{"id":3310,"date":"2015-04-10T15:14:01","date_gmt":"2015-04-10T14:14:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danielebesana.com\/blog\/?p=3310"},"modified":"2015-06-08T15:37:40","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T14:37:40","slug":"online-income-report-march-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danielebesana.com\/blog\/online-income-report\/online-income-report-march-2015","title":{"rendered":"Online Income Report – March 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I’m writing this report I’m drinking\u00a0mate<\/em>, a traditional biter tea I bought back from Argentina, sitting on my living room in Amsterdam. It feels good to be back after two months! But for how long?<\/p>\n

After\u00a0the month of February in Buenos Aires<\/a>, in March I spent\u00a010 days in Uruguay<\/a>\u00a0and then traveled a tiny bit of the big Argentinean territory. The long bus rides together with the desire to\u00a0explore\u00a0new places affected\u00a0my focus on work and when this happens I reduce my working hours to a minimum – that means\u00a0working the urgent issues and not much on long-term strategy.<\/p>\n

Anyway good stuff happened on March and I hope you’ll find the report\u00a0beneficial for you! (I certainly do)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What’s going on<\/h2>\n

oDesk consulting gig<\/h3>\n

If you’re\u00a0after a location independent job, selling your skills on platform like oDesk.com, Freelancer.com or Elance.com is a very good idea.
\nThose platforms are online marketplaces that connects contractors with remote jobs.<\/p>\n

The problem with them is that you need to be specialized<\/strong> in something that is differentiate you from the hordes to avoid the brutal competition of contractors from cheap countries.<\/p>\n

To give an idea, WordPress developers starts from $3\/hour and last year I had a VA from Philippines doing a very simple data-entry job for $1\/hour.\u00a0In order to avoid competing on this price-range, you need to be specialized in something: translation of a specific language, writing on a specific subject or working with a specific technology.<\/p>\n

Long time ago I created an oDesk<\/a> profile as ‘Juniper Networks SRX Specialist’, built around my previous career in network security.<\/p>\n

There are very few jobs available on oDesk for this topic so it’s not something to make a living out of, but they’re generally up my alley as they are remote and quick to do<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In March I got contacted by a previous customer to configure a small firewall and it was\u00a0a nice gig. I could charge expert money<\/strong> for two days of work: \u20ac910<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Investing in new content<\/h3>\n

In February I ordered 300 new articles<\/strong> for my DIY Spanish blog, and they’re being slowly delivered. This counts as expenses for the month, but it’s an investment for the future and I’m happy with the work delivered.<\/p>\n

It will take a couple of months to have the new articles ranked in Google and see some return of investment<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Update on ComeCostruire.info<\/h3>\n

Mid-December I soft-launched the new website: ComeCostruire.info,<\/a>\u00a0the Italian version of ComoHacer, my Spanish blog about manual works and\u00a0DIY.<\/p>\n

March\u00a0traffic was up to 1,968\u00a0visitors with 3,535\u00a0page views!\u00a0\"ga_comecostruire\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Interesting to see that as the traffic goes up, average visit duration goes down<\/strong> and bounce rate goes up<\/strong>. It seems that with more traffic the quality of the visitors went down. I can imagine that who reached the website when it was ranking lower (or in page 2) already had visited other pages in the search results and was more keen on checking the articles.<\/p>\n

Adsense generated\u00a0\u20ac6.19<\/strong>\u00a0from this website with 0 work done.<\/p>\n

With an initial investment of\u00a0\u20ac360, I’m going to break even in 58 months!<\/strong> But hold your horses, the traffic didn’t plateau<\/em> yet so earnings should go up \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

WP Tube new sale\u00a0page<\/h3>\n

In February I changed\u00a0the sale page of my WordPress theme. The previous version\u00a0was old and looked like a blog, while the new page, built with the excellent\u00a0OptimizePress<\/a>\u00a0theme,\u00a0is made with conversion in mind:<\/p>\n

\"WPtube<\/a>
\nMy original goal was to increase conversion rate<\/strong> from\u00a00.28% to 1% but\u00a0that just didn’t happen.<\/p>\n

The number of overall downloads (free + paid version) went down<\/strong> from ~58 to ~40 per week (yes, it’s that noticeable!) but this didn’t affect the earnings.<\/p>\n

In March\u00a0it sold 16 copies for\u00a0a total of\u00a0$618.15<\/strong>.\u00a0with 0\u00a0refund.<\/p>\n

This month I plan to release a minor update with bugfixes and explore some new features.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Income Breakdown<\/h2>\n

Let’s get down to the numbers!<\/p>\n