A lot of things are happening…

Each month, I report on the activities performed for my online company. In the month of May, I’ll take a pause from the classic Evo Report and tell you what we discussed during our annual meeting. Each year, my partner and I take a full day (or a weekend depending on the situation) where we start working at 7am and finish around a beer, ribs and a hockey game. We started this initiative a long time ago when we decided our blog activity was a business. Each year brings its challenges and new ideas. Here’s what we have discussed for 2013. I hope it will inspire you!

Another Discussion I Should Have Had a While Ago

Not so long ago, I discussed on this blog how I should have a clear discussion about our personal finances with my wife. I was hesitant to start this discussion as I didn’t want to turn it into an argument. Well a similar situation was required with my partner. We both have well paid day jobs and busy lives. Last year, I had my third I child and he had his first. He was surprised to see how much time and energy a newborn takes in a day and I was surprised to see how my new job drained me at first. The result of these situations (doubled by the fact that the income was harder to earned) was a drop in our motivation and the number of hours worked in the company. This is why I had to discuss this issue with my friend: what stand do we take with regards to our business? Is it a hobby paying for our internet or do we want to eventually work full time online?

I was somewhat scared to have this discussion with my partner for two reasons:

#1 I didn’t want him to think I was disappointed by his work as I consider I underperformed as well. Sometimes, the other party could think you are blaming them while you are trying to have an honest discussion.

#2 I was scared that he would tell me he just wanted to keep the company as is to see how it goes. If we want to continue making money from our websites, we have to continuously evolve. Business model changes through times in the “real world”, it’s happening in the internet world as well.

The end result was very satisfying; I was scared for nothing. We are both committed to work harder on the company this year and that we would eventually be happy to work full time on our sites. I don’t think this situation will happen very soon considering that we both love our jobs and that we are making a good pay check. However, the plan remains the same; the day I want to retire early, I will count on my online gigs to make it happen. Same for him. In the meantime, we will continue to grow the company as we grow our careers.

Blog (R)Evolution

Hosting our blogs is not enough anymore if we want to go to the next level. We can use our blogs as a launching platform and brand, but we need to expand from simply having a blog set on WordPress. I’ve discussed that we will be working on our traffic by improving our social media presence along with going mobile for our sites. The Facebook page should be as important as our blog. The reason is simple; people going on my Facebook Page, following my twitter account or communicating through Google + are all independent from search engines.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter if Google likes my sites or not; I will continue to get traffic. Aside from social media and becoming mobile friendly, we will also work with different media this year…

Videos & Possibly Podcasts

We just ordered our microphone along with screen capture video software. Our first goal was to build tutorials about things we do (manage our mailing list with Aweber, doing keyword research with Market Samurai, stock research and analysis, etc.). We thought that adding video on our blogs would make them more interesting for readers and could help us rank in another great search engine site; YouTube.

Once we got the idea of doing tutorials and short videos, we started brainstorming on another level. We thought that making podcasts could be another very interesting addition to our brand. Stock market reviews for one could be a great hit. Since we have a huge investing mailing list, we could start our podcast with several subscribers instantly. It’s now just a matter of mastering the art of the microphone before going live.

Membership Websites

Since creating a membership website is one of my 2013 blogging goals, we took a good part of our day to brainstorm on this idea. We had several previous discussions about it but taking 3 hours straight to define our project truly helped to put it in the right light.

We discussed the time table to make sure we will be able to launch it on time. Such projects require several parties and need to be coordinated. We will need a programmer to organise different pages in our site, a designer to make it look sharp, an editor as we need all wording to be perfect and fellow bloggers to publish guest posts, reviews, etc.

We will also create a beta class for long time readers where they will have access to the membership site for free in exchange of their feedback. This will be a great way to make sure we have built a useful tool for investing. If this project works, this may be the beginning of a much bigger company!

Maximize Our VA Utilisation

We have the chance of having one of our VAs working near us. We were then able to invite her for lunch and get her direct feedback on what works and what doesn’t. We also gave her objectives to complete throughout the year. One of them is to take care of the social media campaign. She’s in charge of setting our pages and monitoring our progress.

