Income Report: January 2015

Welcome to the 2nd income report on IncomeBully.com! January has been really fun and exciting and I feel I’ve already built a lot of relationships for just launching this blog on the 1st. You can see the first income report here.

The purpose of the income report is to be completely transparent, but also allow you to see what has worked so far, what hasn’t, where I’m spending my time, how I do things, and probably most importantly, forces me to be accountable to my goals and plans.

Another unexpected benefit of sharing the income reports, is encouragement. A lot of you are eager to see what happens and are rooting for me to succeed and pass along the information. It means a lot to me.

Cool January Happenings

January has been a very fun month, difficult but fun.

This blog was technically setup on January 1st but I don’t think I even shared a single link with anyone until around the 6th or 7th. I figured, I needed to populate the site with some sort of content or else it would make a bad impression and people would likely not want to come back.

I feel like I put up a bunch of blog posts, but then at the same time I often feel like I’m not blogging enough. I should probably put some sort of schedule together in the future. I think that will help with the diversity of topics, type of content, and keep me on a regular writing schedule.

In January, I put together 14 blog posts with 2 very strong guides/tutorials:

3 Common Local SEO MYTHS Finally EXPOSED

Top 5 Web Design Guidelines in 2015

How To Get Website Design Clients When You Have No Portfolio

Mailbag Issue 1: EMD’s for Local SEO, Opt In Boxes, and MORE

The Smart Marketer’s ULTIMATE Guide to Lead Nurturing

The Announcement Of a Fun Case Study, What Will Happen?

Mid-Month Update: January 2015

Shared Hosting or Reseller Hosting Which is Better For You?

Mobile Renegade Users Please Review: How To Update from 1.80 to 1.85

2015 – The DEATH of SEO… No.. The Death of SELLING SEO.

[Tutorial] How I Ranked a Client’s Site in 20+ cities for 60+ Keywords WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT!

Income Report: December 2014

Income Bully 2015 Goals and Resolutions

Welcome To Income Bully – What You Can Expect

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That’s pretty crazy to look at, and know that at times I have felt like I should have been blogging a bit more. I published a new blog post on average of every 2.2 days. I think after I get through February I can focus more on promoting the content instead of the content creation.

I only had 1 mail bag issue this month, but I hope future months I’ll be able to have more than that. You can actually help with it by asking a question, just go to the mailbag section of the site.  

Sales of my WSO/guide: The Ultimate Blueprint To Start a Web Agency has really gone better than I expected in this month. If you read last months income report, you would see that I thought it would be very difficult to bring in even $1,000 but as you will see later on in this post, I definitely passed that amount.  

One really cool thing that I talked about in my mid month update was being featured in a blog created by a guy in Sweden. He put together a really cool blog list post that included the top 99 blogs with income reports. I haven’t done any type of link building yet and not sure if I want to. I may follow in Matthew Woodward’s foot steps in the zero back link experiment. That’s why I was really excited to get an email from Mikael from Sweden that he included me in his list.  

I’ve been lucky enough to meet a lot of new people lately, and this blog has been a gateway for that, along with my Ultimate Guide to Start a Web Agency. I’ve been able to help a lot of people, give advice, but also build a lot of relationships and I think these relationships are really important and probably the most valuable thing that’s happened this month.  

Oh… I almost forgot. I created a twitter a few days ago, and it’s pretty lonely there. If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, please do and drop a message to me!  

So Let’s Break Down January Problems

This month has really made me realize the huge difference between running your own business for web design/SEO/marketing/etc. and making money online through either affiliate offerings, your own products, ads, or whatever monetizing thing you want to do. It’s an entire new world to me. I guess I should say passive income that doesn’t come from any client activities, is an entirely new world.

One problem I have is the time investment between my main business (other side businesses as well) and making money online. It feels like I’m being pulled in a million directions but I know it’s necessary to invest time in multiple areas. In order to succeed, on the online aspect, and not hinder myself in other businesses, I have to figure out a way to manage my time better and structure my days better.

Another hurdle I have to jump is figuring out the best affiliate products to recommend. In order to monetize THIS blog, I need to be able to push affiliate products that make sense and will help people. The problem is, I find it very difficult to find any that I would use, and I do not want to recommend some piece of crap just for a small commission. There are a few products I stand behind 100% but I really need to invest time and money into research and buying some additional products to see what really works, is practical, and easily implemented so that my visitors here can benefit from it.

I made a stupid mistake too…. So I thought that maybe I’d go on fiverr and see what’s up. I ended up purchasing a cheap $5 gig for someone to share a link to their facebook page with 2 million likes. Well, I guess they ended up doing it, but I think they sent me fake traffic. I literally had like 400 or 500 visitors come from “social media” with 100% bounce rate. It was 100% fake traffic, I guarantee it, so that messed up my analytics this month and that really pisses me off. Statistically speaking, even with an awful website I’m bound to get a few people to click around and not be a 100% bounce.

Oh well, lesson learned again, fiverr for any type of traffic is pretty much useless. I probably could have invested the 5 bucks into a facebook ad and got a few subscribers.

I guess this one isn’t a problem.. but… it really pissed me off. So I’m used to emailing people, I’m used to cold emailing hundreds and thousands of business owners on a daily basis with cold tactics, non opt in, whatever. It’s CAN-SPAM compliant, but still some people view it as unsavory but I’ve been doing it for years with a ton of success.

