Online Income Report – April 2015

WPtube April
If you're curious to know why on Earth I'm sharing my online income reports, read here. This report is about the money I make from my websites. It doesn't take in consideration other sources of income, such as my WordPress consultancies.

I’m a bit late with the report, mainly because I’m having a busy and exciting time. I’m doing new things and meeting new people – the reason why is explained later in this post.

I’m back in Amsterdam since over a month now and trying to make the best of my time here.

 

What’s going on

Mobilegeddon no problem?

On April 21st Google released a largely anticipated algorithm update affecting searches from mobile devices. The risk for webmasters was to have their website removed from the mobile search results (currently around 40% of the traffic comes from mobile) if their pages were not mobile-friendly.

The truth is that so far nobody observed big changes in traffic, but lots of website were made mobile-friendly in a hurry and the resulting pages are often worse than before.

I launched a mobile version of ComoHacer using the WordPress plugin WPtouch. The plugin provides a theme specific for mobile devices, with no need to change the desktop theme. With few customization I added the ads to keep monetizing the mobile traffic… but!

In the midst of the changes I mistakenly removed the most profitable Adsense ad from the website!

So I thought that I was affected by Mobilegeddon, but numbers didn’t match up. The traffic was there, but earnings dropped. By the time I realized what happened I’d lost at least €80 of passive income.

All this because I didn’t spent enough time checking the issue. This is a big downside with working on many websites!

 

Update on ComeCostruire.info

Mid-December I soft-launched the new website: ComeCostruire.info, the Italian version of ComoHacer, my Spanish blog about manual works and DIY.

April traffic was up to 2,285 visitors (+17.91%) with 3,927 page views (+13.43%) with absolutely 0 effort. No link building, no marketing, no social media.

comecostruire_ga

 

I’m also pleased to see the growth in the new Google Webmaster Tools interface:

comecostruire gwt

With such a great traffic you would expect me to break the bank, but hold your horses because Adsense generated just €7.87 (was €6.19 in March).

 

I initially invested in this project €360, so it’s gonna take a long while to recover but the traffic is still growing so I may reach €8 next month 😉

 

WP Tube update

In April I released a new minor version of my WordPress theme – version 5.2.2 – with some fixes and little improvements.
I also discovered that there were more than 200 monthly downloads of the free version linked directly to the .zip file and totally invisible from Google Analytics. I changed that, forcing users to go through the ‘order’ process that allows me to get their emails for future marketing.

I thought that this was my best idea ever, but actually after the change I had 10 days with no sale of the Premium version. WTF?

WPtube April

My conclusions:

Requiring more steps caused less people downloading the free version.
Without trying the free version, people don’t buy the Premium version.

I verified this tracking how many sales are coming from the promotional message in the free theme. The traffic converts a good 6.45%!

Here my lessons learned:

  1. Improve the free version to have more people buying the Premium
  2. The more easily they can try the free version, the more Premium will sell

In conclusion, in April I sold 14 copies for a total of $546. with 1 refund.

 

 

Income Breakdown

Let’s get down to the numbers!

  • Advertising
    • Adsense: €527.46 (was €660.26) – dropped because of my ads error!
    • Feedblitz: €146.56 (was €88.45) – ads places in automatic newsletters = passive profit
    • Direct Ads: €165.63 (last month €32.63) – got an advertising campaign on AidBoard
    • BuySellAds:€22.99 (was €39.23)
  • Job Board Services
    • Job posting & Resume: €38.18 (was €36.77) – another bad month for my job boards
  • Affiliate Programs
    • Lead generation: 0
    • Product affiliation: €97.13 (was €139.3)
    • Amazon program: €208.36 (was €416.19) – down this month, it sucks!
  • Sales:
    • ComoHacer ebook: €8 (was €16.55) – one copy sold
    • WP Tube theme: €486.53 (was €582.74) – less than usual but I know why!
    • Website sale: 0
  • Online Consulting
    • oDesk: 0 (was €910)

Total Gross: € 1,700,84 (last month € 2,931.32)

 

Expenses Breakdown

Note: some links to products and services may have affiliation. This means that if you’ll buy I’ll get a commission. Never the less, I’m only mentioning here services that I use myself to operate my websites.

  • Hosting
    • Site5: €19
      • This is the hosting I’m using since a few months and totally happy with. They have servers in Amsterdam too, so I use it for my European websites.
    • HostGator: €18
      • This is a popular cheap hosting provider with servers in US. I still use it for some websites with majority of traffic from Americas, but their support is getting worse and worse!
  • Mailing List services
    • Aweber: €65
    • Mailchimp: €47 – Monthly charge for list size 2,801 to 5,000
  • FlipFilter: €10 – very useful service for website buyers, crunching big data from multiple marketplaces for you
  • Outsourcing
    • Articles: €80.20 (was €1131.4) – no investment for ComoHacer, but regular articles from writers
  • Memberships
    • The Dynamite Circle: €130 – great community of online entrepreneurs, paid three months subscription
    • SEMrush: €59 – PRO membership of this excellent tool to analyze search engine results and competition
  • Software: 0 (was €91)
  • Website acquisition:0
  • Domain renewal: €79 – new entry, from now I’ll also report expenses related to domains registered at Godaddy

Total Expenses: € 507,2 (last month € 1.349.4)

 

Net Total April 2015: € 1,193,64 (last month € 1,581.92)

 

Conclusion

The drop in earnings from Adsense (my mistake), WPtube (a change that gave negative results) and Amazon (quite disappointing) resulted in the worst month in a long time.

It became obvious that running the websites like I’m doing now can provide for a nice lifestyle on the road, living the digital nomad life combining working with traveling, but isn’t really a growing business.

And considering that in May I’m celebrating three years as a self-employed, I feel it’s time to dedicate more time trying to answer the quintessential existential question: what do I want to do with my life?

 

 

I need good vibe, do leave a comment 😉 Thanks!

5/5 - (1 vote)

Di Daniele

Hi, I’m Daniele! A human being from planet earth. I founded WP-OK.it and I like dancing Salsa, running, and living a location independent lifestyle.

5 commenti

  1. Hi Daniele,

    SO glad to see your earning in online. That’s not a problem your earning from adsense was less due to an mistake. It happen with anyone. I hope and wish your adsense will be more than 1.2k from this month.

    Kind Regards
    Yasin Rishad

    1. Thanks Yasin!
      Adsense up to 1.2K, that would be great but it takes more than fixing that mistake.
      Anyway I’m publishing new content on my top Adsense website so in few months I hope to see the benefits.

      Cheers

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