We also wanted her to get clients for private advertising. We are not talking about sidebar links here but to get private clients for complete advertising campaigns. It could be reviews of their products, CPM ads or private affiliate programs that we will share throughout our network only. This is also a great source of revenue that have been underexploited lately.

Accountability

What I like the most about these meetings is the feeling of accountability coming out of this. If we want to make it happen, we each have to commit ourselves and start working very hard. I’m convinced these changes will help us to expand our brand and make our business more fun!

Have you ever thought of bringing your blog to a whole new level or are you happy with where it is at?

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It’s time to switch gears…

March was a success in terms of income. After two good months over $8,000, you always wonder if your strong beginning of the year is luck or if you are a roll. Well, we made over $8,600 in March! The most beautiful part of this is that over 70% of our gross revenues are not coming from private advertising! Google Adsense, our own products and affiliate programs are generating about 75% of our business now. Our model has successfully changed from private advertising to other types of income streams. I think eventually, we will be able to completely disregard private advertising and switch gears to a more lucrative business model…

So let’s take a look at what happened this month…

Traffic Improvement – 364,179 visitors (+5%)

My traffic went up slightly in March. But this is probably what worries me the most. In fact, I had 3 more days in March (which is 10% of a month) yet only increased my visits by 5%… I’m definitely not too proud about it!

We ran into another Google update in March but it didn’t affect us. I was expecting to get lucky and have one of my flagship sites pick up a higher ranking.  It didn’t happen. On the other hand, I can’t say I’ve done much in term of traffic improvement work in the first three months. This is definitely a big challenge for me as I often prefer to work on other projects such as my new eBook for TFB and my mailing list series for The Dividend Guy Blog!

I’m tempted to improve our social media presence but I’m not sure how much traffic I will gain from this strategy. I also need to schedule more time in my week to write articles so I can offer guest posts for my flagship sites. I’ve done a few guest posts for smaller sites and it worked well but it’s time to “refurbish” my link inventory for my bigger websites.

Affiliate Program Strategies – Newsletter Projects

I’m still in the middle of my newsletter project. The goal is to build a 10 email series on how to invest. I want to cover each aspect of portfolio management and add a few affiliate links across the series. They should convert well as I’m providing high value content. I ran email #1 to #6 with my Mastermind Group and received a lot of great comments.

A good tip when you work on such projects is to ask advice of people who doesn’t work in the topic you are covering. For example, my partner works in the financial industry. When I showed him my emails, he thought that most of them were too simplistic. On the other hand, nobody is in the financial industry in my Mastermind Group and they were asking a lot of questions about each email in order to get more details.

The reality is that the field you are working in is definitely simple and easy for you but probably highly complicated for anybody who looks at it from the outside. I have no clue how to build a house, repair a car or manage 30 kids in a classroom. When I think of doing these tasks, I completely freeze and wish I had never thought of doing them!  If I was to read about these topics, I would really appreciate a simple step-by-step guide so I can understand everything.

Niche Site Central $453.67 (-40%)

I’ve decided to publish my Niche Sites income now to give a little bit more transparency. It will also help me know how much these sites are generating in my company. The $755.56 is broken down info 3 sources of revenues:

$244.50 from eBooks (Excluding Dividend Growth)

$209.17 from Adsense (included in my total Adsense earnings)

$0 from affiliate sales

The small eBook sales are still doing great! We had a record month in February but when I look at the overall picture, I’m definitely happy to see that I can steadily make over $200 without doing anything. The other great thing about it is that I mention my sites and other products within these books. This helps me generate indirect income from the book sales.

I had a sales boost towards the end of the month as I’ve declared that I was beating the market like there is no tomorrow with my selection of 20 US dividend Stocks. After a quarter, my small eBook (for sale at $2.99) includes a list of 20 stocks that show an investment return of 16.79% or 6.49% over my benchmark. My only regret about this book is that I’m selling it too cheap! I think I’lll increase the price to $4.99 next year if I continue to get such high results throughout the year!

eBook Development

In March, I’ve started to work on my first free book for The Financial Blogger. I’m halfway done and the book should have about 60-70 pages. The reason why I’m writing this book and giving it for free is to increase my newsletter subscribers. This is the only way I will be able to retain my readers no matter what Google thinks of my site.

