Let’s start off the New Year with a bang…

Welcome to my January 2012 Monthly Income Report!

Each month I share an extremely detailed report about what I’ve been up to, the income I’ve earned online and the lessons I’ve learned during the past 31 Days.

Why?

For several reasons:

1. To keep me headed in the right direction. Sure, I could keep this all to myself but sharing this information publicly helps to hold me accountable and continue to try and outdo myself.
2. I want to be honest and transparent. If anyone talks about making money online, I think that’s really the only way it should be. Wins, losses, successes and failures – the whole deal.
3. I know it inspires a lot of people to take action.

Before I get into this month’s report I just wanted to mention one quick thing: if you’re just starting out online, please understand that making money via the Internet is definitely not an overnight thing.

Time, hard work, dedication, a lot of failures, constant learning and a passion to help other people are all things that I’ve found to be part of the recipe for success.

And lastly – it takes belief. If you don’t believe you can succeed, then there’s absolutely no chance that you will.

“My inner world creates my outer world.” - T. Harv Eker, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind

Let’s get to it…

Important Going-Ons in January

The start of the New Year was rough – mostly because I was sick.

Being sick = no energy = no work, which is unfortunate because after writing my 2012 Goal Post, I really wanted to take massive action.

But, on the bright side, I was reaping the benefits of passive income and I knew after a week off from work that this could be a record breaking month.

One of the key indicators came from my iPhone app business.

iPhone Applications

Right after Christmas my partner and I released a new update to one of our most successful iPhone applications, Baby Maker.

Before the update it was averaging about $50 per day and entering in and out of the top 200 apps in the photo/video category in the app store.

Over the past 31 days it has averaged $156 per day and has been bouncing around the 100 to 120 mark in the same category.

There are a few reasons why our earnings jumped by 212%:

• The update itself. There are websites, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages with thousands of followers that post when old apps are updated. Beyond that, the update definitely helped because one of the prior updates to iOS crashed some parts of the app.
• It was right after Christmas, which is one of the many times during the year when there’s a boom in the number of iPhone and iPod Touch users who are all looking for apps to fill their brand new devices. The other boom times of the year are Father’s Day and whenever a new version of the iPhone comes out.
• Our other apps, both paid and free, which also saw more downloads as a result of the season pushed sales for BabyMaker, not only because there were more people on our brand, but because within 90% of our applications we have a more apps page that showcases some of our more popular (and profitable) applications.

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Thanks for reading!
If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

My Monthly Report – January 2012
Join the community of over 10,000 fans of SPI on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. My Monthly Report – January 2011
2. My Monthly Report – January 2009
3. My Monthly Report – January 2010
4. My Monthly Report – April 2009
5. My Monthly Report – August 2010

Welcome to my December 2011 Monthly Income Report!

Each month I write a detailed report about the money I’ve earned online. It’s not all about the numbers though – it’s more about what I’ve done to earn that money and the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

I’ve been keeping this up for over 3 years now, and every month brings along something different as I’m constantly building my passive income portfolio with new projects and new forms of (virtually) automated businesses each and every month.

So why share this with you?

There are a couple of reasons:

First and foremost, it keeps me headed in the right direction. Seeing the numbers and writing down both my wins and my failures help me stay the course and always try to outdo myself, and publicly displaying these things holds me accountable.

Secondly, and more importantly, I do this to be transparent.

If you’re just starting out online, please understand that making money via the Internet is definitely not an overnight thing, and it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to pull it off.

A lot of people attempt it and a lot of people fail – but I absolutely know that it’s possible. I struggle through trial and error every single day – but as long as you have a goal and constantly work towards it (and fall down towards it too), you’ll give yourself a chance.

Thanks again for your support, and let’s get right to it.

Important Going-Ons in December

December is always an interesting month in terms of my income. With the holidays and much of the population in vacation-mode and away from the office, it does reflect in my earnings report, both in good and bad ways.

Another thing that seems to happen at the end of the year for a lot of people is – getting sick.

During the later half of the month my son got sick, and as most parents know that means that inevitably the rest of the family will get sick too, and this time it was no exception for us.

My wife and I soon picked up whatever bug my son picked up from who knows where, and it didn’t help that we were also hosting a party for my son’s birthday on Christmas Eve, and then celebrating Christmas by house-hopping on Christmas day, and then attending the Holiday Bowl a couple days later, and then an annual Christmas party with some of our closest friends, and then hosting a small New Year’s Eve get-together for our immediate family, and then…I pass out.

Ok – I didn’t really pass out, but I felt like it sometimes – and I still have yet to fully recover.

As a result of all this activity, both in my schedule and my immune system, my ability to get some good work done at the end of the year was not there. But, thanks to the power of passive income my income levels were still maintained.

GreenExamAcademy.com

Typically, the end of the year is a terrible time for sales on GreenExamAcademy.com. November’s monthly income report reflected that, and I was expecting similar, if not smaller numbers in December.

So, it was definitely a surprise when I noticed that the December earnings from this site for December more than doubled.

Less than an hour of work was done on the site the entire month (just a few replies to some emails that came in), so it was definitely time to do some investigation.

There are a couple of factors that probably helped me out here:

Continued Education

Part of the duty of those who pass the LEED exam is maintaining your accreditation by meeting continuing education requirements. I recently put up an affiliate link to some education classes that would satisfy some of the requirements, and they seem to have converted very well in December.

My thoughts are that since people are off from work, they are taking advantage of this extra time to get their requirements in while they can.

A New Version of the Exam

Late next year, they’ll be rolling out a new version of the exam, which means there’s always a huge scramble to pass the current version so people don’t have to learn all of the new stuff – they can more easily pass the older exam and just maintain their accreditation.

Although there’s still a lot of time, there’s been more recent talk in the industry about the new version of the exam, which probably got a few extra people to become interested in passing the exam now.

Good times.

SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com

On the flip side, and as expected, the earnings from this career-based niche site was down compared to previous months.

Nothing to worry about though…

• The site is still ranking #1 in Google for its primary keyword.
• It’s still getting hits from over 4000+ long-tail keywords.
• And it still earned over $1,500.00 (as opposed to over $2k last month).

If you’re interested in learning how I created this site from scratch – all the way from coming up with the idea, to ranking #1 in Google and earning money, you can read more about it here on the niche site duel hub. All free content and you don’t even need to opt-in to get it.

Traffic was down a bit during the month, and CPCs (cost-per-clicks) were down as well – and again, this is expected.

This is just speculation, but the holidays probably had a little bit to do with it. People aren’t searching for as much information about security guard training, and security guard training companies are paying less for advertising at the end of the year, which has a direct effect on my income (since through Adsense, I earn a percentage of the total cost per click that advertisers pay).

I suspect things will pick up in January, and already on the 3rd and 4th of the month I’ve had two consecutive $100+ days.

In 2012 you’re going to see a lot more information about this site – primarily what I do to diversify the income coming from it, as per my 2012 Goal Post.

iPhone Apps

December is always a good month for iPhone apps – especially if you have some exposure in the app store (top lists, features, etc.).

Why?

Because a lot of people open up their presents and see a brand new iPhone, iPod Touch or iPads.

We also timed an updated version of our top performing application, Baby Maker, with the holidays and it seemed to pay off, as you can see below:

It also cracked the top 100 Photo & Video category, and we’re still working on updating it again, since we found a couple of bugs since the latest release.

After that’s done, we’re going to start working on some new apps, and actually begin some marketing to promote the apps we already have in place. Should be fun, and I’ll keep you posted on what’s going on as it happens.

Still, we’re no Benny Hsu

Other Niche Sites

With the other (smaller) niche sites that I own, some were up, and some were down.

One in particular that did really well in December is a fairly new site that targets a specific type of electronic product type (not a brand).

After a 2 month backlinking campaign, the site rose to the top 4 in Google and began ranking for long tail keywords as well.

In December, which is always a good month for electronics and other type of retail niche sites (i.e. gifts), it earned $190.05 from Amazon.com, pushing over $3,873.74 in sales, which is pretty cool.

I’m sure the numbers will be down at the beginning of the new year simply because less people are shopping on Amazon.com. Chris Guthrie always notes that most of his sales for his Amazon affiliate sites come at the end of the year too.

Again, I’m sorry I’m reluctant to reveal any new additional niches to you – at least at this moment in time. I’m still seeing new copycat sites popup as a result of my revealing my security guard training niche site – and unfortunately people are still copying my content, taking what I’ve researched and written and slightly changing the words without any credit back to me or my site. It’s sort of obviously when all of the bullet points and charts within their posts are the exact same as my own.

I usually reserve a spot here in my income reports to talk about what’s been happening with SPI, but there’s too much good stuff to talk about (like reaching a million YouTube video views, 1 million podcast downloads, etc.), and I’d like to talk more about each of those in a blog post later on in the month. For now, let’s just get to the numbers…

Income Breakdown

Disclosure: many of the links below are affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I absolutely appreciate it and if you have any questions about any of the products or services please contact me!

Also, please note that a lot of these are figures from reports from each individual company for the previous month. It does not necessarily reflect the actual payment which, for some of the companies listed below, come 30 to 60 days later because of potential refunds.

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Total: $4,134.97
    • Last Month: $2,045.14
      
    • Difference: +$2,089.83
      

• SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com:
  • Adsense: $1,570.22
  • Job Board: $10.01
  • Amazon.com: $0.48
  • Total: $1,580.71
    • Last Month: $2,170.15
    • Difference: -$589.44
      

• Other Google Adsense (includes other niche sites):
  • Total: $225.56
    • Last Month: $288.66
    • Difference: -$63.10

• Affiliate Earnings (includes other niche sites):
  • Market Samurai: $4,683.36
  • Instant Article Factory: $171.12
  • The Best Spinner: $1,951.12
  • Blog Blueprint: $750.58
  • Unique Article Wizard: $2,978.82
    
  • Bluehost.com: $14,550.00
  • iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $132.56
  • Chris Guthrie’s Amazon Niche Profit Course: $70.22
  • WP-Wishlist Plugin: $12.00
  • Affiliate Marketing for Beginners by Corbett Barr: $307.02
  • Joseph Archibald’s 40 Day Challenge: $205.39
  • Thesis Theme for WordPress: $622.50
  • Aweber: $523.50
  • Elance.com: $206.00
  • Odesk.com: $0.50
  • 99Designs.com: $27.00
  • EasyPLR: $42.03
  • Woothemes.com: $46.00
  • Screenflow: $79.20
  • BuildMyRank: $489.90
  • E-Junkie.com: $67.60
  • Amazon.com: $347.46
  • Beachbody Products: $29.90
  • Total: $28,293.87
    • Last Month:$29,616.24
      
    • Difference: -$1,322.37

• iPhone Applications:
  • Paid Apps: $3,668.62
  • Free Apps: $585.86
    
  • Total: $4,254.48
    • Last Month: $2,853.12
    • Difference: +$1,401.36

• Gross Total in December: $38,485.59
  • Last Month: $44,473.31
  • Difference: -$5,987.72

• Expenses: $3,461.02
  • Major expenses this month include virtual assistants, hosting account for SPI (dedicated server), recurring payments for various tools, CPA fees.

• Net Total in December: $35,028.57

(Click here to read a typical monthly expense report which breaks down how my time and money is spent)

The numbers are a bit skewed because last month I included a substantial non-recurring payment from a client, which isn’t typical – but even so I’m very happy to finish off the year above $35k.

What’s encouraging here is that the portion of my income NOT related to the SPI blog is much bigger than last month, which aligns with my goal for 2012 to expand and diversify more of my outside-of-SPI-income.

That said, as I always make sure to mention in my income reports, I’ll be the first to admit that a significant portion of my income comes directly from this blog, mostly from the products that I recommend as an affiliate, which are products I’ve used and have helped me in one way, shape or form.

I’m very fortunate to have a community that is willing to support me by making purchases through my affiliate links – a responsibility that I will never take lightly and always take seriously – and as such I never promote just for the potential income that can come from an offer.

I am extremely grateful for everything, and I will continue to give back with valuable content and my experience in return.

Lessons Learned in December

In December I had a run-in with a very determined troll, a person who leaves off-color remarks and takes disrespectful actions to attract attention and stir up a discussion.

Now, I always welcome the critics and skeptics, as long as people are being respectful to me and to each other. I wish there were more of this because it’s healthy, and in an industry like internet marketing and making money online all sides of the story need to be addressed, and questions and criticisms are, at least for me, are a very welcome way to make sure everything is addresses as it should.

My issue is with some people’s approach.

In this instance, it’s unfortunate because this troll actually brings up some good questions and concerns (among some not-so-good ones) that I would have been happy to discuss, even publicly – but the off-putting nature of the approach just didn’t sit well with me and as a result, respect was obviously thrown out the window.

I won’t get into too much detail, but this person emailed me a very long email with a number of questions and concerns. As I was formatting a reply, a number of my blogger colleagues messaged me saying that this same person posted the same exact email (verbatim) in the comment sectionon their blogs on posts where I was mentioned or featured.

It was also posted in a number of popular forums and other places online – all within just a few hours before I even had a chance to respond to the initial email. Now – there are 20 to 30 different spots online addressing me and asking me questions (the same questions – one making fun of the shirts I wore in my videos, but that’s a separate story), and now what am I supposed to do – respond to each and every one of them? Monitor each and address them all?

