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Quarterly Report? IncomeBully Update & Future Plans

So, since it’s been awhile since I said I wouldn’t be doing income reports anymore, I thought it would be a good time to do a quick update to let you all know what my plans are, what I’ve been working on, and all of that good stuff.

At first, I thought maybe I’d replace the income reports with quarterly reports. I haven’t done that, in fact, I haven’t done much of anything with content on the blog for a while.

I like the idea of quarterly reports, and in the future I’ll stick with it and share income derived from the blog itself, but think of this as just a little update.

Also, I’ve missed some of the interaction with you guys, and even though monthly income reports weren’t generating income or profitable traffic from the posts themselves, it did create engagement and a consistent post type. It’s making me think twice about whether I should do quarterly reports or monthly. Let me know what you think!

What I’ve Been Working On

There’s quite a bit I’ve been working on, unfortunately, just not much in regards to content for the blog. There are a few things that will relate to content but it’s been a long turnaround time and hopefully that ends.

Case Studies for the Blog

I’m a bit of a freak when it comes to testing things out for SEO / Local SEO. I managed to use my email marketing knowledge and list to cold prospect for case study clients.

I have quite a few case studies that are complete, or nearly complete. Doing these, made me realize what I miss about working with clients, but at the same time, what I loathe.

Anyway, here are a few case studies I have lined up and will publish in the upcoming month.

  • Page load speeds – Does it impact local search?
  • Does NAP Consistency matter? Does Duplicate listings with incorrect NAP info make a difference?
  • WordPress Page Builders (which ones negatively impact search results?)
  • Cold Emailing platforms – What gets the best deliverability?

There’s a few others as well, but I may not end up using them because I’m not certain the data received is statistically significant, controlled, and accurate.

Launched A Coaching Program

A couple months back I launched the Elite Agency Domination Coaching program.

It’s a 6 month to 1 year program where I have coaching calls with each person once a month.

I also have been doing regular coaching calls, where people are struggling with certain issues from Local SEO, to email marketing or other related “How do I” type questions.

The coaching program is something I never really imagined doing. So far, so good though. I’ve gotten to know some really interesting people much better, and seeing what they’ve already achieved.

Quite a few have been having record months, obviously a good thing, but I still have a couple people that have been struggling.

It’s been more time consuming than I expected, but overall I enjoy it and plan to build a funnel to grow this a bit more. Also, it’s a great way to monetize the blog, which is something I’ve struggled with in the past.

Reinvigorating E-Book Sales

Some of you that have read income reports in the past, know that I had ebook sales cut down drastically. That trend has continued.

I attribute those downward spiral of sales to the decline of the Warrior Forum, which I stupidly had a hosted sales page for the Ultimate Agency Blueprint.

I can’t blame only the Warrior Forum and its’ decline as the problem. I also used to post on WF a lot, where I gave advice to people in posts, commenting on ideas, and received a lot of traffic from links in the signature that both came to this blog and to the WF sales page.

Once WF implemented the new reddit style design and took out signature links for those using that design, traffic and sales took even more of a dive. At that point, it didn’t even make much sense to post there anymore.

The Solution:

I need to figure out a way to bring those sales back, as that has always been a core monetization strategy for this blog.

The First Step – I wanted to research different WP plugins for landing pages. I could have just gone with leadpages but decided I want to fully control the page without having to pay an overpriced (imo) fee on a monthly basis.

I came to the conclusion that Thrive Landing Pages is the ideal solution.

2nd  Step – This is where I am right now. I just need to put together the landing pages for the Ultimate Agency Blueprint, and Ice Cold Email Gold.

It’s kind of a “DUH” moment for me. Obviously I knew I needed to have self hosted landing pages, but sometimes when you’re pretty close to a project, or juggling a lot of things at once, it’s easy to overlook even the most basic things. This is also something I’ve noticed people dealing with in our coaching calls, lots of basics being overlooked, and I’m guilty of it as well.

I’m curious to test the difference in conversions between the Warrior Forum WSO page and a self hosted page on the blog.

3rd Step – FB ads campaign / Funnel

Basically, what I’m going to implement is a standard funnel.

FB ads –> Landing page for lead magnet –> Email series, end goal is to convert subscribers to Agency Blueprint customers –> upsell Ice Cold Email Gold –> Upsell coaching.

Pretty basic, and sounds good in theory. However, theory is different than reality and something that could force me to change my plan.

Possible Game Acquisition

I’ve been looking into other ways to generate passive income.

One of the things I have been considering is acquiring a game. It’s a browser based game with a very dedicated community. Right now they have a few volunteer developers, so very low overhead.

They also have a dying player base because of literally no marketing strategy or money invested into acquiring new players.

Their monetization consists of donations, and ad revenue. It’s enough to cover server costs, but only provides a very small amount of profit on a monthly basis.

I’d like to acquire the game for $10,000 or under, which is probably waaay too much considering existing revenue.

However, I estimate that with relatively easy changes and implementing my own marketing strategy, I could turn a $2,500/mo profit on this game while only dedicating an hour or two each month.

There’s also a few other things that I have going on, offline and a few others that just aren’t worth discussing at this moment.