My goal is to become totally independent from search engine traffic since I can’t count on it and can’t definitely game Google. Therefore, by building a strong readership, I don’t have to worry about the next Zoo update done by the big G. If I get more traffic, fine, but I won’t have to wait for it anymore.

The book should be ready to be launched within the following months. It will be interesting to see how my newsletter subscription will go after I launch the book. I hope to get over 1,000 downloads for the first year. The topic is not as sexy as dividend investing (and God knows that investing is not that sexy!) but it definitely cover an important niche nonetheless.

Current Project that I’m Working On

In a few weeks, my partner and I we will be meeting for our annual meeting. This will be a day where we start working at 7am and end-up late at night. We have several topics to cover and we have been working on our schedule for the past two weeks now.

This is the perfect moment to determine which projects we will work on in the next 12 months and how we can switch gears and grow the company. We have been in “survival mode” long enough. It’s time to generate some growth again!

We have several avenues we will look at:

-          Membership sites

-          Social media presence

-          Forum creation

-          Streamline process for niche site creation

-          Traffic building

-          Better use of our VA

-          Better use of our own time

-          Projects we will focus on

The idea is to brainstorm during 12 hours and finish with a small set of ideas we will work on. It’s useless to set a list of 10+ to do’s. If we can come away with 3 to do’s each, this will already be enough! I can tell you the membership site will be one of them for sure, hahaha!

Adsense Income $2,400.76 (-12%)

The thing I hate about Adsense is that it comes and goes like the wind. There is not much I can do but to control my traffic and hope their ads will convert. This is how I end-up with lower numbers in March than February even thought I had more days to make money.

I have a long way before I make a steady $3,000 from this income stream. Then again, Adsense income comes from search engine traffic. The more I get, the more I make. This is definitely an important point we will discuss in our annual meeting! If you have any tricks you have done so far and it works with the “new” Google, I’ll be happy to hear about them!

Now it’s your turn, tell me, what have you done recently on your sites to make them better?

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Last week, Sam from Financial Samurai asked me about my cost structure. I’m known for spending a lot within my company and most readers think my cost structure is quite heavy. I can understand their point of view but I can also tell you that having a third kid last year made managing my schedule a little bit more complicated! We had to rely on our team to keep the company rolling and this is what happened. Here’s the most up to date expense breakdown:

Virtual Assistants & Writers – $2,065

The bulk of our expenses is related to VAs and writers. Since we own several blogs, it’s impossible for us to write for all of them. Over time, my partner and I concentrated on a few sites that we like and truly have a passion for it. Writing for TFB is never a pain; in fact, it’s more fun than it looks!

Several emails and advertising management are handled by my VAs. We also use them to write a few articles, publish and edit others. They truly save me a lot of time as I don’t have to look over their work on a weekly basis. I check a few tasks each month to make sure that we are on track and I leave the rest up to them to manage.

We recently cut back on our writer’s budget. The reason was simple: we wanted to make sure that each site was profitable. Each month, we track our revenues per site and include this data in an excel spreadsheet (another task done by my VA ). Then, it was easy for us to take the average revenue per site on a monthly basis taking the last 18 months as an average. Those who were too close to their cost structure got their number of posts diminished. Over time, we realized that most blogs don’t need 5 new articles weekly to drag traffic. It is sometimes too much to read for visitors anyways! We would rather write quality over quantity and will make the same revenues while spending less money.

Accounting & Banking Fees – $439

Accounting and banking fees are both pains we have to live with. I hate compiling ins and outs so I send all my statements once a month to my accountant and everything is being handled by them. I would probably have to waste a good 3-4 hours per month on that. So I guess it’s worth it! Within the banking fees, we also have a life insurance payment.

