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Income Report – July 2015

I am finally getting around to writing July’s income report and I know what you are thinking:

“Josh, it’s almost September already?”

Yes, I know.

But better late than never! 🙂

These last couple of weeks have been the busiest I have ever been with my online businesses. I have multiple projects going simultaneously and each day I feel l have more and more to do. That is part of the reason why writing this income report has been delayed so long. 

Anyways, I apologize for the delayed income report but let’s get right own to it and see what happened in July!

I Flipped my First Website

As you will see, this was not that impressive nor did it make me rich.

Matter in fact I barely even made a profit from the site but that is okay.

Why?

Because it was a learning experience and I learned some valuable lessons that I can use moving forward. The website I am talking about that I flipped was a website that I bought on Flippa for $400 in January.

You can read more about this site here where I did a write up on it shortly after I bought the site.

I owned the site for around 7 months and you can see some of the traffic and earnings from those 7 motnhs below:

Website’s Traffic History – 7 Months

You see from the screenshot of Google Analytics above that the site’s traffic steadily declined each week that I owned the site. This is partly because I didn’t add any new content, new backlinks or try to improve the organic search traffic to the site.

Traffic also declined due to the type of content that was on the site.

The majority of the pages that received traffic were review type articles that were around 300-500 words only. These articles targeted products that went out of style quickly and the amount of people looking for these specific products declined as time passed.

For example, if you wrote review articles for specific phone models and then when the new model came out the old one become less popular.

The same thing happened on this site and I didn’t put in any effort to stay up to date with the new products. Partly because I didn’t see much potential in the site and didn’t want to waste time/money getting new content written. Also because I was busy working on other projects during this time.

The bottom line here is that the site was neglected and the traffic showed this.

Website’s Total Earnings

In 7 months of owning the site it earned me $213 through Amazon Associates.

This comes out be a tad over $30 a month…

That’s pretty bad

Some months I earned close to $70 while others I earned close to nothing. It varied month to month. The items I was selling were high ticket ($1000+) so one sale a month brought in a good chunk in commissions. The only problem was that the sales were few and far between.

Selling the Site

To be honest, I almost forgot I even owned this site.

What happened was I was reading Jon Haver’s income report and read this:

If any readers are looking to sell their profitable site(s) VERY QUICKLY let me know by emailing me. I can let you know in 12hrs if I am interested and complete the purchase in 24-48hrs – Contact Me Here

This got me thinking:

Maybe I could get rid of a site that I feel has no potential, I hate working on it and could possibly make a profit?

I emailed Jon and he was interested in the site. He ended up buying the site and we agreed on a price of $280. Sweet!

I was sent $280 on PayPal but because of their fees only received $268. Still not bad for a site I forgot I had!

Some Calculations

Let’s run some numbers and check out if I was able to squeeze a out a profit or not.

Costs: Site Purchased – $400

Earnings: Amazon Earnings – $213

Site Sold – $268

PROFIT: $481 – $400 = $81

I full blown $81 profit on this site…

Better than losing money! 🙂

So I was able to turn a $81 profit from this site which isn’t very good but there are some underlying knowledge gained from this site. This type of knowledge has no price tag on it and the site was a great learning experience for me. I learned a lot of things that helped me get better at buying/selling sites and it helped me buy my new site.

Overall, I didn’t get rich from this site (obviously) but I am glad I had this experience.

Amazon FBA Business Update

The month of July was a milestone month for my Amazon FBA business as I placed my very first order! You can read more about my first order here. It cost me $2,600 to purchase my first order.

Although it was awesome that I finally placed my order, I ended up realizing that it was going to take around 2 months before my products would even arrive at Amazon. This was demoralizing as I want to start as soon as possible but I understand that these things take time. 

Aside from that, there wasn’t too much else for me to do in terms of my Amazon FBA business for July. 

Niche Site WP

This site has been a pain in the butt the last couple of months and the earnings have sucked. I gave a pretty good shot at reviving this site but it just doesn’t seem to want to budge. This means a low amount of traffic which in turn means a low amount of earnings.

Maybe I should try optimizing my on page SEO and see how well that works. This site went from being my best earner to pretty much a test site now. If I can get back even a fraction of the earnings it used to make I would call it a success. Let’s take a look at the stats for this site this month:

Traffic:

June’s Traffic: 1,309

July’s Traffic: 1,249

Percentage Gain/Loss: -4.8% 

June’s Earnings: $56

July’s Earnings: $64

Percentage Gain/Less: +12.5%

Conclusion

Not a lot to report for this site.

Traffic stayed about the same and so did the earnings. Both were pretty bad as well but that is okay. I was going to sell this site if I wasn’t able to bring back the traffic/earnings it once had but now I see it almost a challenge.

I want to see if I can figure out what will help this site. Maybe it is on page SEO, maybe it needs more links, fresh content, or something else. Who knows.

