October is typically a great month for online business! People are back from vacation, no BIG holidays and the weather isn’t always amazing so lots of people pushing to have a big Q4!

Sep is one of my 2-3 favourite months for me in my business! Every one of my major businesses has been launched in Sep and I wanted to make sure 2019 was no different with a BIG push for the launch of MotionInvest.com 

Over the years for whatever reason I seem to have found I have a pace to my work which involves three phases to the year…

• Build & Launch – Sep-Dec
• Stabilize – Jan-Apr
• Systematize / Rest – May-Aug

This year the big push in the build/launch phase is the blockchain project extensions BLADE and more relevant to this audience is MotionInvest where Spencer Haws and I are directly buying and selling websites. 

Longer hours and more action… in this phase if I am not making people uncomfortable with the pace I am pushing things it is a problem! I need to be not counting the hours and pushing hard. 

Based on some of the income reports it seems like others are really focused on growing their businesses. 

#1 takeaway – Go in Depth – Several of the sites covered here have refocused in September around the topic of their sites. Having a  site cover a topic in depth on multiple channels helps achieve a few results…

• More efficient creation of similar content – Jon Dykstra is using the years of content at FatStacksBlog as an input to his other content creation efforts (Video and Youtube)
• Topical Authority – The more articles you have around a given topic the more authoritative Google views your site – Ryan Robinson has focused his prolific content creation around the topic of blogging to help his how to start a blog rank higher

Quick August Update on my End:

• The growth rate for blade.software has started to go exponential – see dashboard
• MotionInvest launched with a lot of success, lots of very positive feedback and only made a couple adjustments…
  • Adjustment 1 – Lots of people just wanted the site and not the value add SOP’s or coaching so split those out as an optional purchase
  • Adjustment 2 – Free trial for month 1 subscription 
• Lots of biking with the family was still able to be done in Sep!

My Reason for This Round Up:

When I started my online entrepreneurship journey I took a lot of inspiration from others that were sharing everything they did online. Seeing that people like me were making REAL money and that the opportunity to replace my day job was possible. 

It has been 3 years since I left my day job – https://websiteincome.com/quit-my-job/

The more transparent the report the more I appreciated and was motivated by it. 

Over the years I have tried to be as transparent as possible sharing along the way my goals, business successes/failures and the ultimate results(profits). 

After years of sharing monthly income posts I decided that it made sense to stop these… a decision I actually regret as I wish I had found a way to keep sharing some of what I was doing. My reason was as my online world and “real” worlds became more tangled.  

Looking at many of the people that originally had an income round up they have also stopped. Namely the most famous in the space Pat Flynn no longer does income round ups. 

I will cover…

1. List of inspiring income report posts and how they earned their profits
2. Recognize motivating people showing not just telling people the results they are achieving
3. Learn from others – What the key learning is from the people

Last Month Profit – $20.238.31
Name – Ron Stefanski
Website – onehourprofessor.com
Business Model – Authority Affiliate Site
Income Report – http://www.onehourprofessor.com/august-2019-monthly-income-report/
Key Lesson(s):

• The best month ever for Ron! Congrats!
• His main revenue generating site had a great month and he was surprised as he stated “The only thing that I’ve been focused on with this website in the last six months is updating content and with results like this, I have no question that this strategy works well.” This is a strategy we have had a lot of success with as well with clients from ContentRefined.com 
• The overall growth rate has been incredible! (look at the graph below)

Let’s Reach Success

Last Month Profit – $4,800
Name – Lidiya
Website – letsreachsuccess.com
Business Model – Blogging
Income Report – https://letsreachsuccess.com/blog-income-report-pinterest-strategy/
Key Lesson(s):

• ConvertKit wins another client, although I haven’t used it and I am happy with ActiveCampaign a lot of people are making the switch. 
• The Pinterest strategy Lidiya is using is lean and clearly driving some results. If you have wanted to learn more about driving traffic to your blog check it out!
• 35 blog posts published!

