly.
I believe (though I may be biased) that this blog provides more value than some of the others out there that bring in much more in revenue. I need to do something about that!
Dope. One of your commissions for hosting came from me.
Good month for you man. I hope you never stop doing these reports. Always good stuff
Ah cool, I appreciate it. No plans to ever stop the reports!
Hey Nathan,
Just thought I would tell you that it’s an awesome move creating a web hosting affiliate website.
Not so long ago, I did the same thing for the UK market and it managed to generate a minimum of $2000/month (on a bad month).
I later sold the blog on flippa for $12,000!
Keep it up man.
All the best,
Aden Clark.
Aden, thanks so much for the comment. Wow @ 2K/mo with your hosting affiliate site, what made you sell it instead of letting the money continue coming in?
Hey Nathan,
The main reason for the sale was due to me liking big cash injections fast haha! With this business model not been my bread and butter (I’m a freelancer by day & affiliate by night), at the time, I decided that having 5 to 6 months income upfront was better for me at the time.
It was just a sideline project to be honest, something I did in my spare time. But yes, it would have been a better idea to keep the website and build it out.
It did however, give me some spare cash to play with and I’m still building out several websites using the same strategy, using the cash I generated from that sale (what’s left of it anyways).
All the best,
Aden Clark.
That’s cool Aden. I was just planning on it generating maybe an extra hundred or two a month. Perhaps I need to set my sights a bit higher! I can’t blame you for the cash injections, I’m the same way, so if this affiliate site reaches those types of numbers I may end up doing the same. lol.