I was happy to answer the questions and reply to him criticisms and concerns. It’s easy, because it’s all truth and backed up by real numbers and reports.

But, his intentions were obvious.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things, and the thing is this – no matter what this person does, even if he apologizes and whatever (I don’t expect one), I will never ever be able to get rid of the bad taste of that initial impression.

You never have a second chance to make a first impression, so be wise about what you do and how you approach things.

When all this was going down, I couldn’t believe it. It took almost every ounce of my energy NOT to immediately respond and react to this right away. In the heat of the moment, you’ve got to let things cool down before reacting because you can get into big trouble sometimes, even when you’re not the first one to start something.

In sports, do ever notice how often the person who reacts is always the one to get penalized?

I was glad to wait it out because now I can address it here respectfully in a calm and cool manner, instead of creating some monster of a post that probably would have been very entertaining to read, but it most-likely would have made me look bad too.

Thanks for letting me share that here with you.

On a lighter, but more disappointing note  - I just wanted to congratulate to Adam Baker from ManvsDebt (who now has an amazing podcast, by the way!) for getting first place in our Blogger Fantasy Football league.

I’m a HUGE Fantasy Football junkie and took first place the last 3 years in a row in another league.

It was me and Adam in the finals, and he won by a total of 2.54 points.

2.54 points!

That’s one field goal. One touch down, a 26 yard run, a 22 yard reception and about a billion of other possibilities that could have happened differently to put me into first place.

Why is this important?

Because there will always be the “what if’s”.

There will always be this or that which could have happened instead – stuff you wish you had done differently – and yeah, you can learn from those experiences – but don’t dwell on them.

Don’t get upset because there’s nothing that you can do to change the past.

You can only change the future (as cliche as that sounds).

And I’ll end my report on that note.

Thanks for your time, as always, and if you’re interested in what I’m up to in 2012, check out my 2012 Goal Post.

Happy New Year, and Cheers!

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Thanks for reading!
If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

My Monthly Report – December 2011
Join the community of over 10,000 fans of SPI on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. My Monthly Report – December 2009
2. My Monthly Report – December 2008
3. My Monthly Report – January 2011
4. My Monthly Report – October 2011
5. My Monthly Report – November 2011

Welcome to my November 2011 monthly report!

Each month I publish a highly detailed report sharing not only what I’ve been up to during past month, but also the income I’ve earned as a result of my online businesses, down to the penny.

I do this for a number of reasons:

1. To help me keep track of my progress and focus on improving the numbers each and every month.
2. To help you understand the kinds of ways one can generate an income online.
3. To share what has and what has not been working for me. And most importantly…
4. To be transparent and real about what I do.

If you’re just starting out online, please understand that making money via the Internet is definitely not an overnight thing, and it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to pull it off.

A lot of people attempt it and a lot of people fail – but I absolutely know that it’s possible. I struggle through trial and error every single day – but as long as you have a goal and constantly work towards it (and fall down towards it too), you’ll give yourself a chance.

I’ve got a lot to talk about today, so let’s get right to it.

I hope you enjoy this month’s report!

Important Going-Ons in November

At the beginning of the month I attended Blog World Expo 2011 in Los Angeles. I attended BWE last year too, but this time it was a little (okay – a lot) more significant because I was given the amazing opportunity to speak at the event.

I’ve already written about my experience and even shared a re-recording of my presentation with you so I won’t go into too much detail about the event in this report, but I’ll make 3 points about my BWE speaking experience below:

1. Always over-prepare, especially if you’re doing anything live. I was up until 4am practicing for 3 days straight until the day of my presentation, and although some may think that was a bit overkill, it paid off because my slides broke down and I was still able to remember everything.
2. Stuff happens. No matter how much you prepare for something, no matter how much you plan or practice – something is always bound to go wrong, and that’s okay. Expect it, and roll with it. I truly believe that everything happens for a reason and much like how I turned getting laid off into an opportunity to explore online business, I turned the fact that my slides were messed up into an opportunity to show people it didn’t matter, and I really knew what I was talking about.
3. Poke fun at yourself sometimes. Nobody is perfect, and the moment you claim to be perfect that’s the moment your audience will begin to disengage. As I learned in Stand and Deliver, one of the best things you can do during a presentation (or if you’re writing or recording for any type of audience too) is let your guard down and make fun of yourself. Hence, the Animated GIF of Pat’s  Doubletake.

Beyond the presentation, it was awesome to meet everyone in person who I’ve spoken to online for the past couple of years. There’s truly nothing comparable to physically meeting someone and shaking a person’s hand or giving them a hug.

Thank you to everyone who came to the presentation and/or the SPI community meetup afterwards! Of course, I have to include at least one picture – so here’s one of Corbett Barr from Think Traffic, myself, Chris Ducker from Virtual Business Lifestyle, and David Risley from DavidRisley.com, who I know many of you follow online too:

More Videos!

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been publishing a lot of videos lately, and I don’t plan to slow down.

Why?

Because of Gideon Shalwick.

I always knew of Gideon since I started doing business online, but I never dove into his online video marketing material. It wasn’t until I sat in on his presentation at Blog World Expo that I was blown away – and I left the room after his presentation totally jazzed about doing more videos.

Although I’ve posted several videos in the past and have had some good success with them, I learned that I was barely even scratching the surface with YouTube.

If you haven’t done so already, definitely visit Gideon’s site. Not only his material excellent, but he’s a totally genuine and down to earth kind of guy, and a killer presenter too.

In November, I published a total of 3 videos:

• How to Be Everywhere (my Blog World Expo Presentation)
• Add to Cart Button Made Easy – The Magic Button
• Are You Giving Instant Results? You Should, And Here’s Why

I plan to shoot a lot more, so please make sure you’re subscribed to my YouTube Channel, because not all of them will be posted on the blog.

More Podcast Downloads – Thanks to a Plugin!

For the longest time, iTunes only showed the latest 10 sessions of the SPI podcast.

It was incredibly annoying, especially because every day I would get an email from listeners who wanted a way to get all of the episodes without having to go into each individual post on my blog and download each one separately.

The reason this happens is because iTunes reads the feed coming from my blog. The default setting in WordPress is to show only the latest 10 posts in the RSS feed, which is why only 10 episodes were showing up in iTunes.

The solution sounds simple, right? Just increase the number of latest posts in the settings in WordPress.

Unfortunately, when you do that, two things can happen:

1. You stall the RSS feed because it goes over the 512kb limit (which excludes multimedia); or
2. Your feed continues to work but shows an incredibly long list of posts, which (especially if you show full posts in your feed), can be a lot for your blog’s subscribers.

What I really needed was a way to show only 10 posts in a regular blog RSS feed, and something like 100 posts for the podcast feed.

Unfortunately, there was no such solution.

There was a plugin that changed the number of posts that show per category in the archive, but that didn’t do any good for that category’s feed and for iTunes.

Sick of looking for a solution that probably didn’t exist, I went ahead and created one.

I contacted the talented guys from Blazer Six, who designed my site at Green Exam Academy, and part of this blog, and asked them to create a quick but nifty little plugin that would allow me to control the number of latest posts in the feed per category.

Within a couple of hours the plugin was finished, I adjusted the number of latest posts for the podcast category to 100 and BAM – all of my episodes showed up in iTunes.

So what happened as a result? Let’s see:

• August: 69,484 downloads
• September: 68,912 downloads
• October: 75,915 downloads
• November: 99,640 downloads

It’s simple: more exposure = more downloads!

I’m super stoked to share this plugin with my fellow podcasters who are dealing with this same issue. The plugin was uploaded today and can be found here!

Later this week I’ll create an official launch post with some basic instructions on how best to use it.

New Niche Sites!

For the past couple of months I’ve been creating some new niche sites and I’m already starting to see some movement in Google and some extra money coming in.

Of course, these are brand new sites so the earnings are no where near what happened as a result of the Niche Site Duel, not yet at least, but the results still excite me.

It may seem weird that an extra $25.00 a month still excites me, but it absolutely does. I think what excites me the most is the fact that the strategies that I’m using are still working after all of the latest algorithm changes in Google, and these are new sites in non-make money online niches.

I apologize for not being able to reveal these particular sites to you, and actually I feel weird and uneasy not doing so because I always love to reveal everything here on SPI, but I learned my lesson after sharing the security guard training niche site and seeing a number of new security guard training niche sites pop up, many using my own original work for the majority of their content.

That said, I may do another public niche site project in the future because even though I can almost guarantee there will be copycats, the lessons learned during the process will be valuable to the SPI community.

Plus, I know it can be fun and entertaining to follow along.

One last thing – if you’re familiar with my post, The Backlinking Strategy That Works, you may remember I recommended a product called Blog Blueprint in it. I’ve since taken down that recommendation because it was not performing well anymore, and I’ve replaced it with a tool that I’ve been using as of late that is much much better. I’ve been testing out BuildMyRank (free trial) for a few months now (after seeing Joseph Archibald, Spencer from Niche Pursuits and Justin and Joe from Adsense Flippers use it) and I’m seeing some really good results!

Okay, I’m pretty deep into this post already, I think it’s time for some numbers.

Income Breakdown

Disclosure: many of the links below are affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I absolutely appreciate it and if you have any questions about any of the products or services please contact me!

Also, please note that a lot of these are figures from reports from each individual company for the previous month. It does not necessarily reflect the actual payment which, for some of the companies listed below, come 30 to 60 days later because of potential refunds.

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Total: $2,045.14
    • Last Month: $3,874.65
      
    • Difference: -$1829.51
      

• SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com:
  • Adsense: $2,146.80
  • Job Board: $19.48
  • Amazon.com: $3.87
  • Total: $2,170.15
    • Last Month: $1,983.42
    • Difference: +$186.73
      

• Other Google Adsense (includes other niche sites):
  • Total: $288.66
    • Last Month: $346.20
    • Difference: -$42.46

• Affiliate Earnings (includes other niche sites):
  • Market Samurai: $4,958.40
  • Instant Article Factory: $172.00
  • The Best Spinner: $2,841.00
  • Blog Blueprint: $1,117.76
  • Unique Article Wizard: $2,931.92
    
  • Bluehost.com: $13,950.00
  • iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $221.48
  • Chris Guthrie’s Amazon Niche Profit Course: $79.39
  • Easy Azon WordPress Plugin: $63.72
  • Popup Domination: $23.64
  • Subscriber’s Magnet Plugin: $23.24
  • WP-Wishlist Plugin: $12.00
  • Affiliate Marketing for Beginners by Corbett Barr: $148.41
  • Joseph Archibald’s 40 Day Challenge: $168.20
  • Thesis Theme for WordPress: $759.00
  • Aweber: $543.90
  • Elance.com: $262.00
  • Odesk.com: $50.00
  • 99Designs.com: $101.00
  • EasyPLR: $37.55
  • Woothemes.com: $4.00
  • Internet Business Mastery: $237.95
  • Screenflow: $39.60
  • BuildMyRank: $17.70
  • Amazon.com: $89.31
  • Beachbody Products: $29.90
  • Blog World Expo: $144.42
  • Passive Income Strategies for Podcasters: $618.75
  • Total: $29,616.24
    • Last Month:$29,497.51
      
    • Difference: +$118.73

• iPhone Applications:
  • Paid Apps: $2107.00
  • Free Apps: $746.12
    
  • Total: $2,853.12
    • Last Month: $2,911.12
    • Difference: -$58.00

• Payment from Client / Consultation (1 client):
  • Total: $7,500.00

• Gross Total in November: $44,473.31
  • Last Month: $38.612.90
  • Difference: +$5,860.41

• Expenses: $4,125.22
  • Major expenses this month include virtual assistants, hosting account for SPI (dedicated server), recurring payments for various tools, Attorney and CPA fees, hotel and travel for Blog World Expo, 

• Net Total in November: $40,348.09

(Click here to read a typical monthly expense report which breaks down where my time and money is spent)

The additional $7500.00 from the client I’ve been working is not a usual payment so it does skew the results a little bit, but it is money earned as a result of my business (actually, to be exact, as a result of being found by this client on iTunes via the podcast, which I’ll talk more about in a post later this month).

Take that payment away and actually my earnings are slightly less than last month, but even so I still pinch myself when I add up all of the numbers each month – I still can’t believe it sometimes.

As I mention in all of my reports, I’ll be the first to admit that a significant portion of my income comes directly from this blog, mostly from the products that I recommend as an affiliate, which are products I’ve used and have helped me in one way, shape or form.

I’m very fortunate to have a community that is willing to support me by making purchases through my affiliate links – a responsibility that I will never take lightly and always take seriously – and as such I never promote just for the potential income that can come from an offer.

That said, over $8,000 this month were earned outside of the SPI blog and whether I make $8,000 or $80,000 – I’d still be the same person, live the same lifestyle and be just as happy.

I am extremely grateful for everything, and I will continue to give back with valuable content and my experience in return.

Things I Learned in November

November was a good reminder, once again, that diversity is extremely important. My earnings from my original business at GreenExamAcademy.com almost dipped below 2k for the first time ever, which is due to a number of variables including the fact that the industry is slowing down a little bit, and November and December are historically the slowest month’s for sales on the website – professionals aren’t studying during the Holidays, hehe.