Last Month Profit – no update this month
Name – Spencer Haws
Website – NichePursuits.com
Business Model – Authority Affiliate Site
Income Report – https://www.nichepursuits.com/get-ready-niche-site-project-4/
Key Lesson(s):

• No update this month

Last Month Profit – $6,238.21
Name – Johnny FD
Website – johnnyfd.com
Business Model – Mixed – Dropshipping & Investing
Income Report – https://www.johnnyfd.com/2019/10/sept-2019-monthly-travel-expenses-and.html
Key Lesson(s):

• What is impressive about Johnny is the lifestyle he lived in Sep with expenses under $4k… what some people have in mortgage and vehicle expenses covered his entire month including a private jet, 3 trips and driving a ferrari! 
• His big Sep focus was on his conference – invest like a boss!

Last Month Profit – $37,063 
Name – Jon Dykstra
Website – fatstacksblog.com
Business Model – Authority Website (display ads)
Income Report – https://fatstacksblog.com/income-report-august-2019/
Key Lesson(s):

• Jon was prolific in Sep with new toys… lots of new video and audio equipment to help relaunch his YouTube channel and his soon to be launched PodCast channel. 
• He is relaunching an EZoic review and case study which is looking promising
• His income report does not include any revenue or expenses from his blog FatStacksBlog.com
• It is interesting that Jon still finds it interesting to write the content himself on some of his sites. He enjoys it and is able to keep the rest of the machine moving while still creating content for his sites himself!

Last Month Profit – $25,280.27
Name – Ryan Robinson
Website – ryrob.com
Business Model – Authority Website (affiliate earnings)
Income Report – https://www.ryrob.com/blog-income-report-september-2019/
Key Lesson(s):

• Almost 100k unique sessions up this month! That is a BIG increase congrats! 
• 7 new LONG form guides on blogging related topics! 
• Ryan is focusing his blog around the topic of blogging and trying to really drive the topical authority of his site around that niche. Currently his most popular articles cover a more widespread range of topics such as business ideas, books etc. By foucsing it should help signal to Goolge his blog is the authoity on blogging and therefore help rank his guide 1st which is his big money maker.

Honourable Mentions:

Although they don’t do exactly income reports there are a few reports that are worth mentioning and when they publish new reports I will be sure to include.

• No honorable mentions this month

Am I missing any I should include? Please drop a message in the comment section below with anyone I should include next month!

August is typically a month where lots of online entrepreneurs enjoy the summer weather. Many of the reports below mention their appreciation for a source of income that gives them the flexibility to enjoy life in the summer!

#1 takeaway – Risk Mitigation: As entrepreneurs we are constantly pushing forward and sometimes don’t do the little things to make sure our business risks are mitigated. This often takes the form of relying on 3rd party services (email, hosting, payment processing, passwords etc) to hold our critical business data. There were 2 people this month that had scares which could have been a lot worse regarding 3rd party services holding their site and websites email list. My #1 takeaway this month is to refresh my monthly task of ensuring up to date backups of business critical infrastructure is taken! 

#2 takeaway – Prolific Commitment to Content: Many of the successful businesses in this group use the word “investment” and not “expense” when discussing content. The most expensive single outlay of capital by far is content for most of these businesses. 

• 24k word pieces of content
• $10k worth of content in a new site before the first monetization method is tested
• 39 blog posts in a single month
• $5k-$20k in content investment per month 
• 75% of monthly expenses every month is an investment in content
• 3 podcasts, big industry reports, content updates and 5 person marketing team! 

This analysis has me doubling down on the creation of some incredibly useful pieces of content (plus more than just words) that are in the works and coming out soon! 

Quick August Update on my End:

• I have a significant focus on adbank.network and blade.software but in the rest of my business here were some of the key activities for Aug…
• August was busy putting the final touches on the entity of MotionInvest.com and getting it ready for our soft launch in Sep and a larger push coming soon.
• A rededicated focus the last 6 months to an ecommerce store with consistent content and executing 1 solid upgrade strategy per month has paid off with the sites best month in over 2 years!
• ContentRefined was finalizing the plan for a couple big pushes in September during August including some team re-org.
• My family summered hard with the kids out of school enjoying the cottage and lots of mountain biking 

My Reason for This Round Up:

When I started my online entrepreneurship journey I took a lot of inspiration from others that were sharing everything they did online. Seeing that people like me were making REAL money and that the opportunity to replace my day job was possible. 