About a year ago, we took a permanent life insurance of $250,000 on both my partner’s and my life. In our shareholder agreement, we included that upon death, the $250K would be payable to the other partner so he could buy the deceased’s share. This was a great way to ensure that our work was 1) preserved for the other partner and 2) that our wives would get a benefit from this company.

Servers & Utilities – $1,259

The number here seems very high. We don’t spend $1,000 in servers. But we both have internet access, phone and other utilities linked to this spending account. This is why we end-up paying so much in servers & utilities. This is a way for us to benefit from the fact that we have a company at the same time since we don’t draw any income or dividend from it. We also include our $150/month Aweber subscription in there. Since having newsletters is now part of our core business, it’s a small fee generating a lot of money. Plus, it makes us more independent from Google!

We have done some major restructuration with our servers in 2012 in order to optimize our speed and service along with our cost structure (you can read about our servers’ adventures here). Our servers + domain renewal costs range around $600 per month now. We still have some cleaning up to do that should result in another saving of $50/month. This should be done in the upcoming months.

Total Operating Cost: $3,763/month

So our total operating cost per month is now below $4,000. I believe we have a very strong structure since we can easily grow our business without spending much money. The only spending account that could increase would be writers but this would also mean that our revenues would expand at the same time.

We currently average $8,000 in gross income per month since the latest Google EMD update. So after two major hits in 2012, we are still in line to make slightly over the psychological bar of $100K per year. So where does all our exceeding money go? I’ll let you guess…

Debt Servicing – $2,945/month

There is another important account in our budget: debt servicing! I mentioned last year that we are on an aggressive debt repayment plan. We used to be over $90K in debt and we are now down to $77K. We have restructured our debt to pay a smaller interest rate (we now pay 4%! Whoohoo!). Our goal is to pay off all our corporate debts within the next 24 to 30 months. Since the online economy is changing rapidly, we thought it would be a better idea to clean up our balance sheet while we are making money and stop leveraging for a while.

Borrowing to finance our growth was definitely the best strategy we used for a while. Now that it has become harder to growth (because of a lack of time doubled with internet uncertainty), we decided it was time to pay our debts back. In less than three years, we should have a company netting roughly $50,000 per year in profit. This is what I call free cash flow!

Total Work Hours: 40 hrs/month

The beauty of all this is not the 100K in revenues and definitely not the 45K of operating costs! The beauty is to make 25K each of net profit with less than 40 hours of work per month. This means that my hourly wage when I work on my blog is around $48/hours. This is not an astronomical number but considering that I can derive benefits from the company in addition to the $48/hours (such has having free internet and not having to pay for any computers!), I think it’s truly worth it!

The decision we made was to work less and earn less. However, we wanted to see our company grow while we are working at our day jobs. This is mainly the reason why we have decided to keep our cost structure higher. The idea behind it is also to build a safety net. If I was to lose my job tomorrow morning, I could fire all my writers and VA’s (which would suck!) and start working 40 hours for my company and keep a decent living from the income. This would give me enough time to turn around and make my company grow even faster.

If we would have kept only a few sites and would do everything by ourselves, we would surely have a cost structure of less than $1,000/month and netting over $7,000 each month. But we would also work a lot more than 10 hours a week! I still prefer playing with my kids than blogging, hahaha!

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Things You Do When You are Focused…

February was the month of “getting back on track”. I was very happy as I was able to achieve several tasks in my quarterly objectives. After 6-7 weeks of participating in a Mastermind Group, I can say that I already feel the difference. The level of accountability has just been raised. It’s a lot more “complicated” to find excuses for not doing your work when you commit yourself to 3 other individuals. We aren’t judged when we fail, but doing nothing is not acceptable. Doing nothing on your couch is easy, but when you have to tell your friends that you are not doing anything, that’s a different story.

