Greetings from Uruguay, country number #51 (but I don’t count the country visited, right?) where I moved after spending one month in Buenos Aires.
While I didn’t fell in love with Buenos Aires, I had a very good time there and I got chance to present in a Digital Nomad events – cool!
Talking about business, February was a slow month and few things went wrong, let’s see!
What’s going on
Hosting problems
I’ve been using HostGator since a few years now, and I already noticed how their support went down the toilet in the past 18 months. In February I had a pretty harsh confirmation of that.
HostGator closed one of my account, hosting two money-making websites, because of high resource consumption.
This was the message:
Your account has been abusing CPU resources for an extended period of time and has been disabled in order to ensure continued performance stability of the account and server.
The email also said:
If you reply back to this email with your IP address (https://www.hostgator.com/ip.shtml) we will be more than happy to go ahead and enable HTTP access for you, allowing you to safely work on the script while minimizing the negative effects on the server and its other users.
OK shit happens so I quickly took action, reviewed the account and replied as asked.
What they didn’t say in the email is that they needed three days to reply to the support request! And they did so only after I complained on Twitter (it always works to tweet a complain to big companies, as they have dedicate people to the social media accounts that are very reactive and can escalate internally).
@danielebesana ^Jb We apologize for any delays. May we have the related ticket ID? We may be able to expedite a review.
— HostGator Support (@HGSupport) February 11, 2015
On the second day without reply, I already moved the biggest website to another hosting account (Site5) but because of the DNS propagation time I kept loosing traffic.
What are the lessons here?
- I’ve to review my hosting situation and consider investing in a VPS
- I need a better ‘disaster recovery’ procedure
Sold a website
One year ago I bought a Spanish website marketplace with a partner. The partnership didn’t work out and I ended up having a little monster to take care of.
Luckily a Spanish company with with a bigger plan came along and we got into negotiation. I ended up selling the website for 4x the whole 2014 net profit!
That’s not a standard multiplier, but as I said the buyers had a business plan and were very interested in acquiring the existing traffic and large user base.
I spare you the math of buying my partner quote, share earnings and the selling price but at the end with this sale I realized a 900€ profit.
If I consider all the time I invested in this website, the hourly profit I got isn’t anything to be proud of, but wasn’t a loss either!
Investing in new content
As I said last month I believe that good quality content pays off.
And my Spanish website ComoHacer.info did great so far because it’s built on great content, old style and on weird subjects you may say, but people love it looking at the comments!
So I took an opportunity to work with the previous owner and get 300 new articles ready for publishing. It’s quite of an investment but will be split in few weeks.
The website made an average of €400 via Adsense in the last 12 months with almost 500 articles published.
The bet here is to see if adding 300 more articles will increase the Adsense earnings accordingly!
WP Tube new sale page
In February I spent some time (around 8 hours) to change the sale page of my WordPress theme. The previous version was actually a blog-style page and had many limitations.
I built the new page using OptimizePress, a WordPress theme and plugin that helps building landing pages and sales funnels.
It’s a great product and it has all the elements needed to quickly build a professional looking sale page! What most impressed me, is that it’s really, really intuitive. I used many themes that have visual editors but none of them has been so intuitive like OptimizePress.
Thanks to that, towards end of February I launched the new page and I’ll check how it performs in the next month.
My original goal was to increase the conversion rate from 0.28% to 1% but so far the increase wasn’t that noticeable.
In February I sold a total of $594. with 1 refund.
Income Breakdown
Let’s get down to the numbers!
- Advertising
- Adsense: €515.71 (was €696.89)
- Feedblitz: €75.14 (was €85.73)
- Direct Ads: €32.63 (last month €32.63)
- BuySellAds: €16.91 (was €19.77)
- Job Board Services
- Premium Job posting: €24.4 (was €197.27) – a pretty bad month for my job boards
- Resume Access: €35.31 (was €17.25)
- Affiliate Programs
- Lead generation: 0
- Product affiliation: €27.96 (was €234.98) – just a shitty month, traffic was there but very low conversions
- Hosting affiliation: 0 (was €44)
- Amazon program: €224.45 (was €191.01) – a bit of bounce back!
- Sales:
- ComoHacer ebook: €24.15 (was €29,09)
- WP Tube theme: €560.06 (was €558.29) – good!
- Website sale: €900
Total Gross: € 2.436,72 (last month 2,106.91)
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!
- Site5: €19
- Mailing List services
- FlipFilter: €10 – very useful service for website buyers, crunching big data from multiple marketplaces for you
- Outsourcing
- Translation: 0 (was €169.32)
- Articles: €678.77 (was €40) – this is for the new bounce of articles for ComoHacer
- Memberships
- The Dynamite Circle: 0 – great community of online entrepreneurs, already paid three months subscription
- SEMrush: €59 – PRO membership of this excellent tool to analyze search engine results and competition
- Software
- OptimizePress: €91
- Website acquisition:0
Total Expenses: € 977,67 (was 377.61)
Net Total February 2015: € 1.459,05 (last month 1,729.3)
Conclusion
I’m not really happy with my websites February’s performance, but I’m very happy with the lifestyle they allow me to have.
My job boards revenues are down and I don’t see how to turn that up – I’ve left them go passively for quite some months now.
In the last moths I also increased the expenses, mainly because I’m investing in content.
Hopefully I’ll see the returns in coming months 🙂
That’s all, folks!
I am really impressed with the amount of income you are able to make while on the road. I just completed my NL and US tax reports (what a pain in the ass) and was wondering if your taxes are really complex with your sources of income?
Hi Keith!
Thanks man, and this doesn’t include the WordPress freelance part that is another source of income.
It’s very nice to see money coming in while being on the road!! I’m sure you can generate an income with your IT experience too.
About taxes, you’ve the extra burden of declaring the US tax report… for me, being an Italian citizen I just need to fill in the tax declaration of the country where I reside (Netherlands).
My taxes are not complex at all, and this is thanks to a reasonable accountant and a reasonable tax system.
Basically this is that happen:
– all my invoices (freelance work) are declared every quarter for the VAT declaration and add up to my income
– Adsense earnings are also invoiced by Google
– Paypal is a pain because of many small transactions. We decided to declare the money I withdraw to my bank account for VAT and income. This is a practical solution.
Hope it helps!
Keep it up D!
Thanks! Writing the March report now 🙂