It has been 3 years since I left my day job – https://websiteincome.com/quit-my-job/

The more transparent the report the more I appreciated and was motivated by it. 

Over the years I have tried to be as transparent as possible sharing along the way my goals, business successes/failures and the ultimate results(profits). 

After years of sharing monthly income posts I decided that it made sense to stop these… a decision I actually regret as I wish I had found a way to keep sharing some of what I was doing. My reason was as my online world and “real” worlds became more tangled.  

Looking at many of the people that originally had an income round up they have also stopped. Namely the most famous in the space Pat Flynn no longer does income round ups. 

I will cover…

1. List of inspiring income report posts and how they earned their profits
2. Recognize motivating people showing not just telling people the results they are achieving
3. Learn from others – What the key learning is from the people

Last Month Profit – $17,131.22

Name – Ron Stefanski

Website – onehourprofessor.com

Business Model – Authority Affiliate Site

Income Report – http://www.onehourprofessor.com/august-2019-monthly-income-report/

Key Lesson(s):

• The overall growth rate has been incredible! (look at the graph below)
• Technical challenge cost Ron a lot with a site being updated and having a noindex, nofollow not removed when the site was moved from staging to production
• Content is by far the biggest expense with a $10k investment in content in a new site without turning on any source of earnings from it

Last Month Profit – $4,590

Name – Lidiya

Website – letsreachsuccess.com

Business Model – Blogging

Income Report – https://letsreachsuccess.com/earned-4590-online-last-month-business-vision/

Key Lesson(s):

• Interesting self reflection on aiming to make six figures from blogging
• 39 blog posts published on her site in August! Continues to publish prolifically

Last Month Profit – no update this month

Name – Spencer Haws

Website – NichePursuits.com

Business Model – Authority Affiliate Site

Income Report – https://www.nichepursuits.com/get-ready-niche-site-project-4/

Key Lesson(s):

• No update this month

Last Month Profit – $4,026.72

Name – Johnny FD

Website – johnnyfd.com

Business Model – Mixed – Dropshipping & Investing

Income Report – https://www.johnnyfd.com/2019/09/aug-2019-monthly-travel-expenses-income.html

Key Lesson(s):

• One of the only people on here whose business model is dropshipping via a shopify store. It can be a great model with a few more moving parts/opportunities for optimization vs a typical content site
• With a busy fall travel schedule he seems to have really prioritized the lifestyle side for the month with lots of gym time and relaxing time!

Last Month Profit – $38,047 

Name – Jon Dykstra

Website – fatstacksblog.com

Business Model – Authority Website (display ads)

Income Report – https://fatstacksblog.com/income-report-august-2019/

Key Lesson(s):

• Jon had a scare this month where he thought his database of email subscribers may have been lost! This is not something that I have historically backed up but based on Jon’s scare I am adding it to my monthly task of backing up critical business data!
• Optimization mindset – Jon is great at always looking at tweaks to make small incremental improvements! For one site he optimized image hosting saving him $300/month, he jokes that it will help pay for netflix but in all reality if he continues to find a $300/month savings every month in 1 year his entities value will have increased by over $100k (monthly savings 300×12)*(business valuation 3x annual earnings)

Last Month Profit – $30,814

Name – Ryan Robinson

Website – ryrob.com

Business Model – Authority Website (affiliate earnings)

Income Report – https://www.ryrob.com/blog-income-report-august-2019/

Key Lesson(s):

• This is the first month I have had Ryan on here, Maddie from ContentRefined who was on his podcast here mentioned I should include him!
• Epic Content – Ryan has really focused on producing incredibly large posts 5000+ word minimum with some monsters at 24k words like his how to start a blog post

Honourable Mentions:

Although they don’t do exactly income reports there are a few reports that are worth mentioning and when they publish new reports I will be sure to include.