Another thing I experienced in November was the idea that the environment you work in has a major impact on your work flow and productivity. Coincidentally, Gideon Shalwick just posted a video about this very subject and I just so happened to not be feeling the energy in my existing office anymore. I gutted my entire office and rearranged the setup, and for the past week I’ve been a productivity mad-man!

Going along with productivity, I’m sure the parents who read SPI can agree with me on this (and especially the parents that work from home) – it’s tough to get long periods of productive work in while at home with kids. Over the 2 years of my sons life I’ve adapted to the fact that during the day I won’t have more than a 1 hour stretch of uninterrupted work, and that’s stretching it. That’s why most of my work is done in the late night when our son goes to sleep, and why I’ve learned to really be productive while working – cutting out any distractions and getting right to what needs to be done.

That said, I still feel like every once and a while long periods of uninterrupted work during the day would be beneficial for my businesses, which is why my wife and I struck a deal with each other.

Every Wednesday I get the entire day to myself to work. No matter what I need to get done, whether it’s work on new sites, existing projects, interviews or whatever, I get the entire day to myself. In exchange, my wife gets all of Friday to herself to do whatever she wants and I’m responsible for watching our son.

It’s a win-win because we both get our alone time, and we both get to spend an entire day with our son during the week too. Of course, we’ll always have our Thursday date nights, which is just as important in my opinion, but after trying this out for the past couple of weeks it has worked out great for the both of us, and it will definitely allow me to finish the SPI product that should be launched in January.

I’m not saying this is the solution for all couples out there, and it may not even be possible for some, but I think the most important lesson here is that communication is key and couples should definitely talk to each other about what would work best. That’s obvious, of course, but it’s not always acted upon.

And lastly, November was the month of Thanksgiving here in the U.S. and I just wanted say thank you one more time to all of those who read, watch or listen to Smart Passive Income. This site would not be anything if it wasn’t for you and your support – whether you click through my affiliate links, share my articles on social media, leave comments or are just simply a silent reader – I appreciate you.

Here’s to a wonderful and safe end of the year! Cheers, and let’s get ready for 2012!

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If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

My Monthly Report – November 2011
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Related posts:

1. My Monthly Report – November 2009
2. My Monthly Report – November 2008
3. My Monthly Report – October 2011
4. My Monthly Report – December 2011
5. My Monthly Report – September 2011

Welcome to my October 2011 monthly report!

Each month I share the income I’ve generated online – down to the penny.

I do this for several reasons:

1. To help me keep track of my progress and focus on improving the numbers each and every month.
2. To help you understand the kinds of ways one can generate an income online.
3. To share what has and what has not been working for me. And most importantly…
4. To be transparent and real about what I do.

As you’ll see, this report isn’t just about the numbers – it’s about education and learning from my past experiences.

Remember, success online does not happen fast, and it doesn’t not happen to everyone. I’m here to help and give you the best chance to succeed.

I hope you enjoy this month’s report. I apologize for its lateness – I just got back from Blog World Expo in Los Angeles and am still in recovery mode. Staying up late most of the nights to work on my presentation and network has really taken a toll on my body – but it was all totally worth it.

I’ll be posting more information about my Blog World Expo experience very soon, and I’ll be sure to include my presentation for those of you who were unable to attend. Thanks for your patience!

Important Going-Ons in October

October was very much about stepping out of my comfort zone, something that I always try to do because I know it will take my business to the next level and separate me from the pack.

Bold actions, which lead to amazing results, often come with getting uncomfortable.

When I started blogging, shooting videos and recording podcasts – those were all things that I was definitely not comfortable with at first, and this past month it was speaking in public.

At the beginning of the month I attended and spoke at the Financial Blogger Conference, which was my first public speaking experience. I had such an amazing time and I’m definitely looking forward to more conferences and speaking engagements in the future now.

I also began to shoot more videos, and did them in a style that also required me to come out of my shell a little too.

So far, the response has been nothing but positive, which is great! Here are the links to the videos:

• Traffic Isn’t Everything – Everything You Need to Know About Conversions and Click-Through Rates
• Blog World Expo Presentation Preview Video

The rest of the month was dedicated mostly to preparing for my Blog World Expo presentation on November 4th, a presentation that was 3 times as long as my first one, and at the largest blogging and new media event in the world. I cannot wait to tell you what happened and what I learned.

Security Guard Training Niche Site

For those of you new to SPI, I recommend you check out The Niche Site Duel to see exactly how I built SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com from scratch.

I wrote a post mid-month about how a niche site with a target keyword (security guard training) with only 9900 exact searches per month generates $1,500 per month on Adsense. Well – I should change that number to $1,968.33 because the earnings in October were just that.

As the site grows and I continue to add a few articles here and there, I continue to be found by more long tail keywords in Google and as a result the income keeps climbing higher and higher.

Additionally, the minor changes I made to the Adsense blocks (as shown on video in Traffic Isn’t Everything – Everything You Need to Know About Conversions and Click-Through Rates) are definitely paying off.

The sad thing is that I want to put more time into growing this site even more and expanding the income streams outside of Adsense, but it’s time I just didn’t have in October. To make more time, I’m thinking about possibly hiring someone to take charge with this site and take it to the next level. I’ve talked about private advertising and putting a directory on the site before – it would be cool if I could find someone to manage that for me in exchange for a percentage of the income.

Just an idea.

Like I mentioned in my last monthly income report, I’m seeing new sites pop up in the exact same niche, and unfortunately a few of those sites are copying my original content. I’ve contacted my attorney about this and there are a number of things I could do from here. I’ll keep you posted and hopefully give you some options that you could do in case the same things happens to you.

Also not cool is this… a number of people are attempting to log into my WordPress Dashboard. I know this because I’m using a plugin called Limit Login Attempts, which shows me the IP address of those who attempt to login to my site, and I can limit the number of attempts and actually lock them out.

20 people have attempted to login. This is a little scary, and another reason why I don’t reveal all of my niches here on SPI.

The plugin lists the IP addresses of those who attempt to login and I really thought about listing those IPs here, but that’s not how I roll. Luckily, none of the attempted logins are from people who have commented here on SPI.

…and this is why you should really think twice about what your passwords should be.

A New Old Niche Site?

I’m really thinking about my next “experiment” to reveal on SPI, something similar to the niche site duel where I take you step by step through a particular process to potentially make more money.

After talking to Justin and Joe from AdsenseFlippers.com and learning that they have a database of niche sites up for sale that are already making money, I thought it might be interesting to buy an existing site and see if I could increase its earnings and take it to the next level.

Would this be something you’d be interested in following? Let me know.

iPhone Applications

My partner and I have been making extremely slow progress on some new apps, but it’s progress nonetheless.

We had some hiccups with our current developer but today we received a promising beta version of an app we’ve been working on and we’re really close to getting to a point where we can finally launch it.

If there are any take aways from this, it’s that software development, especially software development that relies on outsourced work, can be a very long and tedious process.

Our current apps saw a little bit more exposure in October, which is why you’ll see a slight increase in earnings compared to last month in the income report below.

Smart Passive Income

In October, SPI saw record numbers once again – both in traffic, subscribers and income.

Not much new information to report here, so I’ll just do a quick recap of the articles that I wrote in case you missed anyt:

• My First Public Speaking Experience at the Financial Blogger Conference 2011
• My Monthly Report – September 2011
• Traffic Isn’t Everything – What You Need to Know About Conversions and Click-Through Rates
• What I’m Reading and Who I’m in Love With Right Now
• SPI 027 : How to Harness the Power of Social Proof Online (Podcast)
• Pat FAIL – My Past Business Ideas That Didn’t Work Out So Well
• How 9,900 Exact Match Searches Equate to $1,500 Per Month
• Ask the Reader: How Do You Know When It’s Time To Move On?
• Follow Up: How Do You Know When It’s Time to Move On (From the Readers)

The new podcast episodes, especially, has been getting a LOT of great feedback. One person at Blog World Expo, actually, came up to me and said my latest podcast episode on Social Proof just “blew his mind”, which is a pretty awesome compliment.

If you have yet to listen to a podcast episode of mine, this one is the one to listen to. You can get it on iTunes here and download it to your mp3 player so you can listen to it on the go.

I think it’s time for some numbers…

Income Breakdown

Disclosure: many of the links below are affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I absolutely appreciate it and if you have any questions about any of the products or services please let me know!

Also, please note that a lot of these are figures from reports from each individual company for the previous month. It does not necessarily reflect the actual payment which, for some of the companies listed below, come 30 to 60 days later because of potential refunds.

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Total: $3,874.65
    • Last Month: $3,629.25
      
    • Difference:+$245.40
      

• SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com:
  • Adsense: $1,968.33
  • Job Board: $14.81
  • Amazon.com: $0.28
  • Total: $1,983.42
    • Last Month: $1,585.50
    • Difference: +$397.92
      

• Other Google Adsense (includes other niche sites, YouTube and infobarrel)
  • Total: $346.20
    • Last Month: $421.24
    • Difference: -$75.04

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Market Samurai: $4,144.62
  • Instant Article Factory: $86.00
  • The Best Spinner: $2,963.00
  • Blog Blueprint: $1,515.41
  • Unique Article Wizard: $2,909.14
    
  • Bluehost.com: $14,700.00
  • iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $177.44
  • Chris Guthrie’s Amazon Niche Profit Course: $175.05
  • Easy Azon WordPress Plugin: $42.32
  • Affiliate Marketing for Beginners by Corbett Barr: $187.68
  • Joseph Archibald’s 40 Day Challenge: $111.77
  • Other Niche Site Affiliate Commissions: $66.49
  • Thesis Theme for WordPress: $1,047.50
  • Aweber: $476.70
  • Elance.com: $255.00
  • Odesk.com: $150.50
  • 99Designs.com: $26.00
  • Amazon.com: $89.31
  • Beachbody Products: $29.90
  • Legalzoom: $52.85
  • Blog World Expo: $290.83
  • Total: $29,497.51
    • Last Month:$28,406.75
      
    • Difference: +$1,090.76

• iPhone Applications:
  • Paid Apps: $2069.00
  • Free Apps: $842.12
    
  • Total: $2,911.12
    • Last Month: $2,549.53
    • Difference: +$361.59

• Gross Total in October: $38,612.90
  • Last Month: $36,592.27
  • Difference: +$2,020.62

• Expenses: $4,614.34
  • Major expenses this month include virtual assistants, hosting account for SPI (dedicated server), recurring payments for various tools, Attorney and CPA fees, new business formation, and additional equipment and tools for my business.

• Net Total in October: $33,998.56

(Click here to read a typical monthly expense report which breaks down where my time and money is spent)

Most parts of the business have seen an increase in income compared to last month, which is awesome!

As I mention in all of my reports, I’ll be the first to admit that a significant portion of my income comes directly from this blog, mostly from the products that I recommend as an affiliate, which are products I’ve used and have helped me in one way, shape or form.

I’m very fortunate to have a community that is willing to support me by making purchases through my affiliate links – a responsibility that I will never take lightly and always take seriously – and as such I never promote just for the potential income that can come from an offer.

That said, over $9,000 this month were earned outside of the SPI blog and whether I make $9,000 or $90,000 – I’d still be the same person, live the same lifestyle and be just as happy.

I am extremely grateful for everything, and I will continue to give back with valuable content and my experience in return.

Things I Learned in October

Planting Seeds and Bearing Fruit

In case you didn’t notice, my earnings from Bluehost, the domain and hosting company that I use and recommend as an affiliate, makes up about half of my affiliate earnings from SPI – earning $14,700 this past month alone – and it’s not a recurring commission.

This just blows my mind, especially considering I don’t really do much to aggressively promote the service. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I even mentioned Bluehost in any posts that I wrote this past month.

I don’t say this to show off, but I say this because I know I have properly planted the seeds to make this happen.

What is a “seed”?

A seed is any form of content that gets posted on the web that could potentially grow into a sale, or “bear fruit”. A post, a video, a podcast – once they are published they are always available on the for people to find. The more seeds you plant, the more opportunity you create for yourself.

It’s almost like modeling nature. In nature, for example, do most plants produce just one seed, or many?

Many, of course, because it’s all about opportunity.

To help illustrate this point, below you’ll see an easy diagram of how people can eventually get to an affiliate link for something I recommend, like Bluehost.

Again, these are non-aggressive approaches that create a highway or avenue of opportunity to click on a link ad potentially make a sale.

For more details about my Bluehost links specifically – where they are located and how they convert – please click here.

The most important thing to do is just plant those seeds and let them grow.

Time for some Vitamin C and some much needed rest. Thanks for your support, and all the best to you! My Blog World Expo recap is up next.

Cheers!

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Thanks for reading!
If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

My Monthly Report – October 2011
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Related posts:

1. My Monthly Report – October 2009
2. My Monthly Report – October 2008
3. My Monthly Report – November 2011
4. My Monthly Report – January 2011
5. My Monthly Report – September 2011

Welcome to my September 2011 monthly report!

Every month I write a detailed report about my online businesses.

I do this not only to help me keep track of my progress, but also to show you what’s working for me, and what’s not.

In my monthly reports I always include an extremely detailed breakdown of the income I’ve earned online and I conclude with some of the more important things I’ve learned during the month.