The reason I’m sharing that, is because I understand when some of those email account holders get pissed off by an inbox full of solicitations. I don’t get upset when they send an email back to me saying to go Eff myself along with pretty much any other insult you can imagine. I have thick skin.

Earlier this month I sent out an email linking people to my tutorial on how I ranked a business in 20+ cities for 60+ keywords. The people I sent to were those that bought my WSO and had confirmed their opt in to my list. Well, I get a message from Aweber letting me know that someone complained and said they never gave permission for me to send to them, that they never signed up for the list.

I was really surprised by that, considering the fact that I was linking to a super useful resource that is 100% free. I wanted to reach through the screen and slap them around a little bit(softly), because not only did they subscribe, they confirmed their subscription and I have the IP address and the exact time of day when they confirmed. If you want to unsubscribe, cool, I get that, but to say you never subscribed in the first place and I’m just spamming you, well… that’s stupid considering you had to confirm your opt in, and I have your IP address along with the time and date.

Oh well.. I guess that type of thing is going to happen.

/rant

Let’s get to what you have all been waiting for…

January 2015 Revenue Breakdown

Last month my total revenue with online stuff was $3,528.10, 130 sales of my E-Book and $18.10 in affiliate income. I also had 69 subscribers on my list.

This month:

Do you want to be alerted for next month’s income report and other blog posts?

Start a Web Agency WSO – $4,016 (+$506)
149 sold

Affiliate Income – $46.48 (+28.38)

Total Revenue = $4,062.48 (+534.38)

Total Subscribers = 212 (+143)

Alexa Rank = 2,918,591

Twitter Followers = 72

Facebook Fans = N/A (Maybe I’ll make a page this month?)

As you can see, I had increases in my eBook, along with affiliate income. This is really cool because I expected a huge drop off in sales. WSO’s and info products in general seem to have a short life span. I don’t anticipate this to be normal or something that can be sustained. Once again, I will have to expect a sharp drop next month in sales and need to figure out a way to replace it. Perhaps I can be pleasantly surprised yet again, but I can’t “get comfortable”.

Other Metrics:

1,488 Unique Visitors

64.78% Bounce Rate

2.39 Pages Per Session

02:56 Average Session Duration

Now, remember when I talked about my stupid decision about buying the status update on Fiverr that sent me a ton of fake traffic? If I segment that out of these stats, my new stats look like this.

51.07% Bounce Rate

2.93 Pages Per Session

4:04 Average Session Duration

As you can see, my legitimate stats aren’t nearly as bad as what it seems with the fake traffic included in the report. I believe the month of February will display similar stats as the second group without the fake fiverr BS. I believe as I add new content, my average page per session will increase and I hope to decrease my bounce rate to below 50% this upcoming month.

What’s Next for Income Bully In February?

Well one exciting thing is a quest I’m teaming up on with a new friend, Luis. As mentioned in an earlier blog post this month, we will be starting 3 businesses in 3 months, with a budget of $100 each month. It’s February 1st and we need to go from concept to profit by the end of the month.

This should be challenging and perhaps not very realistic, but with so many ideas about making money online it’s very easy to just sit on a ton of ideas and execute none of them. I’d prefer to just “take action” as they say, and just get going with it and see what happens.

I also plan to do outreach for the blog and hopefully generate some additional traffic. I’ve thought about guest posting, but I’m not 100% sure on the type of outreach I will be doing.

Another exciting event for February is my first Webinar, it’s going to be at 6:30 CST on February 3rd and you can sign up here. If you’re reading this after the 3rd, maybe I will have a replay link for you to check it out. It’s on the topic of local SEO and ranking for a TON of keywords with no backlinks. There’s 2 other guys in the webinar and they created an awesome plugin for some SEO automation that you will want to check out as well.

I hope to continue building my list, I’d like to add an additional 100-200 subscribers each month. The goal for the year is 1,000 subscribers and I think I can probably meet that goal, we shall see! One method I’m using to generate subscribers for this blog besides the basic inline content forms from aweber, is creating different lead magnets at the bottom of posts on this blog. You’ve probably seen them already! I ended up buying a plugin called magic action box pro, which I am now an affiliate for as well, and it’s really made the form creation and aweber integration stupid simple. It looks good, it’s quick and easy, and I feel confident recommending it to all of you that use WordPress. There’s a free version too but it’s definitely limited but you can at least try before you buy.

One last focus of effort in February will be expanding my Twitter following. I just created a twitter for the blog a few days ago, and it’s already grown pretty well. 72 followers, and I haven’t told a single person about it yet. I hope to have about 300 followers by the end of February.

Here is a summary of goals I have for February:

• Create a blogging schedule
• Figure out a better system for time management
• Research and buy products in hope of finding some quality affiliate products to promote
• Engage in blogger outreach
• Launch business #1 in the 3 businesses in 3 months challenge
• Double my affiliate income
• Start exploring other passive sources of income to replace WSO sales
• Grow my twitter following to 300
• Get Alexa Rank to 1.9 Million

I think that’s it for this month… thank you for visiting and making it through this post! Keep coming back to check on the progress. I’d love to hear from you all, just give me a comment below!