So let’s take a look at what happened this month…

Traffic Improvement – 345,687 visitors (-15%)

If I want to feel good about myself, I can always tell myself that February is three days short compared to January and a drop in traffic is normal. However, the drop is bigger than three days. I can partially explain the rest of the drop by the end of the “January effect”. Each year, the month of January is very impressive in terms of traffic. I feel like a gym: everybody is interested in taking care of themselves and all sign-up with good intentions. Then, the interest fades away and traffic goes down a little.

The rest of the difference lies within two big names who mentioned my sites in January. I didn’t get any such mentions in February and didn’t have any traffic spikes this month. My strategy to improve traffic is based on guest posting and Directory submissions for smaller sites. As I mentioned in my authority website update, I’ve taken the habit of sending more newsletters to my investing crowd and it generates more traffic as well. I’ll definitely start the same strategy with TFB in the upcoming weeks! I have a great mailing list but I don’t send many emails these days…

Affiliate Program Strategies – Newsletter Projects

I’ve used my newsletter this month to gather feedback for a big project I’m working on in 2013. I asked people what was their #1 investment struggle in order to build the best membership website ever. I’ll come back with more info on my membership site later on in this post.

With regards to the newsletter, I can tell you that sending an email every two weeks since the beginning of January made a huge difference in the level of response I’m experiencing right now. I can already see my readers being a lot more engaged than before. They not only answer my questions but also give additional feedback and ask more questions themselves. On the one hand, it’s very time consuming but on the other, I can see how people appreciate my site and it’s very good for my self esteem .

The more email I send, the less people unsubscribe to them and select my email as spam. It’s one thing to build a strong email list, but it’s another thing to keep your readership! Each time I send an email, I make sure that I truly add value or genuinely ask questions of my readers. I want to help them participate in my site, not simply send them bunch of promotions until they sign-up for something!

Niche Site Central $755,56 (+38%)

I decided to publish my Niche Sites income now to give a little bit more transparency. It will also help me to know how much these sites are generating in my company. The $755.56 is broken down in 3 sources of revenues:

$364.68 from eBooks (Excluding Dividend Growth)

$370.80 from Adsense (included in my total Adsense earnings)

$20.08 from affiliate sales

I’m happy to declare that this is one of my most profitable months from my niche sites. I can now see the day where I will generate $1,000/month from these passive sites! I was surprised to see how many eBooks I’ve sold over the month. If I count Dividend Growth, I average a total of 4 books per day!

Depending on the book and the channel used, I’m making between $2.60 and $9.36 per sale. My goal is to eventually reach 10 books per day with our current offer and boost it up with other books. I think that selling small ebooks is probably one of the best ways to make passive income. Once the book is complete, it’s only a matter of plugging your title as much as you can throughout your articles and on your site. Then, you just let the magic begin and receive email daily about more books sold!

What I like the most about my niche sites is that they are not selling private advertising at all. Therefore, it’s a “pure” way of making money online passively. I need to seriously work on my affiliate program strategy in order to boost my overall sales but I will start that in Q2. My first quarter is already full of projects to be completed!

eBook Development

I didn’t work on any new eBooks this month. We started to think about a few projects to improve our current offer but I haven’t start writing anything.

The big work has been done on my Dividend Growth sales page. I still need to work on it (and take off the adsense ad block for example!) but I like the text on the page. I’ve removed a lot of content from it and gone straight to the point. I’m now considering buying a “sales pagemaker” software such as Lead Pages in order to add a more professional look to my sales page. It was relatively easy to reach out to my readers as they know my blog and trust it. Now, I’m entering in the hardest phase of eBook sales marketing: selling books to non-loyal readers. I am still selling nearly 50 books per month but I can continue to grow this passive income source. I definitely think I could be selling more books and make a lot more money than I am right now. It’s only a matter of implementing a better marketing plan for it.

Current Project I’m Working On

At the beginning of 2012, I mentioned that one of my goals was to create a membership website. The math behind such a product is ridiculously interesting:

200 subscribers at $87/year makes… $17,400!