I do this to motivate and to be transparent. Plus, I personally feel that if a person is publishing information about making money online he or she should show all sides of the equation so that the readers can make honest decisions based on honest information and common sense, not on hype.

As always, I don’t consider myself a “guru” and I use my own experiences, experiments and case studies as my teaching tools, and that’s usually what I write about.

I hope you enjoy this month’s report

Important Going-Ons in September

Most of September was dedicated to preparing myself for my first public speaking engagement. As I mentioned in my last post, which includes a video of my half-hour presentation, I really wanted to do well and knock it out of the park.

Public speaking is something I’ve always wanted to get into and I know that if I can master the craft my entire business will benefit because of it.

As a result of all of my preparation I didn’t focus as much as usual on my online businesses, but that was a conscious decision I made.

I took my own advice and made sure to focus on one thing at a time.

My presentation was my number one priority and after going up on stage and doing my thing, I’m happy to say that all of the hard work definitely paid off.

One of the best parts about it was reading all of the tweets that people posted during the presentation:

And there are literally hundreds of tweets like this. It was such an amazing and humbling experience and I just wanted to once again thank the entire personal finance blogging community for their kindness and support, and also thank you, the SPI reader, for listening to me worry so much about it leading up to it.

Now it’s time to shift gears and prepare for my presentation at Blog World Expo in November, which will be longer and more technical. But – now that I have my first presentation under my belt I probably won’t stress as much.

I say that – but we’ll see what really happens.

Interestingly enough, even though I focused less on my actual businesses my overall income continues to grow. The reality of passive income was not only apparent during the one day city-wide blackout that happened in the beginning of the month, but it was also illustrated during the month in whole.

I love the fact that I can take breaks or focus on other things (like public speaking) and my business can still run and function on its own.

Security Guard Training Headquarters

For those of you new to SPI, I recommend you check out The Niche Site Duel to see exactly how I built SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com from scratch.

The little work I did do on some of my income streams included experimenting with the Adsense ads on this niche site. With 400 to 600 uniques a day it’s a perfect platform to run these types of tests on.

Back on March 2nd, I ran an experiment that dealt with where the ads were placed on the site. This resulted in a 139% increase in revenue, which over a long period of time can add up to huge amounts.

I had honed in on the proper placement of the ads, concluding that having a horizontal text link ad across the top and a large rectangle ad block justified to the right within the first paragraph of text in a post were the best for my site.

All sites react differently to how and where the Adsense ads are placed, and the best thing you can do it test, test, test!

This month, my experiment dealt with how the ads look.

I will write a more detailed post about this soon because I know it’s something a lot of you are interested in, but changing the font, font size and font color of one ad block increased my click-through rate (for that one ad) from 2.87% to 5.02%.

This is why even though I had about 5000 less pageviews on the site in September vs. August (even though I still maintain the #1 ranking for security guard training), I was able to increase the income generated from this niche site from $1,498.39 to $1,585.50.

Ad optimization is extremely important, and like I said I’ll write a more detailed post about exactly what I did in the near future.

Other Niche Sites and Ranking Changes

Many of you know that I also have other niche sites which are also bringing in an income each month through Adsense and affiliate earnings.

Please respect that I do keep these other niche sites private. I would love to reveal them but I’ve already learned from revealing the security guard niche site that there are people out there who will go into the exact same niche, create a site that looks very similar, and publish content that is 95% the same as mine.

Not cool – especially because I followed the rules and did the research to create the unique content on my own.

Anyways…

One of my niche sites, which was previously ranking at #3 for its target keyword. It had been at #3 for the past few months, until I saw a sudden drop in rankings a couple of weeks ago. It moved from #3 all the way down to #62.

I had hired a temporary VA from Odesk to run through The Backlinking Strategy that Works to try to get closer to #1, and apparently Google didn’t agree with something.

From my previous experience, when something like this happens the best thing to do is to just keep going (as long as you’re following the plan as you should). I did not tell my VA to stop and all I did was write 4 more articles (over 500 words each) and posted them on the site in 4 consecutive days. By the 5th day, I was back in the top 10 and now the site is sitting at #2 for the keyword, higher than it was before.

Apparently, there needs to be some sort of balance between the content published on the site and the backlinks pointing to it. As we all know, content plays a major role in search engine rankings now and a site that lacks content, or one that hasn’t updated for a while, runs the risk of being “temporary penalized” if all of a sudden new backlinks are appearing out of nowhere.

Of course, this is all speculation based on my own experience, but to me this makes sense.

So, if your niche sites sees a sudden (and significant) drop in rankings, try adding a lot more unique content to your site. If you do that and are patient with it, you might climb back to where you were.

Smart Passive Income

The numbers for SPI just keep blowing my mind.

In September, SPI surpassed 4 million pageviews and 1.75 million visitors since its birth.

The number of subscribers surpassed 30,000 as well. I’m not sure if I’ll reach my goal of 40k by the end of the year, but it should be close. My exposure at Blog World Expo should help with that.

Affiliate earnings keep growing too, and to know that this is happening without any active promotion in a month where all I did was essentially write more blog posts, is amazing.

SPI also flirted with the #1 spot in Google for “passive income”, surpassing Wikipedia every now and then throughout the entire month. This has only recently started happening ever since upgrading the website to the Thesis Theme.

Lastly, I also upgraded to a better CDN (content delivery network). I switched from Amazon CloudFront to MaxCDN.com, which increased the site’s speed even more.

The page load time is now close to 3 seconds.

Sweet!

Okay, let’s get to the numbers…

Income Breakdown

Disclosure: many of the links below are affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I absolutely appreciate it and if you have any questions about any of the products or services please let me know!

Also, please note that a lot of these are figures from reports from each individual company for the previous month. It does not necessarily reflect the actual payment which, for some of the companies listed below, come 30 to 60 days later because of potential refunds.

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Total: $3,629.25
    • Last Month: $3,423.40
      
    • Difference:+$205.85
      

• SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com:
  • Adsense: $1,574.76
  • Job Board: $10.74
  • Total: $1,585.50
    • Last Month: $1,498.39
    • Difference: +$87.11
      

• Other Google Adsense (includes other niche sites, YouTube and infobarrel)
  • Total: $421.24
    • Last Month: $393.63
    • Difference: +$27.61

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Market Samurai: $4,900.98
  • Instant Article Factory: $373.00
  • The Best Spinner: $2,003.73
  • Blog Blueprint: $1,803.11
  • Unique Article Wizard: $2,990.88
    
  • Bluehost.com: $12,600.00
  • iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $487.47
  • Chris Guthrie’s Amazon Niche Profit Course: $210.58
  • Easy Azon WordPress Plugin: $21.24
  • Affiliate Marketing for Beginners by Corbett Barr: $474.30
  • Joseph Archibald’s 40 Day Challenge: $261.27
  • Other Niche Site Affiliate Commissions: $62.03
  • Thesis Theme for WordPress: $671.00
  • Aweber: $524.18
  • Elance.com: $413.00
  • 99Designs.com: $27.00
  • Virtual Staff Finder by Chris Ducker: $385.00
  • Beachbody Products: $65.07
  • Legalzoom: $44.55
  • Blog World Expo: $88.36
  • Total: $28,406.75
    • Last Month:$25,764.23
      
    • Difference: +$2,642.52

• iPhone Applications:
  • Paid Apps: $1,829.00
  • Free Apps: $720.53
    
  • Total: $2,549.53
    • Last Month: $2,954.75
    • Difference: -$405.22

• Gross Total in September: $36,592.27
  • Last Month: $34,034.40
  • Difference: +$2557.87

• Expenses: $5,479.87
  • Major expenses this month include travel expenses for the Financial Blogger Conference, virtual assistants, hosting account for SPI (dedicated server), the new Content Delivery Network, and recurring payments for tools like Unique Article Wizard and Article Samurai, which I’m now exploring but cannot yet recommend. Attorney and CPA fees are included here as well.

• Net Total in September: $31,112.40

(Click here to read a typical monthly expense report which breaks down where my time and money is spent)

Another incredible month, and my Bluehost earnings are just through the roof. I’m so thankful!

As I mention in all of my reports, I’ll be the first to admit that significant percentage of my income comes directly from this blog, mostly from the products that I offer as an affiliate (about 15-20% of the income listed under “affiliate income” does not come from this blog). To be honest, it was never my primary intention to make money from this site. My primary intention was and will always be to help other people understand how businesses and blogs work on the internet, and for them to be better at it after reading, watching or listening to my material, which all comes from the wins and fails of my own real-life case studies and experiences without pushing or promising anything.

I know that I’ve created a wonderful resource here on SPI with a ton of free information about all kinds of things related to online business and blogging, and the fact that people are kind enough to offer me something in return – whether it’s by going through an affiliate link, encouraging me to create a product of my own to sell, asking me for mentorship or advice, or even just thanking me for helping them earn more money online or get more traffic to their website, I am extremely grateful for and I will continue to give back with valuable content and my experience in return.

Things I Learned in September

In September, I was reminded about the importance of relationships. Online, there needs to be some level of trust between you and your readers before you can expect any type of transaction to happen – from clicking on a link to clicking on a buy now button.

If you haven’t noticed, a lot of the articles I wrote in September were about the importance of building relationships:

• SPI Session #26: Two Types of Relationships You Must Develop Online in Order to Succeed
• How to Manage Relationships Online Like a Pro (for Free)
• R.A.O.K. Friday
• And you could even include part of my presentation from the Financial Blogger Conference

Content, design, SEO – those things are all important – but they should each be guided by the relationship you want to have with your readers.

Another thing I learned was just how much people appreciate transparency.

I hear it all the time here on the blog and via email, but a lot of people came up to me in person last week, shook my hand and just thanked me for being honest – which is weird because I ask myself: does that mean everyone else is being dishonest?

I guess in the industry I’m in, people don’t necessarily “lie” (although some do, straight up), but most tend to “bend the truth”, and that scares me. Although I’m happy that being honest helps me stand out of the crowd, I wish everyone were transparent so that we could all feel safer about the decisions we make online.

Transparency is trending and you even see big brands using it as a marketing tool. Domino’s Pizza, for example, has recently been producing commercials and YouTube videos that reveal customer testimonials about their pizza, including the bad ones, and then explaining that they have to do better.

I like it.

To finish up, I’m currently working on my first paid product for the SPI community and transparency will play a huge role in my approach and how it’s marketed. It’s not for everyone, but its in high demand and it’s going to be awesome.

Thanks for all of your support, and here’s to a happy, healthy and profitable October.

Cheers!

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

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Thanks for reading!
If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

My Monthly Report – September 2011
Join the community of over 10,000 fans of SPI on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. My Monthly Report – September 2010
2. My Monthly Report – September 2009
3. My Monthly Report – October 2011
4. My Monthly Report – August 2011
5. My Monthly Report – June 2011

Welcome to my August 2011 monthly report!

Each month I write a detailed report about what’s been happening with my online businesses. I do this not only to help me keep track of my progress, but also to show you what’s working for me, and what isn’t.

I also include a detailed breakdown of the income I’ve earned online and I conclude with some of the more important things I’ve learned during the previous month.

I do all of this because I want to be transparent. I don’t consider myself a “guru” and I use my own experiences, experiments and case studies as my teaching tools.

I hope you enjoy this month’s report

Important Going-Ons in August

August was an incredibly inspirational month for me.

Not only because I achieved record breaking numbers in both traffic and income for several of my online properties, but also because I heard and shared a number of other success stories from people who are making an honest living online in industries outside of the make money online industry.

Here are links to these amazing stories in case you missed any of it.

• SPI Podcast Session #24 – Online Business Success Stories – Part 1
• SPI Podcast Session #25 – More Online Business Success Stories – Part 2
• Taking Control – An Incredible and Inspiring Success Story ($2,325.91 in a Day!) with Benny Hsu

In addition to that, my proposal to speak at Blog World Expo 2011 in Los Angeles was accepted! I’ll be speaking on the monetization track and as most of you know, I have a pretty non-traditional take on monetizing a blog so it should definitely be an interesting presentation.

I’ve been preparing and practicing my presentation skills already – keeping in line with the advice I learned in Stand and Deliver – which I highly recommend even if you don’t plan on ever doing any public speaking. The skills and tactics it teaches, which are almost scientific and mathematical, can be applied to several aspects of business and life.

Security Guard Training Headquarters

For those of you new to SPI, I recommend you check out The Niche Site Duel to see exactly how I built SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com from scratch.

Security Guard Training Headquarters is doing extremely well since the theme was updated a month ago. Adsense earnings hit a record high, the traffic has consistently been growing and I’m starting to get more emails about advertising on the site, which I have yet to take advantage of, unfortunately.

I am taking baby steps, and for administrative reasons I filed for a DBA (doing business as), primarily to setup a separate Paypal account that will make and accept payments under the name of the website. Currently, if I were to use my primarily Paypal account, it would be tied to GreenExamAcademy, which wouldn’t make a lot of sense. This isn’t required, but for me I like to keep it all separated, especially if I’ll be accepting recurring payments from companies for advertising.

I’m currently exploring a service from Adpeeps.com which would allow me to create my own ad management system on the site. I’ll save the details, once it’s up and running, for a future post.

As far as keywords are concerned, I’m still ranking #1 for security guard training and am ranking high for several other relevant keywords too, including armed security guard training, security officer training, security guard classes, security guard gear, and security guard.