This month there is one other report I want to feature…

EmpireFlippers – Quarterly Report

$498k/month Revenue in Q2 2019 Published Aug 26, 2019

https://empireflippers.com/q2-report-april-may-june-2019/

Key Lesson(s):

• Compounding growth over 6 years “If you roll up your sleeves, commit to work every day, and have a vision of the future for your business, then the compound interest you’ll gain might just change your life.” 

• Content consistently everywhere, their content push on giant industry report, 3 podcasts, content updates to existing content has all resulted in over 50% of their inbound traffic being organic.  

Am I missing any I should include? Please drop a message in the comment section below with anyone I should include next month!

When I started my online entrepreneurship journey I took a lot of inspiration from others that were sharing everything they did online.

It has been too long!

Since 2012 I had been almost always posting once/week with the exception of a couple 1 month breaks.

It has been A LOT longer and this post is to communicate…

• Where have I been?
• How have my businesses faired with lack of time on them?
• What to expect moving forward at AuthorityWebsiteIncome?
• What has my focus now?

Where Have I Been?

My focus has been and continues to be on the project adbank.network where we have a real opportunity to cause some disruption to a giant problem!

The short version of what adbank does is it is an ad network build on the Ethereum blockchain that has payments transparently flow directly between advertiser and publisher with the middle mans cut finally being fully transparent!

If you are an advertiser or publisher you can test out the beta platform here – https://beta.adbank.network/

 

 

What is exciting is that many of the skills I have developed building my online businesses have been stretched executing on this project.

 

What does my focus mean for my online businesses?

They are going nowhere, I have always been focused on building the systems/procedures and teams to continue the execution of the businesses with as little involvement from myself as possible.

So for each of the business divisions here is how they have fared with me not spending much/any time thinking about them…

My Website Portfolio:

I have continued to let this business slide especially on the monetization side it has been the hardest hit by my lack of focus.

It is relatively easy to systematize the articles (ContentRefined) and links (LightningRank) for the sites but the hard part is monitoring the monetization. Some of the assets continue to do well and even grow despite my lack of focus while others completely fell off the map from an earnings standpoint. Sites that once made $1k-$3k/month with the same traffic now are making almost zero because of a handful of very fixable reasons… affiliate program no longer exists, links broken, advertising paused due to handful of reasons.

I don’t see a lot of focus getting out here with the exception of a couple I have handed off to managers to run including focusing on the monetization of those sites.

This is the benefit of the systematized approach where many systems held and despite me not putting any thought into my portfolio sites the content from ContentRefined and links from LightningRank kept coming.

 

Productized Service Businesses:

I am very proud of the managers on these businesses!

These businesses launched with the initial push from the AuthorityWebsiteIncome audience but without any support for the last months have continued to be strong performers.

Kelley at LightningRank plus another new business she launched off of nothing more then an email idea from me had their best months ever at the end of last year.

Maddie and ContentRefined has continued to grow bringing on additional staff in house and dialing in our ideal client (portfolio managers!)

 

Whats Next at AuthorityWebsiteIncome.com?

Only useful articles!

Right now there is a large team that is pushing hard every day to get sites to perform well in Google leveraging great content and links.

As we push on this basic concept there are a lot of interesting learnings.

So… we will be sharing as much useful/actionable information as we  can related to

 

What has my focus now?

The project adbank.network did a successful token sale and is now actively pushing on 3 primary fronts.

Tech:

The tech development is going very well with plenty of challenges. We have delivered a working beta platofrm on the main net 2 months after ICO.

In addition we have hired a brilliant PH.D. In computer science with a specialty in machine learning and are continuing to grow the team.

• Beta release – https://beta.adbank.network
• Beta release update

Acquisition:

A big part of our strategy is to seed the adoption of the disruptive technology by acquiring existing ad networks and converting them to the adbank platform.

• Acquired ad network – Ecigmedia.com
• Acquired ad network update

Intellectual Property:

With a patent pending on the application of AI to leverage transactions that occur on a blockchain to fight digital ad fraud we hope to have a winning position in the market.

 

Summary

It has been the craziest project I have been a part of. Very proud of the team behind adbank as well as the team that has continued to grow the other businesses with a giant lack of support from me. They are all very inspiring people!