If I was able to sell over 600 books in 5 months, I’m pretty sure I can gather 200 subscribers per year. If I can build a strong membership website, I will be able to make over $20,000 per year with it over the next two years. That would be an amazing piece of diversification for our company and a great way to create passive income. My goal is to build the membership site and optimize it in a way that a VA could update everything and take care of customer service without me putting a single hour into it. At $500 per month, I think I can get a pretty solid VA that will take care of everything and I will still net over $11,000 per year for doing very little work.

I’ve asked my Mastermind group about feedback on the project and I have a lot of tasks to accomplish before I make a single buck out of it! I’ve worked on a timetable to make sure everything will fall as scheduled. Technically, I should be able to launch the site for September. As was the case with my book in 2012, this will give me the opportunity to do a first launch in September and promote a re-launch for the Holidays. I’ll probably do a January promotion since I get a lot of good traffic at that time of year.

Adsense Income $2,729.09 (-36%)

After hitting a record month in January, I was expecting a drop in Adsense. I’m happy to see that I was almost able to keep an average of $100/day. I’m currently sitting at $97.46/day so I’m not too far. I’m confident to reach the $3,000 level next month as I continue to work on my traffic and perform Adsense optimization.

I’ve also tried an alternative to Adsense this month with a few of my sites. For one month, I put a few Media.net codes on some of my sites. The results were disgusting! I know the ad blocks were not published on prime space but I made $17 in a month for three different ad blocks on three different websites. I’ll change these codes for an additional Adsense block this month and compare their results. By creating a new channel for each block, I’ll be able to identify what works and what doesn’t.

If I end-up with a similar result, I’ll just forget about adding more ads. But I’m confident I can at least make $100 total with these new spots on my sites. This $100 would be just enough to break the $100/day again!

Now it’s your turn, tell me, what have you done recently on your sites to make them better?

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It’s rare, but sometimes I’m not proud of myself…

When you see January’s results, you will probably see that I have done quite well. In fact, I killed my previous Adsense earnings record . But I’m not super proud of myself. I feel like I didn’t accomplish much during this month. Could it be because I took 2 weeks off and only had 2 days to work on my business? That has definitely something to do with it. Still, I really feel like I didn’t do enough this month. I will have to work harder in February to reach my objectives!

Traffic Improvement – 407,510 visitors

My traffic shows a great improvement in January with 407,510 visits, not unique visitors. I’m tracking the number of visits instead of unique visitors since I think it’s important to look at the global number of individual coming to our sites and not only ones that come once and leave. People who come back are my most important visitors after all!

My 2013 goal is to reach 491,000 visitors per month. I started the year with a big boom since December was showing 367,017. I’m now at 83% of my objective but that’s only the beginning. The next 90,000 monthly visitors will be hard to gain!

I’ve already started to do some guest posting and commenting for specific sites. I sent 2 newsletters this month to boost my traffic and it worked well. I’m just hoping for some love from Google to boost my search engine visitors and I’ll be on track .

Affiliate Program Strategies – Newsletter Projects

I just mentioned that I used my newsletter to generate additional traffic. What I did was send an email with a question to my subscribers. I detailed my answer to this question on a post (which I linked to) and ask readers what they thought. It generated over 500 visitors to my site and a few hundred replies back.

The good news was I generated more traffic, the bad news is that it takes forever to answer everybody back! Hahaha! Since the response was so good from my subscribers, I intend to use that strategy at least once a month. This could eventually lead to an affiliate marketing strategy at the same time if I direct my readers to one of my posts that includes affiliate links. We’ll see how it goes!

Niche Site Central $549.12 (+80%)

I decided to publish my Niche Sites income now to provide a little bit more transparency. It will also help me know how much these sites are generating for my company. The $563.64 is broken down into 3 sources of revenues:

$306.71 from eBooks (Excluding Dividend Growth)

$256.93 from Adsense

$0.00 from affiliate sales

I’m happy to present stronger results for this month after a disappointing December! $304 was definitely too low for my niche sites and I’m happy to crack the $500 level! My eBook machines are selling more than I expected. I must admit that I got some help from a small eBook that I put together about the Best 2013 Dividend Stocks. I offered it for free to my newsletter subscribers for 5 days and then charged $2.99. It was more like a symbolic contribution than anything else. I was surprised to see that I could sell 29 copies this month without pushing the product through any channels. Making a small profit of $80 for the book pays for the work involved and I still benefit from the marketing strategy for free!