I’ve noticed, however, several other copycat websites spring up as of late that don’t rip off my content 100%, but they’re pretty darn close. I knew this would happen – it was only a matter of time – but for those of you who keep asking me to disclose some of my other niche websites, this is why I don’t do that.

I would be okay with this if these sites actually added more value to the content that I had already published – that’s how we all should be approaching niche site marketing and our competitors, but sadly, they don’t. Google has consistently mentioned that creating high value content that other websites will naturally link to is the best way to show authority for a particular keyword, so if these sites want to outrank me that’s exactly what they’re going to have to do.

There’s no easy way in, and of course how fast you climb Google depends on a number of factors including strength of competition, the quality of content on your own site, the quality of backlinks pointing back to your website, on-page SEO, etc. – but the truth is you have to earn your rankings, especially if you want to stay there for a while.

iPhone App Stuff

My business partner is in a middle of a move, our developers are a little slow, and as a result we have no new applications to launch like we had hoped. As Benny’s app success story showed you, this is definitely not an overnight success kind of thing.

I’ll keep you posted if anything new comes up, but I just wanted to be honest and upfront with you – nothing new here.

Our current apps are still live and still earning for us.

Smart Passive Income

A few things to announce.

First, the SPI iPhone Application is doing really well. I launched it mid-July to make it more convenient for iPhone users to consume my content (blog, podcast, etc) and it’s proving itself to be very useful.

AppFlurry showed that the app has been used over 20,000 times, primarily to listen to my podcast, which is awesome.

For android users, I was about to get one built until I saw someone had created an unofficial SPI fan android app.I don’t have an android phone so I can’t tell if it works, but the screenshots look great and thank you to the developer for building it for me. It should serve as a good temporary fix until the official one gets released – maybe at the same time the iPhone app gets updated since there may be some new features installed.

Secondly, the SPI podcast climbed back into the top 20 business podcasts in iTunes (at the time this post was published)!

Thank you all so much for your kind words about the podcast. I really love recoding it and I can’t wait to come out with the next one in a week or so.

I also have some updates about the email subscription rates since I made changes per Derek Halpern’s conversion advice. Look out for that detailed information in an upcoming post.

Finally, I want to tell you about the WordPress Plugins I’ve been working on, which I haven’t mentioned in a while.

As you know, I tell you about my failures as much as I do my wins – and my idea to build premium WordPress plugins completely flopped.

Actually, the ideas are still good in my opinion, but the execution was terrible. I am usually pretty good to sticking with projects I’m excited about, but several things got in the way – both internal and external to the specific plugin projects – and I just had to put this particular adventure on hold for now.

Sometimes, that’s exactly what you have to do.

One of the plugins was actually built, but it did not turn out like I had hoped. This is partly the developer’s fault, but probably moreso my fault for not communicating EXACTLY what I wanted to see, which is something you have to do when outsourcing work like this.

The second plugin was half built, and like I said I just had to put it aside for other things.

Was I in over my head?

Maybe – but not because it wasn’t something I can’t do – it was just something I couldn’t complete and focus on at that moment.

All that said, I am more prepared if I do get back to it and know exactly what to expect.

Okay, let’s get to the numbers…

Income Breakdown

Disclosure: many of the links below are affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I absolutely appreciate it and if you have any questions about any of the products or services please let me know!

Also, please note that these are figures from reports from each individual company for the previous month. It does not necessarily reflect the actual payment which, for some of the companies listed below, come 30 to 60 days later because of potential refunds.

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Total: $3,423.40 (includes affiliate products)
    • Last Month: $2,979.90
      
    • Difference:+$443.50
      

• SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com:
  • Adsense: $1,487.32
  • Job Board: $11.07
  • Total: $1,498.39
    • Last Month: $1171.29
    • Difference: +$327.10 (design change for the win!)
      

• Other Google Adsense (includes other niche sites, YouTube and infobarrel)
  • Total: $393.63
    • Last Month: $410.43
    • Difference: -$16.80

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Market Samurai: $4,600.80
  • Instant Article Factory: $650.00
  • The Best Spinner: $2,270.00
  • Blog Blueprint: $1,371.20
  • Unique Article Wizard: $2,819.36
    
  • Bluehost.com: $9,935.00
  • iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $691.26
  • Chris Guthrie’s Amazon Niche Profit Course: $140.03
  • Easy Azon WordPress Plugin: $42.48
  • Affiliate Marketing for Beginners by Corbett Barr: $148.41
  • PopUp Domination: $6.64
  • Joseph Archibald’s 40 Day Challenge: $205.06
  • Other Niche Site Affiliate Commissions: $33.58
  • Glen Allsop’s Cloud Blogging: $155.50
    
  • Thesis Theme for WordPress: $1,424.00
  • Aweber: $643.92
  • WooThemes: $116.00
  • Elance.com: $103.00
    
  • Odesk.com: $100.00
  • 99Designs.com: $100.00
  • WP-Wishlist: $101.10
  • Virtual Staff Finder by Chris Ducker: $77.00
  • Beachbody Products: $29.99
  • Total: $25,764.23
    • Last Month:$24,823.72
      
    • Difference: +$940.51

• iPhone Applications:
  • Paid Apps: $2,198.00
    
  • Free Apps: $756.75
    
  • Total: $2,954.75
    • Last Month: $3,461.67
    • Difference: -$506.92

• Gross Total in August: $34,034.40
  • Last Month: $32,851.84
  • Difference: +$1,182.56

• Expenses: $4,779.58
  • Major expenses this month include booking hotel for Blog World Expo, virtual assistants, hosting account for SPI (dedicated server), new accounting software and expenses while in Boston for a client meeting.

• Net Total in August: $29,254.82

(Click here to read a typical monthly expense report which breaks down where time and money is spent)

Another awesome month, and it’s fantastic to see consistent growth all around the board.

As I mentioned in my last report, I’ll be the first to admit that a good chunk of my income comes directly from this blog, mostly from the products that I offer as an affiliate (about 20% of the income listed under “affiliate income” does not come from this blog). To be honest, it was never my primary intention to make money from this site. My primary intention was and will always be to help other people understand how businesses and blogs work on the internet, and for them to be better at it after reading, watching or listening to my material, which all comes from the wins and fails of my own real-life case studies and experiences without pushing or promising anything.

I know that I’ve created a wonderful resource here on SPI with a ton of free information about all kinds of things related to online business and blogging, and the fact that people are kind enough to offer me something in return – whether it’s by going through an affiliate link, encouraging me to create a product of my own to sell, asking me for mentorship or advice, or even just thanking me for helping them earn more money online or get more traffic to their website, I am extremely grateful for and I will continue to give back with valuable content and my experience in return.

Things I Learned in August

In August, I was reminded about the power of the spoken word.

While preparing for my upcoming presentations at the Financial Blogger’s Conference and Blog World Expo, I’ve been watching and listening to a number of speakers recommended by several of you in my last post.

I’ve watched and listened to over 20 presentations and have learned quite a bit about what kinds of things work and what kinds of things don’t, but what resonated with me most while watching each of them is just how engaged I was, as a listener, as if I was hanging on to almost every single word and the way every single word was said.

There’s really nothing like hearing someone’s actual voice. There’s a connection – something almost tangible to attach to and be reminded of later on.

This is why I believe all bloggers who want to grow should utilize their own voice for their brand.

I recommend reading Are YouTube Videos and Podcasting Worth the Effort?

Another thing I learned is that inspiration is everywhere, you just have to look for it.

The online business success stories I shared this past month totally blew me away, and based on many of your comments you were inspired by them too.

There were some common themes throughout each of the stories we heard:

1. Their success did not happen overnight, even Benny’s iPhone app success story. Yes, his app blew up like crazy a week after it was introduced to the app store, but it took him a long time and a lot of frustration to get the thing designed and just right. Time well spent indeed.
2. They each got into their businesses wanting to fulfill a need that other people had, or a gap that needed to be filled.
3. They were all very passionate about what they were doing, primarily because it related to something that was related to their own lives and experiences.

When I think about these three things, it reminds me of my own story too.

Of course, inspiration is awesome, but what you do when you are inspired means even more.

And the last thing, which is the most important thing of all – is:

Don’t forget to enjoy life!

I have to remind myself of this every once and a while and I know many of you could benefit from that as well.

I was in Boston for a few days to help out a client, and when I got back it seemed like my son was so much bigger. It was only a few days, but it’s crazy how fast they grow up. He’s counting, talking, starting to say the alphabet  - before I even know it he’ll be wearing a backpack and going to school.

That short little trip (I don’t leave the house often) made me realize how short and precious life is, and how we shouldn’t waste any second of it. Always try to enjoy what you’re doing, no matter what.

Thank you all for your support, and I wish you all the best!

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If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

My Monthly Report – August 2011
Join the community of over 10,000 fans of SPI on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. My Monthly Report – August 2010
2. My Monthly Report – August 2009
3. My Monthly Report – September 2011
4. My Monthly Report – June 2011
5. My Monthly Report – April 2011

Welcome to my July 2011 monthly income report!

Each month I write a detailed report about my online businesses – what I’ve been up to, what’s working, what’s not, and how much and where my income is coming from.

I create these reports for several reasons. First, they are here to help me keep track of how I’m progressing – sort of like an online journal that I can go back to in the future.

Secondly, I want to be transparent about everything I do online. I talk a lot about online business strategies that I use and this is where I summarize whether those things work or not. I share so you can learn from my wins, as well as from my losses too.

Lastly, I share the numbers in this post only because I know you’re interested and they inspire. I don’t do this to showoff or pretend like I’m better than anybody else, because I’m not. I just take action and execute, and these are my results.

I hope you enjoy this month’s report!

Important Going-Ons in July

Is it August already?

Unbelievable.

Even though July flew by like nobody’s business, I was still able to complete a lot of tasks that have been on my plate for quite a while.

July was all about getting things done and putting things into motion. I’ll have the month of August to see how everything goes.

The Smart Passive Income iPhone Application

The SPI iPhone Application is a free app that I launched mid-month on iTunes that anyone with an iPhone can download to more easily consume my blog content and my podcast, among other thing. An android version is in the works.

The app has a lot of special features (you can read more about it here), but the primary purpose is to give me another way to connect with my existing audience. It probably won’t be so hot as far as reaching out to new audiences on iTunes (my podcast does this for me), but I am already getting a ton of great feedback about it and how it’s making me stand out of the crowd even more, which is pretty cool.

As I mentioned in my announcement post, I want to give other bloggers and podcasters the opportunity to create an app just like this one for their own brand using the code I already have. I would like to publish the apps under my own Apple Developer’s license, which would save everyone $99/year and the extreme hassel of setting up a new developer’s account, but Apple is pretty strict on “cookie cutter” applications from a single developer – apps that are basically the same except for one or two things.

Other developers with similar services are running into issues and I would like to work this out before I offer this to others.

So if you’re on the waiting list for one of these, I’m still working on it.

Over 2000 people have downloaded the app already, which is awesome.

Derek Halpern’s Advice

I finally got around to implementing the advice from Derek Halpern of Social Triggers for increasing conversion rates and optimizing the SPI blog. If you haven’t seen the video critique, I highly recommended watching it if you want to see where I went wrong and what I was instructed to do.

I added custom subscriber boxes to my About Page, my Income Reports Page and my Video Page. I’ll be able to keep track of how these convert and will definitely report back to you next month with the results. It was silly of me not to include opt-in boxes there in the first place.

In half a day, I’ve already added 21 subscribers from the About Page alone.

I also began to create some resource pages, special landing pages on the blog that talk about a particular topic or category, and it includes links to several related posts on SPI.

They’re like “best of” pages for a particular topic. Check ‘em out below:

• How to Build a Niche Site
• Smart Affiliate Marketing Strategies
• Blogging Tips You Should Know
• Email List Building Strategies
• YouTube Marketing

You can see these in the sidebar of the blog on the right hand side along with a few other pillar posts that I’ve published.

They are a great way to organize the 400+ posts I have published on SPI and better deliver that content to you.

If you click on them now, you’ll see that the sidebars and navigation menu is missing. This is what a true landing page / squeeze page should look like, however for this blog and the content that is included on these pages, I’m thinking about re-including the sidebar and navigation so they match the rest of the site.

I would love to hear your thoughts about that.

Green Exam Academy

Sales are slowing down a bit on this site, but it is totally expected.

The summer months are terrible for exam prep material. This has been the trend for the last 3 years.

Work usually dies down industry-wide during these months and sales should begin to increase come September.

There are some changes coming up in the exam, since they update it every 2 years. I’ll have to make sure I keep up to date on that because I may have to invest a month or so to create some new material.

I’ll gladly trade a month of work (maybe 1 or 2 hours a day), for 2 years of passive income.

Security Guard Training Headquarters

On the flip side, things are looking up for this experimental niche site (at securityguardtraininghq.com), which continues to grow both in terms of traffic and income each month. I’m approaching $1200/month of residual income and an average of 550 unique visitors a day.

Check out the Niche Site Duel to see exactly how this site was built from scratch.

More and more of the articles that were published on the site in May are getting picked up by Google, and I’m seeing a TON of long-tail traffic coming in.