But I want to try and figure out what it is. It is also worth pointing out that as I am writing this it is almost the end of August and the stats don’t look much better than July’s numbers. I will let you know what my plans are for this site and if they work or not.

Niche Site SH

This is a fairly new niche site that I started and it is making slow, yet steady progress in terms of traffic. 

There is one problem that I didn’t account for before I started this site:

The fact that the product that this site sells is mostly bought in person, which is not a good thing for me.

I am still trying to determine of continuing this site is worth the effort or not. I do not see a point in wasting money on PBN links, content and my time on a site that will not pay me back down the road. It is a though I am currently toying with, nonetheless lets see the numbers for the site.

June’s Traffic: 467

July’s Traffic: 470

Percentage Gain/Loss: +.07%

There is nothing to report for the earnings as no sales were made. 

Conclusion

Not a lot going on with this site at the moment to report. Within in the next month or two I will determine if I should keep working on the site or not. I will keep you up to date on my final decision for this site!

Niche Site GM

Like I mentioned in last month’s income report, this site is starting to gain traction in Google!

This means more and more keywords are beginning to rank and each day I am getting more visitors. It can be a slow process to get a niche site started and getting organic traffic but it is worth the time investment.

I think this site is going to be pretty successful and has the potential to earn at least $300+ a month, and possibly even more! Let’s see how the traffic and earnings looked this month

June’s Traffic: 382

July’s Traffic: 735

Percentage Gain/Loss: +92.5%

June’s Earnings: $2.52

July’s Earnings: $4.29

Percentage Gain/Loss: +70% (a little misleading…)

July saw a nice increase in traffic but still only around $4 in earnings. I am not too worried about earnings at this point and more focused on growing the sites organic traffic. 

You will see in August’s income report that this site really started to take off and get some traffic. 

Conclusion

I am looking forward to seeing this site progress each month and I think I can turn it into a consistent earner. This would be a nice site to add to my portfolio of sites!

The plan is to keep adding new PBN links and maybe some pillow links to diversify the anchor text. Aside from that there isn’t too much else to do besides wait and watch the site progress.

July’s Earnings : -$2,450.71

In July my niche sites earned me close to $150 but the payment of $2,600 for my first Amazon FBA put me in the red for this month.

One thing to remember that this is not including the earnings from my site that I have documented in my Niche Site Journey. I have not included that site in the income reports because I want to keep that site in it’s own updates. 

The earnings are pretty bad once again this month but next month is going to change in the upcoming months with my Amazon FBA product going live, new websites that I have purchased and my niche sites growing.

It is not easy to make money online and it takes a lot of hard work to even make a little bit. I have been fortunate to have made a good chunk of money within the last year and I am currently in a lull for my business in terms of earnings. 

Mostly because I have reinvested most of my profits back into my next business projects and I am just now getting close to reaping the rewards from that. I am extremely excited to see what these next couple of months bring for me and my business but I think the future is bright!

Thank you all for reading even though this income report was very late. Also, next month I might be changing the format of my income reports or possibly removing them completely from my site. Mainly because of the new direction my business is heading with selling on Amazon and investing in websites. I will need to rethink how I do my income reports to make them the best they can be for you guys.

Thanks again for reading 🙂

Comments

10 Comments

Richard

Thanks for the update Josh. I am fascinated by the whole Amazon FBA market so I can’t wait to follow along and see how your income goes when your first product starts selling 🙂

Josh
Josh

You’re welcome Richard! Thanks for commenting

Josh

Alexander @ Cash Flow Diaries

Congrats on the first site flip. Pretty cool. I always wondered how the price of a site is figured out. Amount of page views?

Thanks for posting your july income. I have updated you on the The Ultimate List of Blogger Incomes!

Josh
Josh

Hi Alexander,

Thank you for adding me to your income reports!The price of a site is usually around 20x monthly profit

Josh

Rob E

Looks like when the hare (amazon) flies past the tortoise (niche sites) in earnings per time required, you may go the Spencer Haws route 🙂

Looking forward to your coming posts on both businesses.

Cheers Josh.

Rob

Josh
Josh

Hi Rob,

Looks like that may be the case 🙂 the only problem is that Amazon has not proven itself yet so let’s hope I can find some success with Amazon! Thanks for commenting

Josh

Jon Haver

Glad you are happy with the sale…I am as well.

Josh
Josh

Good to hear from you Jon! And I am glad to hear that 🙂

Josh

Theodore Nwangene

Congrats Josh,
Its good you sold the site instead of leaving it to waste away i mean, the domain would have expired without you even knowing judging by the fact that you said you didn’t remember you still have it.

Your July income is not also bad, you’re really moving forward.

Wishing you many more better months ahead.

Josh
Josh

Thank you Theodore!

Yup, I’m very happy with the sale of the site. I’m hoping my next months income will be better with my Amazon product going live soon, fingers crossed.

Josh


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