Plans for the Future of Income Bully

I’m at the point where I need to either put in a lot more time into the blog, or I need to just forget about it and shut it down. Some blogs can be run passively, this isn’t one of them, and won’t be one for quite some time.

So after a bit of thinking, I decided I’m not going to scrap it, and I need to come up with a solution to the problems I’ve had on this blog.

There’s people that are doing incredibly well running a blog. Some doing 6 figures on a monthly basis. So I decided to seek the help of one of those people, and convinced them to “coach” me, and hold me accountable, in exchange for paying them on a monthly basis.

Yes, I literally said, “take my money, just teach me 1 on 1.”

So here’s a few things I feel I should address.

Content Production

Regularly scheduled content creation and publishing has been a pain in the ass for me. I started off strong, but then ideas kind of fell apart, and my pickiness on the quality of content hindered the growth of the blog.

The person I’m working with, let’s just call him Mr. Blog Coach, estimated that if I kept up with publishing without all these long breaks in between, and the inconsistency, I’d be at around $15,000/mo from the blog itself, not including additional affiliate products, my own products, etc.

Blog content ideas come and go. One thing I’ve started to do, is creating a massive list of topics I could write about, and add to it as the ideas come to me. Since doing this last week, I already have a spreadsheet of 65 blog post topics.

The next step is to create a content calendar, and schedule posts or deadlines for posts on a monthly basis. I have 5 posts planned per month right now, but if I can do more then great, but there will be a minimum of 5 posts.

Another suggestion was made to break each post into 5 parts structurally. Not a 5 part series, but spending time on a daily basis to complete 1 part out of the 5. Consistent action gets results. I know this from agency experience, but for some reason wasn’t translating it to the blogging world.

Hopefully these adjustments will help in content production.

Sell More “Stuff”.

Another issue I’ve had is finding the “right” products to promote, and simply not monetizing very well.

A long time ago a reader suggested to write review posts on basically everything I’ve tried, whether I like it or not because I would benefit from ranking for longer tailed keywords, and the reader could decide if they want to buy or not either because of my post, or despite it. Either way it would produce additional income.

Mr. Blog Coach suggests the same.

A lot of blogs tend to make a majority of their money from hosting affiliate offers. You see guys like Pat Flynn and others offering Bluehost and getting a big commission out of it. Unfortunately, my niche really isn’t the whole make money blogging thing.

Ryan from NameHero, used to run IMgrind and told me a good idea may be to try implementing multiple funnels, with a hosting offer towards the beginning. While I promote NameHero (poorly) that may be a decent idea. My hesitation to put out much blogging content is because I don’t consider myself an expert in this area. The only side of it that I feel knowledgeable enough to teach, is blogging / content marketing for lead generation.

However, looking at it objectively, there’s a ton of people out there that would love to make an extra couple thousand dollars on a monthly basis from a blog. So even though I don’t consider myself to be a successful blogger according to my standards, I do believe there’s money to be made from people that think otherwise.

Mr. Blog Coach made another good point. I’m too hesitant to sell to my subscribers. I’m well enough off that I don’t need any money from the blog, and the goal was to truly help people. However, I’ve realize how foolish that sounds because even if that’s the case, I’m simply not motivated by things that aren’t producing good income.

I’ll need to test things out in the future, to find the perfect balance between producing revenue from this blog, without turning people off.

Boost Subscriber Numbers

While I was researching landing page options for wordpress and deciding on Thrive landing pages, I discovered “Thrive Leads”.

I plan to build up subscribers through fb ads and the funnel I’m creating, but overall I’m not very happy with the conversion rate from visitor to subscriber. I get a decent chunk of search traffic, so being able to turn a higher number into subscribers is pretty important.

This is where Thrive Leads should help.

I’ll have different ways to capture subscribers, through pop up light boxes, sticky ribbons, corner slide in, scroll mat, etc. It appears to be a better option than Opt-in monster from what I can tell.

I’ve read some case studies from people using Thrive Leads as well. One guy boosted subscribers by 372%. Another person 37%, considerably smaller but an increase is an increase.

Entrepreneur on fire, boosted conversions by 268%.

I really like the split testing features and reporting along with the options available to capture opt ins. Pretty excited to implement this and test it out.

Currently, I’m around 1,500 unique subscribers. I’d like to double that in the next year, preferably the next 6 months!

Another thing I think I’ll be doing, which won’t exactly boost subscriber numbers but instead increase overall reach is starting an IncomeBully facebook group. Personally, I hate facebook. I hate logging on. The last time I actually liked going on facebook was probably in 2012 or so. BUT… other people have created groups and it seems to be working for them so why allow them to have full access to an audience without contesting it?

My good buddy Andrea keeps harassing me about it, so at the very least, it’ll get him to shut up.

Final Thoughts

Wow, it really has been a while since doing one of these, much longer post than I expected, and this is without going through and reporting income and traffic stats as well. I also didn’t include a lot of the plans I have, for the sake of brevity.

Maybe I should do this more often. It’s one thing to have plans written down on paper just for yourself, or plans lying around in your head but outlining them for everyone to see is much more motivating.

Anyway, I’m glad to be able to share this with you guys, especially those of you that may have been wondering what’s going on with me and the blog. Hope this answers some questions.

I’m excited to be back!

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