The site saw visitors from 4,790 different keywords in July, compared to 3,358 different keywords in June.

I’m also now ranking #1 for Armed Security Guard Training, which I did a successful backlinking campaign for during July as well.

I’m now targeting guard card, which is a California requirement for security guard training and is a very competitive eyword. Before working on it I was off the radar, but now I’m ranking #34.

It’ll take some time, but I’m on my way.

Furthermore, I just gave my VA the green light to switch the theme of the site to a brand new one that was custom designed to look more professional, be more user-friendly, and potentially increase my adense earnings. If it’s not live already, it will be live soon.

And if it looks funny, that means my VA is still working on it

I’m confident that once the switch is made later today that it will look more professional and definitely be more user-friendly, however as far as my adsense earnings, what will happen is really an unknown until it’s live for a few days.

The earnings could take a hit, or it could skyrocket. It might not even change at all since I’m keeping the general placement of the ads on the page the same.

Another thing to think about is the fact that some websites experience a drop in search engine rankings when a new design is introduced.

It could happen, although I know the site has some of the best content about security guard training on the web, so hopefully Google continues to recognize that.

We’ll see what happen, and I’ll do a more detailed report later in the month for you with some results and numbers.

iPhone Applications

We’re currently working on an update on our most profitable applications to better secure their rankings and positions in the App Store so they can continue to provide us with a generous passive income.

In August, we’re planning to work on 3 or 4 new applications at the same time, which will hopefully be ready before the holidays when app sales are always at their highest.

Happy Holidays, for sure!

Consultations

I’ve been working with a high-end client over the past couple of months (who found me through my podcast on iTunes) and although the work is definitely not passive, it is some of the most fulfilling work I’ve done in a long time. I cannot reveal who I am working with just yet, but the web and social media work I’ve been doing for them has been seeing massive results. Next month, you’ll see a decent sized portion of my income coming from this active work.

Okay, let’s get to the numbers…

Income Breakdown

Disclosure: many of the links below are affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I absolutely appreciate it and if you have any questions about any of the products or services please let me know!

Also, please note that these are figures from reports from each individual company for the previous month. It does not necessarily reflect the actual payment which, for some of the companies listed below, come 30 to 60 days later because of potential refunds.

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Total: $2,979.90 (includes affiliate products)
    • Last Month: $3,325.25
      
    • Difference:-$346.25
      

• SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com:
  • Adsense: $1162.71
  • Job Board: $8.58
  • Total: $1171.29
    • Last Month: $1093.68
    • Difference: +$77.61
      

• Other Google Adsense
  • Total: $410.43
    • Last Month: $215.26
    • Difference: +$195.17

• InfoBarrel Earnings:Total: $4.83
  • Articles Written: 3
  • Last Month: $2.21
  • Difference: +$2.62

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Market Samurai: $3,738.24
  • Instant Article Factory: $120.00
  • The Best Spinner: $1,187.00
  • Blog Blueprint: $1,336.72
  • Unique Article Wizard: $2,737.62
    
  • Bluehost.com: $7,220.00
  • Glen Allsop’s Cloud Blogging: $93.30
  • iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $858.20
  • Chris Guthrie’s Amazon Niche Profit Course: $421.07
  • Easy Azon WordPress Plugin: $245.10
  • Internet Business Mastery Academy: $1,117.95
  • Affiliate Marketing for Beginners by Corbett Barr: $187.68
  • Traffic School by Corbett Barr: $3,344.11
  • PopUp Domination: $15.14
  • Joseph Archibald’s 40 Day Challenge: $11.98
  • Other Niche Sites: $142.12
  • Thesis Theme for WordPress: $463.50
  • Aweber: $507.65
  • WooThemes: $58.00
  • Elance.com: $257.00
    
  • Odesk.com: $50.50
  • 99Designs.com: $74.75
  • WP-Wishlist: $41.10
    
  • EasyPLR: $28.75
  • Virtual Staff Finder by Chris Ducker: $255.00
    
  • Passive Income for Podcasters on PodcastAnswerMan.com: $281.25
  • Insanity Home Fitness Program: $29.99
  • Total: $24,823.72
    • Last Month:$21,203.57
      
    • Difference: +$3,620.15

• iPhone Applications:
  • Paid Apps: $2,680.00
    
  • Free Apps: $781.67
    
  • Total: $3,461.67
    • Last Month: $4,557.56
    • Difference: -$1,095.89

• Gross Total in July: $32,851.84
  • Last Month: $30,393.49
  • Difference: +$2,458.35

• Expenses: $4,267.23

• Net Total in July: $28,584.61

(Click here to read a typical monthly expense report)

Another awesome month of earnings!

I’ll be the first to admit that a good chunk of my income comes directly from this blog, mostly from the products that I offer as an affiliate (about 20% of the income listed under “affiliate income” does not come from this blog). To be honest, it was never my primary intention to make money from this site. My primary intention was and will always be to help other people understand how businesses and blogs work on the internet, and for them to be better at it after reading, watching or listening to my material, which all comes from the wins and fails of my own real-life case studies and experiences.

I know that I’ve created a wonderful resource here on SPI with a ton of (free) information about all kinds of things related to online business and blogging, and the fact that people are kind enough to offer me something in return – whether it’s by going through an affiliate link, encouraging me to create a product of my own to sell, asking me for mentorship or advice, or even just thanking me for helping them earn more money online or get a load of traffic to their website, I am extremely grateful for and I will continue to give back with valuable content and my experience in return.

Things I Learned in July

Right away, I’ll say this: it feels REALLY good to get stuff done.

That burst of energy you get when you complete something you’ve been working long and hard for – it’s amazing, and it should be acquired often.

Be careful though, because I’m not asking you to put more activities and projects onto your plate. That could actually hurt you by dividing your time and focus and you’ll end up not completing anything at all, leaving yourself with a bunch of half-finished projects.

A half-finished project might as well be no project at all.

What I recommend doing is breaking your existing goals down into smaller, more achievable goals – goals that you will reach often, knowing that with each achievement you’re getting closer and closer to your final destination.

For example, with the security guard training niche site, before I even started it I had an initial goal of earning $1000 a month from it. To get there and keep me motivated, I broke that goal into a ton of smaller, achievable goals – from building the website, publishing 10 posts in the beginning, building X amount of backlinks per day, getting within the top 100 in Google, then the top 50, top 10, then 3, then #1. Then, it was $200/month, $500/month, and finally $1000, which I met 2 months ago.

I’ve revamped the goals for the site, which I’ll share in detail in a later post, but each of those little goals gave me a boost of energy to get to the next.

If you’re not breaking down your bigger goals into smaller ones for anything you want to achieve – it doesn’t even have to be online business or blogging related – then you’re seriously decreasing your chances of ever reaching those goals.

This is why the folder system I talk about in my productivity podcast session (SPI Podcast Session #12) works so well for me.

I’m Inspired

I’ve learned that there are some amazing people doing some amazing things online.

I’m finishing up splicing together a number of interviews I did over the past couple of weeks with several people who own successful online businesses in industries completely unrelated to making money online or blogging.

These will be featured in two separate podcast episodes in the next couple of weeks. I’ve seriously listened to a few of them more than once because they are just so inspiring.

One person turned his chef experience into an online business, another person does stuff online related to a popular video game, another person used his passion for running and exercise to start a couple of online businesses – it’s crazy. And there are stories from people who have left high-paying corporate jobs, on their own will, to do business online and earn a passive income too.

I can’t wait to share these wonderful people with you, so look out for them in the next week or so.

Good luck with all of your projects – break them down so you can achieve something today – and you’ll be well on your way.

Cheers, and thanks for taking the time to July’s report!

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Thanks for reading!
If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

My Monthly Report – July 2011
Join the community of over 10,000 fans of SPI on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. My Monthly Report – July 2009
2. My Monthly Report – July 2010
3. My Monthly Report – October 2011
4. My Monthly Report – December 2011
5. My Monthly Report – November 2011

Welcome to my June 2011 monthly income report!

Each month I share the income I’ve generated online – down to the penny. I do this for several reasons:

1. To help me keep track of my progress and focus on improving the numbers each and every month.
2. To help you understand the kinds of ways one can generate an income online.
3. To share what has and what has not been working for me. And most importantly…
4. To be transparent and real about what I do.

As you’ll see, this report isn’t just about the numbers – it’s about education, inspiration and illustrating how anyone can become successful online. I am nobody special – and if I can do it, you can too.

I hope you enjoy this month’s report.

Important Going-Ons in June

June was all about improvement.

I’m sure many of you can relate to this: as an online entrepreneur, it’s in our nature to focus those frequent ‘entrepreneurial bursts of energy’ on brand new projects – putting less focus on some of the older projects we already have in place.

Starting and experimenting with new projects is good – it’s really what the Smart Passive Income Blog is all about – however, it can lead to spreading oneself thin and not realizing existing projects to their full potential.

In June, I focused on improving the existing web properties and projects I already had in place.

Security Guard Training Headquarters

Check out The Niche Site Duel to see exactly how this site was built from scratch, less than a year ago.

This niche site, the newest and most public addition to my passive income portfolio, continues to grow both in terms of traffic and income. For the second month in a row it has earned over $1000.

I’ve been working on improving this site for the past 2 months, investing about a month’s worth of income to hire a writer from Elance to do research and complete the content that was missing from the site.

Now, there are 109 posts published on the site, all “seeds” that have been planted that could pull in more long-tail traffic (and income) through keywords that are a lot less competitive. Already, the site is starting to see results:

• In May, it was found via 2,366 different keywords.
• In June, it was found via 3,358 different keywords.

That’s a significant jump, and the more time that goes by, the more traffic I should see thanks to this investment.

Also in June, I’ve been working on a redesign of the niche site.

Although I’m happy with the free theme I used to launch the website and it’s performing really well, I’m interested to see how a more professional design will compare as far as engagement, email signups and of course, income. Plus, it will probably help when seeking out potential advertisers for the site too.

When I make the switch, I’ll do a more detailed post about the design, where it came from and how it performs, but because I know you’re interested in what it looks like, I’ve included a mock-up design for you below:

My full time programmer has already coded this for me and we’re just testing a few more things before it goes live.

Thanks to everyone who commented on the design on my Facebook Page – the immediate feedback was extremely helpful. (Don’t worry, I got rid of the glow behind the man and the logo – and I have to reiterate the power of Facebook here – 50 comments within the first couple of hours, for free. Out of this world.)

Also, I have to write (or hire a writer) to create the Top 10 Security Guard Interview Tips eBook that will be used as a lead magnet for my email list. Currently on the site, the opt-in form is below-the-fold at the bottom of the sidebar and there’s no real incentive to subscribe, so I suspect these numbers will increase dramatically once the switch is made.

What I’m most interested in is how this will effect my Adsense earnings. Will they go up, or will they go down? The only way to really know is to make the switch and test it out for a week or two.

Of course, I’ll keep you posted.

Any thoughts on the new redesign?

The Smart Passive Income Blog

In the beginning of June, I shared a couple of very detailed posts about where the SPI blog is lacking and what I can do to improve:

• Smart Passive Income Gets Critiqued – Conversion Strategies with Derek Halpern
• What Else is Wrong with the Smart Passive Income Blog – SEO Mistakes

As you can see, you don’t have to be perfect to make headway online – just learn as you go and make improvements along the way – that’s exactly what I’ve done since the beginning.

The video critique with Derek was especially helpful, and although you don’t see most those recommended changes on the site yet, there is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that will eventually lead to those changes.

Primarily, the SPI blog is going through a major backend redesign – meaning the coding structure and CSS of the site are being redone. The way the site was originally put together (by 3 different designers over time) made the coding really “dirty” and not optimized at all for speed and search engine optimization.

The redesign is almost complete and you should be able to tell when that happens, although of course I’ll make a formal announcement and share more details about exactly what’s going on.

After the backend is complete, it’ll be easy for me to update the site based on Derek’s suggestions.

iPhone Applications

iPhone apps have been bringing in a steady passive income of $3000 to $6000 a month for over 2 years now for my partner and me.

In June, we decided that we’re going to get active again and shoot for $10,000.00 per month. We’re hiring a developer to code for us full time and turn some more of the ideas that we have into apps. This, mixed with some unique marketing strategies we’re going to try should get us to that next level – hopefully by the end of the year. And who knows, maybe one of ideas will become the next Angry Birds…

Highly unlikely – but hey at least we’re giving it a shot.

In addition to new applications, we’re going back to our old applications and updating those as well.

I’m excited.

Let’s get to the numbers…

Income Breakdown

Disclosure: many of the links below are affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I absolutely appreciate it and if you have any questions about any of the products or services please let me know!

Also, please note that these are figures from reports from each individual company for the previous month. It does not necessarily reflect the actual payment which, for some of the companies listed below, come 30 to 60 days later because of potential refunds.