I think I’ll sell the book right away next year… still not sure about this strategy, what do you think? I guess that I could probably sell 1,000 copies at $2.99 so I would be making a net profit of $2,500. That would be a good start of the year, don’t you think?

eBook Development

My Evil Plan didn’t work out as planned and I’m pretty upset about it. In my original plan, I was going to direct my newsletter subscribers towards Amazon to download a free copy of my Best 2013 Dividend Stock eBook. Then, I was counting on the momentum to gain credibility as an author and boost my ranking for my other book in the Amazon system. I also counted on some indirect sales coming from people that had downloaded the free eBook (or pay $2.99 for it after the free period of 5 days).

I encountered two major problems:

#1 I wasn’t able to format my document to Kindle on time. I’m very bad with technology and even thought it was almost text only, the Kindle file looks like crap. Therefore, I had to abandon the project of going through Amazon and sell it through my own network.

#2 I was disappointed by the Kindle issues and I still have my goal of having 8,000 downloads for that free book over the year. Well, I’m going to be disappointed there too! For some weird reasons, my download link works very well but doesn’t track the number of downloads on my end! Therefore, I have no clue how many people have downloaded the free book over the first 5 days! Even worse; we have no clue why this link didn’t work as all the other links we used prior to this one with the same plugin have always given us accurate information!

So long story short, I’ve put a lot of effort in place to market my book but I have no clue how many books have been downloaded and the indirect effect on my sales… that’s very frustrating!

On the other hand, my other eBook goal was to hit 500 copies sold of Dividend Growth which I easily attained! As at January 31^st, I’m sitting on 527 copies sold. I haven’t requested help from other bloggers to review my sales page and process and I’ll be working on this in February to make sure I continue to sell at least 1 book per day. Generating a passive income of about $250 net per month would be awesome!

Current Project I’m Working On

At the beginning of the year, I joined a Mastermind group. I’ll share a little bit more about this project in another post  but for now, let me just say that we meet virtually each Monday. The cool thing about that is definitely the increase in the accountability level. Since we set goals weekly, it kind of looks funny if you don’t do anything during that week to achieve them. So my weekly goals are smaller parts of my bigger plan. We just had our fourth meeting and I find it truly awesome!

The other major project I’m currently working on is my Aweber series. I’ve taken a short break from it and came back with another article this Monday. I’m far from being done with it as I also want to package it into an eBook. The book will obviously be an enhanced version of the series with even more details and more ways to make money with your newsletter. I believe this book will be a great promotion tool to boost my TFB mailing list as well. And hopefully, I’ll make a few bucks with my Aweber affiliate links!

Adsense Income $4,257.34 (+71%)

My adsense earnings definitely look like a roller coaster! After dropping under the bar of $2,500 in my December report, I’m back with a record month of $4,257.34! There are two things explaining this awesome month:

#1: I was mentioned by some big sites and got a huge traffic spike (I made $657 on one day!)

#2: It’s January, and people are always looking for investing tips at the beginning of the year

My Adsense income can be compared to how well I do with my investing websites. While my other blogs are pretty stable, my investing sites are the fuel of this source of income. It’s not the best scenario I could imagine since it puts my business at risk, once again! However, the fact that I’m pretty good at writing about investing topics I am comforted a little bit.

Can I make another $4,000 next month? Definitely not! Unless I get another big mention . What I’m the most proud about is that after this huge traffic peak, I was still able to generate an average of $100/day for the rest of the month. This leads me to think that I’ll be making around $3,000 for February and can forget about my “low months” at $2,500. This could be very interesting as my other sites are picking up. It’s more like a mass effect and the overall result pushes me past the $100/day level.

The key now is just to work on the traffic!

Now it’s your turn, tell me, what have you done recently on your sites to make them better?

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