Greetings from Bali, Indonesia. This long trip is almost finished, and we’re back where it started: in the beautiful town of Ubud.
This is the 3rd month in a raw that I publish the income report very late. Actually I’m loosing interest in writing the reports. It’s quite of a time investment and at this stage I don’t feel I need to proof anymore that it’s possible to make money online.
I’ve been living the digital nomad lifestyle for almost four years now, visiting lots of countries while keeping up my online businesses, and I found other channels to connect with entrepreneurs (online communities, masterminds) that proved to be much more effective than writing these reports.
On another note, I enjoy much more writing about my travels and I would rather invest my limited free time to do that.
I may change format and keep them short – just for accountancy. Any suggestion is welcome!
What’s Going On
Where I’ve been
First, a travel update: on the 2nd of March I left Bali for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. From there up north to the food capital of the country, Ipoh, then Taiping with the beautiful lake gardens, Georgetown in Penang island ‘the Pearl of the Orient’, and then the island of Langkawi where I was happy to meet again my long-time traveler and friend Greg.
Recommended Tool: SUMOME
After last month Gert-Jan’s comment, I took actions to increase the newsletter subscribers of RouterFreak.
Gert-Jan suggested I should be focus more on growing the email list, since that’s a strong sought-after marketing channel.
So I checked a few tools, namely ThriveLeads and Sumome, to see what I could do.
I eventually implemented the free version of Sumome, that provides a set of interesting marketing and social media tools.
The List Builder tool creates a simple opt-in popup, but it’s triggered in a ‘smart’ way that is not just time-based. Most of the popups appear too soon when visiting a website, and are quickly dismissed because the visitor is still trying to figure out if that website is interesting for them.
List Builder, instead, detects when a visitor is about to leave and only then triggers the popup.
The results are pretty good, this graph shows the increment in March and April (I activate Sumome mid-March and took this data mid-April):
Another useful Sumome tool is Share. It controls the placement of the social share buttons on the site, both desktop and mobile, and provides useful statistics about shares in different social media.
The Numbers
Income Breakdown
Let’s get down with the numbers!
- Advertising
- Adsense: €261.58 (was €283.2)
- Feedblitz: €2.05 (was €11.93) – the ‘trick’ I use to monetize newsletters is almost over!
- Direct Ads: €323 (was €4770.07) – directly negotiated advertising campaigns
- Sponsored posts: €263.31 (was 0)
- BuySellAds: 0 (was €13.57)
- Job Board Services
- Job posting: €69.34 (was €34.65) – Premium job posting on AidBoard
- Affiliate Programs
- Lead generation: 0
- Product affiliation: €66.11 (was €45.73) – Clickbank, SEMrush, DPD and others affiliate programs
- Amazon program: €108.85 (was €195.39)
- Sales:
- ComoHacer ebook: €23.7 (was €7.99) – slowly but steady, this eBook is contributing as passive income
- RouterFreak eBooks: €308.95 (was €335.76) – pretty good launch of the new eBook 🙂
- WP Tube theme: €102.69 (was €207.86) – my WordPress theme, running on auto-pilot
- Website sale: 0 – Nothing to sell at the moment!
- WP-OK services: €1383.53 (was €1284.4) – my bespoken WordPress management & support service
Total Gross: € 2,913.11 (previous month 7,190.55)
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 services that I use myself to operate my websites.
- Hosting & Domains & Websites
- Site5: €126.59
- This is the hosting I’m using and happy with. I recently switched to a VPS4 solution. They have servers in Amsterdam too, perfect for my websites with European audience.
- 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!
- Domain renewal: €13.13 (was €11.76) – expenses related to domains registered at Godaddy
- Website acquisition: 0 (was 0)
- Site5: €126.59
- Mailing List services
- Outsourcing
- Articles: 0 (was €35.54)
- Contractors: 0 (was €90)
- Partnerships: 0 (was €2684.62) – revenue sharing
- Memberships
- The Dynamite Circle: 0 (was 0) – great community of online entrepreneurs, quarterly paid
- SEMrush: €29.5 – PRO membership of this excellent tool to analyze search engine results and competition
- Ahrefs: €18.68 – This is a great tool for backlink analysis
- Boomerang for Gmail: €13.47 – Excellent tool for email management
- HelpScout: €13.17 – helpdesk software used for customer support
- Advertising
- Adwords: €47.37 (was €60.41)
- Facebook Ads: 0
- Paypal Payment Fees
- Paypal Fees: €100.14 (was €257.74) – the price to pay for receiving Paypal payments!
- Software Licenses
- Software: €350.19 (was 0) – 1-year license for a WordPress management software
Total Expenses: € 837.43 (was € 3,160.22)
Net Total March 2016: € 2,075.68 (last month 4,030.33)
Conclusions
After the exploit of February (over 4K net profit) I’m back to the more familiar 2K range.
I looked back to March 2015, that netted 1,581.92€.
That’s a 30% net profit increase!
As usual, I hope to read a comment or two here below.