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Total: $3,328.25 (includes affiliate products)
    • Last Month: $3,118.35
      
    • Difference:+$209.90
      

• SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com:
  • Adsense: $1086.64
  • Job Board: $7.04
  • Total: $1093.68
    • Last Month: $1077.72
    • Difference: +$15.96
      

• Other Google Adsense
  • Total: $215.26
    • Last Month: $260.05
    • Difference: -$44.79

• InfoBarrel Earnings:Total: $2.21
  • Articles Written: 3
  • Last Month: $3.55
  • Difference: -$1.34

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Market Samurai: $4,560.96
  • Instant Article Factory: $80.00
  • The Best Spinner: $1,658.00
  • Blog Blueprint: $1,387.74
  • Unique Article Wizard: $2,279.34
    
  • Bluehost.com: $7,505.00
  • Glen Allsop’s Cloud Blogging: $92.91
  • iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $310.52
  • Chris Guthrie’s Amazon Niche Profit Course: $324.59
  • Chris Guthrie’s EasyAzon WordPress Plugin: $21.24
  • Internet Business Mastery Academy: $456.05
  • Affiliate Marketing for Beginners by Corbett Barr: $187.68
  • PopUp Domination: $23.53
  • Joseph Archibald’s 40 Day Challenge: $168.10
  • Other Niche Sites: $134.58
  • Thesis Theme for WordPress: $54.12
  • Aweber: $305.87
  • Amazon Associates: $72.75
  • WooThemes: $54.00
  • Elance.com: $380.00
    
  • Odesk.com: $400.00
  • 99Designs.com: $50.00
  • WP-Wishlist: $130.20
    
  • EasyPLR: $33.25
  • Virtual Staff Finder by Chris Ducker: $77.00
    
  • Insanity Home Fitness Program: $146.80
  • Thrive-90: $84.00
  • MindMeister: $193.84
  • Clicky Web Analytics: $31.50
  • Total: $21,203.57
    • Last Month:$18,638.24
      
    • Difference: +$2,565.33

• iPhone Applications:
  • Paid Apps: $3,621.00
    
  • Free Apps: $936.56
    
  • Total: $4,557.56
    • Last Month: $3,511.22
    • Difference: +$1,046.34

• Gross Total in June: $30,393.49
  • Last Month: $26,609.13
  • Difference: +$3,784.36

(Click here for a typical monthly expense report)

Another stellar month, surpassing $30k for the first time in a very long time without any large sums of income from a coaching course or consultation.

My affiliate earnings have gone through the roof, as you can tell – most of it coming as a result of the SPI blog, my podcast and related YouTube videos. I’m very grateful for the undying support of the SPI community, and I hope you can tell that building relationships with your readers and creating massive value for them is really the only way to build a sustainable online business, even if you don’t have any of your own products – which I don’t.

The best part is that because of these relationships, I have thousands of people on my team (Team Pat!) who aren’t afraid to drop my name on their own blogs or by word of mouth and market for me.

As I mentioned in a previous income report, my large affiliate earnings are starting to classify me as one who only makes money by teaching others how to make money online – and I do not want to be put into that category, but – I guess it’s almost inevitable because of the numbers and how popular this blog is growing. It sort of overshadows that I still earn between $7k and $12k a month outside of this niche, which is an amount I would be extremely happy with if that was all I earned.

Don’t get me wrong – I obviously welcome the additional income and am very thankful and fortunate that I’m in a place where I’m earning more in 2 months than I used to earn in a year of working my old 9 to 5 job. I’m so glad I was laid off…

Things I Learned in June

I touched on this briefly earlier in the report, but it’s important so I’ll mention it again – you don’t have to be perfect in order to make progress and see results. In fact, your audience appreciates imperfection and transparency.

The two posts that I linked to that showed some of the issues with the SPI blog were two of the most viewed posts this month – and based on the comments a lot of people felt better after reading that a site like SPI was not perfect, and it still isn’t.

Based on the same themes of transparency and being real, my most popular post of the month was The Dark Side of Successful Blogging, a post where I shared some of the not-so-talked about, not-so-happy things that can come with being a successful blogger.

The point is – don’t be afraid to be real. You don’t have to paint a pretty picture and pretend you’re someone you’re not online, because people can see right through that. You become more believable and more authoriratative if you tell it like it is. People appreciate that – especially online where one can easily choose to show only what’s working (e.g. someone who made $100,000 in affiliate commissions, only to leave out the part that they spend $125,000 in Adwords and Facebook ads to achieve those earnings.).

Other important lessons were brought back our attention recently when California, my home state, passed a bill that resulted in Amazon.com eliminating its relationship with California-based affiliates, damming the income streams of tens of thousands of people, including me.

The key lessons learned here are:

1. The importance of diversification; and
2. The importance of control.

Diversification is important because, as demonstrated by Amazon, if you rely on only one income source and something happens to it, you’re done.

I’m very fortunate that I didn’t rely so heavily on Amazon.com as an income stream, but a lot of other people (and companies that employed many people), were not so lucky. Some people’s lives changed dramatically overnight with the simple signing of one’s signature on a bill.

Diversify by creating new web properties, trying other affiliate programs, expanding onto other platforms, adding new products to your product line, mixing up your backlinking strategy, and building new relationships.

Control is important too. The best type of income you can earn online is the one from a source that you can control. It’s hard (and nearly impossible) to have 100% control, but the more control – the better.

Writing on your own blog, for example, gives you more control than writing for another site that you don’t own. eHow.com, for example, just recently cut off their writer’s compensation program and terminated the passive income of thousands of people, and what they do is nothing we can control.

We can’t control Amazon’s decisions either. We can possibly influence decisions, which can be very powerful, however if you really want to give yourself the safest route to a successful online business, you should definitely do what you can to maximize control.

And of course, diversification and control go hand-in-hand here.

These are definitely some important lessons to think about.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s income report. I have some really cool things coming up for you in July, including something for those of you with iPhones, so look out for that.

Here’s to a profitable month! Cheers!

---------------------
Thanks for reading!
If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

My Monthly Report – June 2011
Join the community of over 10,000 fans of SPI on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. My Monthly Report – June 2009
2. My Monthly Report – June 2010
3. My Monthly Report – September 2011
4. My Monthly Report – August 2011
5. My Monthly Report – May 2011

Welcome to my monthly report for May of 2011!

As many of you know, once a month I publish a report that details exactly where my online revenue comes from, along with the lessons I’ve learned and what I plan to do next.

I write these reports for a number of reasons: to help me keep track of my progress with my online businesses, to hold myself accountable for the goals that I set out to achieve, and most importantly to inspire and show you that it really can be done.

Thank you for your support, your encouragement, your constructive criticism and fervor for the SPI brand and everything I do. It means the world to me.

Important Going-Ons in May

A lot of great things happened with my security guard training niche site, a site that I recently created and revealed publicly here on the blog.

It’s still sitting at #1 in Google, and it grossed over $1,000 in residual income in May. I saw the highest grossing day ever ($90.48 on May 23rd), and although that particular day’s income was somewhat of an anomaly, all signs are telling me that the site may eventually get to a point where $90 to $100 a day could become a normal day’s passive income.

This is why I turned down a five-figure offer for the site (and a counter-offer as well), because there’s still a lot of potential that has yet to be realized.

To help me reach my potential, I finally got around to filling out the site and adding more content to it. When I got to #1 in Google in November of 2010 (73 days after starting), I had about 30 posts published on the site, which included state requirements for only 11 of the 50 U.S. states. A lot of content was missing, and because I was sitting at #1 in Google already it was hard for me to justify spending hours a day doing the research and writing the content to fill out the site.

That’s definitely not the right mindset.

Although getting to #1 in the search engines is a goal, it doesn’t mean I should stop there, especially knowing that over 55% of my search engine traffic comes from keywords other than my target keyword.

I finally took action and hired a writer on Elance to do the research and create the rest of the articles for me.

As of today, the site currently has all 50 states covered for Unarmed Security Guard Training requirements, and I re-hired the same writer to do research and write posts for “Armed” Security Guard Training, which will add another 50 articles to the site and, over time, a substantial number of long tail keywords that I could potentially rank for.

I’m currently running a backlinking campaign that targets the keyword Armed Security Guard Training that points to a secondary page on the site that will include a list of all 50 states requirements. According to Market Samurai, the keyword has comparable search numbers to my primary keyword, however it’s a bit more competitive.

Right now, I’m sitting at #5 for that keyword, and I’m shooting for the top once again.

The “write more, get found more” strategy is already working its magic. Between April 1st and April 30th, the site was found on Google by 1,728 different keywords. Between May 1st and May 31st, after the new articles had been posted for a majority of the month, the site was found with 2,366 different keywords.

And of course, as a result, my traffic is going up, and so is my income.

Once all of the new content is up, I’ll have a site that should be 100% ready for a massive private advertising and paid directory campaign. I’ll definitely keep you posted.

Going “Insane”

A lot of you have been asking me how my Insanity workouts have been going, so here’s a quick update.

I’m in my final week of the 60-day at-home fitness program, and it’s been such an awesome experience!

My wife and I together have done every single workout and we’re both feeling great, which definitely helps to keep up with our 17 month old son who runs around like crazy and needs every single ounce of our energy to keep safe and entertained. Every day – 7am to 8pm at night…it’s crazy, but I love it.

Anyways, I personally feel like I’m in the best shape of my life, and I even “tested” my endurance in a 5k “ridiculous obstacle course” race a couple of weeks ago, and after the race, when I’d usually be tired and on the ground, I felt like I could have ran a marathon.

Here’s a picture of me, my wife April, and one of our teammates after crossing the finish line:

After I finish Insanity, I’ll be publishing a post about the program and the kind of changes I’ve seen, including some before and after pictures. Already I can tell the results will be better than my P90x Results post.

The Smart Passive Income Blog

I feel like I’m a broken record when I say this, but the SPI blog saw record numbers once again, on several different levels:

• Visitors: 138,742
• Average Time Spent on Site: 7 minutes 10 seconds!
• Bounce Rate: 25%
• New Subscribers: 2,205

(Stats from Clicky)

The time spent on site is what really blows me away. 7 minutes is out of this world and it makes me so happy to know that I can provide content that invites people to spend that much time with me here on my blog. It means a lot, and I’ll always do my best to make sure you get something out of your time spent reading, watching or listening to my content.

My most viewed pages and posts were:

1. How to Create a Facebook Landing Page (12,335 pageviews)
   • Interesting info:
     • 53% of visits from Google Search
     • 27% of visits from YouTube (from the link shown in the description of this video)
2. My Income Reports (11,692 pageviews)
3. The Niche Site Duel Hubpage (11,421 pageviews)
4. My Income Report – April 2011 (9,454 pageviews)
5. The Backlinking Strategy That Works (9,234 pageviews)
6. Passive Income 101 (8,301 pageviews)
7. I Was Just Offered 5 Figures for my Niche Site (6,766 pageviews)
8. Resources (6,420 pageviews)

My top 10 search terms were:

1. smart passive income (7,011)
2. passive income (4,626)
3. smartpassiveincome (2,484)
4. pat flynn (2,206)
5. passive income ideas (1,010)
6. niche site duel (781)
7. facebook landing page (630)
8. facebook html (470)
9. passive income blog (378)
10. smart passive income blog (349)

My top 20 traffic sources were:

A couple of interesting things to note about my traffic sources:

First, notice Yahoo (#10) and Bing (#12). Yes – people actually use those search engines, so don’t discount them all together. Where are you in Yahoo and Bing’s search engine?

Secondly, people who visit my blog as a result of a recommendation from another blogger spend a lot more time on my site than any other kind of traffic source, by far.

Thirdly, Facebook (#4) and YouTube (#5) are right up there, and still there are those who are afraid to branch out and utilize those traffic sources. You’re missing out!

I think it’s time for the income breakdown…

Income Breakdown

Disclosure: many of the links below are affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I absolutely appreciate it and if you have any questions about any of the products or services please let me know!

Also, please note that these are figures from reports from each individual company for the previous month. It does not necessarily reflect the actual payment which, for some of the companies listed below, come 30 to 60 days later because of potential refunds.

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Total: $3,118.35 (includes affiliate products)
    • Last Month: $3,626.05
      
    • Difference:-$507.70
      

• SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com:
  • Adsense: $1073.80
  • Job Board: $0.96
  • Amazon.com: $2.96
  • Total: $1077.72
    • Last Month: $777.34
    • Difference: +$300.38
      

• Other Google Adsense
  • Total: $260.05
    • Last Month: $244.47
    • Difference: +$15.58

• InfoBarrel Earnings:Total: $3.55
  • Articles Written: 3
  • Last Month: $3.92
  • Difference: -$3.07

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Market Samurai: $4,131.84
  • Instant Article Factory: $43.00
  • The Best Spinner: $1,639.00
  • Blog Blueprint: $1,881.55
  • Unique Article Wizard: $2,252.54
    
  • Bluehost.com: $6,175.00
  • Glen Allsop’s Cloud Blogging: $93.30
  • iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $202.89
  • Chris Guthrie’s Amazon Niche Profit Course: $290.13
  • Internet Business Mastery Academy: $123.95
  • Affiliate Marketing for Beginners by Corbett Barr: $78.54
  • PopUp Domination: $38.12
  • Joseph Archibald’s 40 Day Challenge: $93.47
  • Other Niche Sites: $136.14
  • Aweber: $389.36
  • Amazon Associates: $135.38
  • WooThemes: $72.00
  • Elance.com: $412.00
    
  • Odesk.com: $50.00
  • WP-Wishlist: $225.60
    
  • EasyPLR: $20.43
  • Virtual Staff Finder by Chris Ducker: $154.00
    
  • Total: $18,638.24
    • Last Month:$16,538.49
      
    • Difference: +$2,099.75

• iPhone Applications:
  • Paid Apps: $2,481.00
    
  • Free Apps: $1,030.22
    
  • Total: $3,511.22
    • Last Month: $3,998.46
    • Difference: -$487.24

• Gross Total in May: $26,609.13
  • Last Month: $41,634.24
  • Difference: -$15,025.11

Last month’s report included two large chunks of income (over $16k) from a coaching course and a consultation gig, which is why this month’s total is significantly less than the previous, however if you take that into account my online income is still on the rise.

Now, if you’ve been following my income reports for a while, you’ll notice that a part of my income report may be “missing”.

eHow.com, a site I had once written articles for back in 2008 and have since been earning a consistent $200 to $300 a month from, has decided they no longer want to pay royalties to those who participated in their Writer’s Compensation Program. They offered to buy the rights to everyone’s articles for a lump sum, and if authors decide not to accept the offer, the articles will get taken down.

This is very interesting stuff that I’m sure we could talk about for days, but I’ll save it for a later post. Just wanted to share why eHow will no longer show up on my income report.

This just shows you how important diversification is in the make money online world, because you never know one income stream that seemed reliable one day, might be gone the next.

Things I Learned in May

My good friend Chris Ducker from VirtualBusinessLifestyle.com, who was our guest on SPI Podcast Session #20, said something in his interview that I believe I had heard before, but I don’t know – maybe it was his British Accent or something – it just really resonated with me this time.

Chris said, “Money can be made. Time however, once you’ve spent your time it’s gone forever.”

It might also be because I get to see exactly how fast my son is growing up. I can actually measure his height and feel how much heavier he is, and it really scares me. Not that I don’t want him to grow up, I just don’t want to miss any part of it, and the more I can become more efficient in my businesses, the more passive my passive income can be, the more I can spend time with him here at home.

I printed out Chris’s quote and have it tacked on the wall next to my computer because it’s perfect. If I get distracted – a quick glance and I’m back where I need to be.

Another thing I learned is how effective “teasers” are. Think about movie trailers – the best ones leave you hanging and wanting more, and that’s what brings in the business later on.

Online, one person quickly comes to mind when it comes to utilizing the “teaser” – Glen Allsop from Viperchill.com.

If you follow Glen on Twitter, he loves to post teasers, typically to content or products that he has coming out soon, and they always draw me in. Here’s an example of one of his tweets from the other day:

Good times.

Thanks for all your support, and here’s to a profitable and efficient June!

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Thanks for reading!
If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

My Monthly Report – May 2011
Join the community of over 10,000 fans of SPI on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. My Monthly Report – March 2011
2. My Monthly Report – September 2011
3. My Monthly Report – April 2011
4. My Monthly Report – February 2011
5. My Monthly Report – June 2011

It’s the first Monday of the month, which means it’s time for another income report!

Each month I write a detailed report about my online income – how much I’ve made, where it comes from, and most importantly what I did and what I’ve learned along the way. I do this not only to help me keep track of how my multiple online businesses are progressing, but also to teach, inspire and show the world that a regular person like myself, with some hard work and smart planning, can do some wonderful things online – and so can you.

These monthly reports have grown to become the most popular and most visited posts on the blog, so as long as you still feel they are useful, I will definitely continue to publish them. And as always – thank you for your support!

Let’s get started.

Important Going-Ons in April

Something a little different than usual – I was paid for some social media consultation and web design work that I’ve been doing for the past couple of months for a client who actually found me through my podcast on iTunes.

I typically don’t agree to do that much consultation work, but I was in full support of what my client is aiming to achieve and was happy to provide my services.

A lot of the work included designing and programming a new website, which I handed off to my programmer who did an awesome job. In that sense, it was indeed an extra form of passive income. In total, I would say I spent about 10 hours of actual work on this project myself, which isn’t very much time at all.

My Security Guard Training Niche Site

My security guard training niche site, which was born from the Niche Site Duel, saw record earnings again in April. Still sitting at the #1 position in Google, I had a couple of $60.00 days which is awesome.

I did not add any new content or do any backlinking, so my time invested here in April was next to nothing.

I did, however, spend about a half an hour posting a new job on Elance to help complete the site. Let me explain…

You see, every state in the U.S. has different security guard training requirements – different hours, different courses, different procedures, etc. Currently, my site only provides specific information for 11 of the 50 states. Although they are the most popular states in the industry, I stopped adding new content when the site hit #1 in Google as I began to focus on creating new niche sites.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier, but I hired a person on Elance to complete the information for the remaining 39 states. It makes sense now that I have a steady flow of income that I can reinvest in the site.

I’m hoping that after information about all 50 states are published on the site, it will:

• Look much more complete and official as an authority resource for security guard training.
• Help rank for keywords that relate to security guard training in the other 39 states.
• Increase traffic to the site because of keyword rankings and word of mouth.
• And as a result increase revenue from Adsense and advertising.

Plus, if I ever plan on selling the site, it will be worth much more since it’ll will be complete.

The person I hired is an American-based writer who has a fantastic reputation on Elance with a ton of great feedback and a number of repeat customers. After a quick interview, I hired her with confidence knowing she could get the job done. She even agreed to make phone calls to companies in each of the remaining states to make sure the information was 100% correct.

I’ll keep you updated on the progress, but because I know you’re interested, the fixed price for this job with this particular provider on Elance came out to be $875.00, which is about a month’s worth of income for the site. I suspect that the cost will be easily made up after all of the new information is published on the site.

Good times!

My Getting Started Page

As many of you know, I finally completed my first version of a Getting Started Page here on The Smart Passive Income Blog. The purpose of this page is to give new visitors one place where they can get all of the information they need to get started on the blog – either as a newbie who wants to know where to begin, or someone experienced who wants links to my best content.

I talk more about the purpose of this page on The Hole on Most Blogs (Including Mine) That Needs to Be Filled.

I think the page I created does an excellent job of organizing and condensing the 400+ pages of information that exist on SPI for anyone new, however when I announced that the page was live last week, it was met with mixed reviews.

A number of people told me the page has way too much information on it and is overwhelming. Others, including some first timers to the blog, tell me it’s perfect and exactly what they wanted to see.

I think compared to what the blog was like before this page existed, it’s a home run – especially considering how overwhelming the blog was to a new visitor beforehand. But, I also agree that the page does have a lot of information on it. I may try to break the information up into 2 or 3 different pages and see how people respond to that.

Overall, it’s a major success and already I’m tracking a number of affiliate sales coming from the “domain and hosting” portion of the page, so it is being read and it is being used.

Lastly, I’ll be attempting to “double index” SPI for the term “passive income” on Google with this page. Double indexing is when you have your website show up twice, right next to each other, on the search engine results page. Here’s an example from CopyBlogger for the term “copywriting”:

Similarly, SPI ranks #2 in Google for “passive income”, outranked only by Wikipedia. If I can do this, it will drastically increase the traffic coming to my site since I’ll have the #2 and #3 spots in Google (or better yet, the #1 and #2 spots…if I can outrank Wikipedia).

There are various strategies to achieve the “double index”, but I’ll save that for a later post.

Ok – I think it’s time to get into the numbers for April

Income Breakdown

Disclosure: many of the links below are affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I absolutely appreciate it and if you have any questions about any of the products or services please let me know!

Also, please note that these are figures from reports from each individual company for the previous month. It does not necessarily reflect the actual payment which, for some of the companies listed below, come 30 to 60 days later because of potential refunds.

• GreenExamAcademy.com Product Sales:
  • Total: $3,626.05 (includes affiliate products)
    • Last Month: $4,534.87
      
    • Difference:-$908.82
      

• SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com:
  • Adsense: $774.30
  • Job Board: $3.04
  • Total: $777.34
    • Last Month: $660.70
    • Difference: +$116.64
      

• Other Google Adsense
  • Total: $244.47
    • Last Month: $330.54
    • Difference: -$86.07

• eHow Earnings:Total: $259.51
  • Articles Written: 139
  • Last Month: $393.69
  • Difference: -$134.18

• InfoBarrel Earnings:Total: $3.92
  • Articles Written: 3
  • Last Month: $6.98
  • Difference: -$3.06
    

• Affiliate Earnings:
  • Market Samurai: $3,430.56
  • Instant Article Factory: $243.00
  • The Best Spinner: $1,427.00
  • Blog Blueprint: $1,476.97
  • Unique Article Wizard: $1,957.74
    
  • Bluehost.com: $5,320.00
  • iPhone Apps w/o Experience eBook: $468.50
  • Chris Guthrie’s Amazon Niche Profit Course: $149.69
  • Internet Business Mastery Academy: $145.50
  • Affiliate Marketing for Beginners by Corbett Barr: $197.88
  • PopUp Domination: $38.22
  • Joseph Archibald’s 40 Day Challenge: $484.11
  • Other Niche Sites: $167.21
  • Aweber: $324.36
  • Amazon Associates: $197.77
  • WooThemes: $28.00
  • Elance.com: $40.00
    
  • Odesk.com: $50.00
  • WP-Wishlist: $116.40
    
  • EasyPLR: $150.58
  • 99Designs.com: $50.00
  • Virtual Staff Finder by Chris Ducker: $75.00
    
  • Total: $16,538.49
    • Last Month:$16,574.47
      
    • Difference: -$35.98

• Consultation & Web Design
  • Total: $5000.00

• Niche Site Coaching 2.0
  • Total: $11,186.00

• iPhone Applications:
  • Paid Apps: $2,344.00
    
  • Free Apps: $1,654.46
    
  • Total: $3,998.46
    • Last Month: $6,928.68
    • Difference: -$2,930.22

• Gross Total in April: $41,634.24
  • Last Month: $29,429.93
  • Difference: +$12,204.31

This is definitely my highest grossing month ever, although the figures are a bit skewed because I don’t usually have the large sums from consultation and coaching like you see in this month’s report. Even without those, my income still remains fairly steady around the mid 20k mark, and although it’s true that a large percentage of that does come from this blog and “making money online” tools and resources (thanks to those of you who have used my affiliate links!), I hope it doesn’t take away from the fact that I am still earning a decent income from businesses outside of this niche, which was really what I wanted to showcase on this blog when I created it back in 2008.

My large affiliate earnings are starting to classify me as one who only makes money by teaching others how to make money online – and I do not want to be put into that category, but – I guess it’s almost inevitable because of the numbers and how popular this blog is growing. It sort of overshadows that I still earn between $7k and $12k a month outside of this niche, which is an amount I would be completely happy with if that was all I earned. Don’t get me wrong though, I am extremely happy about the affiliate earnings and especially my non-aggressive, “this is how I do it and these are the tools that I use myself” approach to it.

Things I Learned in April

One important thing I learned in April is that you cannot please everybody, and you shouldn’t try to! When I went live with my Getting Started Page, I thought it was perfect and that it was everything people were looking for, but as I mentioned before, it was met with mixed reviews. It can be really easy to get caught up in the comments and suggestions, to make immediate changes and then more changes when more comments come in, but it’s best to let things settle down first and wait until the new-ness factor of whatever it is goes away.

Do you remember how many people hated Facebook’s “like” button when it first came out? It replaced the “Become a Fan” button and everyone went crazy for about a week, but now that the change isn’t new anymore and people are getting used to it – the “like” button can be seen as a major success that has changed the way we interact and share things on the web. I’m glad Facebook didn’t give in to what a lot of people wished for, because now the “like” button and Facebook are the #1 traffic source for SPI.

I’ll sit on the current design for now, and maybe make a few tweaks here and there as time goes by, but I know it’s a good page, and I’m going to stick with it.

Another thing I learned in April was that you should make it a daily routine to check your stats – or at least a couple times a week. With passive income, it can be easy to just let things ride without checking, but the problem with that is that if something happens, you’ll never know until you either get a notification, or you check and find out on your own, at which point it could be too late.

The reason I bring this up is because – if you noticed, my iPhone application earnings took a bit of a hit in April. The reason was because our “paid application contract” expired, and we were not sent any notifcations about it. Two weeks went by and all of our paid applications were taken out of iTunes, and as a result we lost about $80-$150 a day.

Not cool.

When I finally checked my stats for this income report, I saw that the later half of April produced no income from paid apps, so I logged into our account with Apple and of course, there was a notification that said we had some paperwork to take care of.

Now, I could blame Apple for not sending an email – and they totally should have, but it’s a two way street and as a business owner it’s my responsibility to keep tabs on how the business is progressing at all times…not just once a month for an income report, but at least twice a week (preferably every day – it only takes a minute) to make sure all systems are go.

To streamline this, it would be smart of me to allocate maybe 10 minutes a day to check the stats of all of my businesses and websites, just to make sure everything is healthy. I could maybe have a “quick open” tab or shortcut that opens them all up at the same time. That said, I have to be sure to not get too engulfed in the numbers and what they mean, which I tend to do when I’m looking at stats. That should be reserved for another time during the week or month.

It’s a learning process!

Thanks for all of your support, and here’s to a profitable and healthy May!

Cheers!

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My Monthly Report – April 2011
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Related posts:

1. My Monthly Report – April 2009
2. My April 2011 Expense Report
3. My Monthly Report – April 2010
4. My Monthly Report – March 2011
5. My Monthly Report – February 2011