Managing a website portfolio can be a rewarding and lucrative endeavor, but it also requires careful planning and ongoing maintenance to ensure the success of each site. Sharing income reports with others can provide valuable insights and help identify improvement areas.

By regularly monitoring traffic and revenue, staying up-to-date with industry trends and best practices, and continually seeking ways to optimize and grow each site in the portfolio, website owners can maximize the potential for financial success and build a sustainable, long-term business.

In this income report series, we aim to share our growth journey and the key factors that have contributed to our success. We will also share the minor details we focus on each month to improve the overall growth of our portfolio. Our goal is to provide inspiration and guidance for building your own AI-driven website portfolio at a lower cost

1. Traffic & Earning Overview

During the month of December, the portfolio sites saw a substantial drop in search traffic, which followed a similar rate of traffic drop (7494 visits) during the transition from October to November. This decrease in traffic largely occurred on websites that rely heavily on AI content.

Based on our data, we believe the AI content isn’t the sole reason for this traffic drop. In fact, the decline in SERP ranking for a couple of sites in the portfolio indicates we need to update those contents that were used to drive a major part of the traffic on prominent sites.

How do we know content updates should get our content back on track?

We had always believed that with a well-planned content production strategy and expert guidance, we could create highly optimized content at a low cost for multiple AI-driven websites that compete on SERPs. When we noticed that some keywords on one of our well-maintained sites were losing their positions, we decided to update the top-performing content that was driving traffic.

Just three weeks later, we have already seen some positive results. Most of the updated content has recovered its keyword position and the traffic it had lost. In fact, our overall monthly traffic on those sites is even better now. I will later highlight the two sites that we were able to recover from the traffic and pageview loss, as well as the corresponding recovery in revenue.

While this strategy may not be effective for all sites in the portfolio, we are confident that we can execute it successfully in the first quarter of 2023.

Could this be a seasonal traffic drop?

It is difficult to determine whether or not the traffic drop mentioned is seasonal. There could be a number of factors at play, such as changes in search algorithms, competition from other websites, shifts in consumer behavior, and whether people are looking for the topics at the same frequency they previously did.

The compassion between December traffic of 2021 and 2022 shares common traffic frequency, although it’s difficult to conclude, given we have many more new pages (than 2021) on the sites responsible for driving traffic. What I would like to note is that the comparison between 2021 and 2022 December traffic shares a sudden drop in traffic despite the sites were making some growth in the previous months.

I do not think the traffic drop mentioned is necessarily a seasonal occurrence. We have recently been able to recover SERP positions and traffic on a couple of sites, suggesting that other factors may be at play than this being a seasonal occurrence. The comparison might have produced different results if we had recovered these rankings and traffic for most of our sites in the portfolio (which is too good to ask for in just a month).

That being said, let’s get into the traffic and pageview stats of the portfolio:

The overall traffic for the portfolio declined by 10.93% in December, with a total of 61,045 visitors compared to 68,539 in the previous month. In addition, there was a noticeable decrease of 11.68% in page views, with 71,221 page views in December compared to 80,643 in November.

It is worth noting that these numbers represent the entire portfolio, and it is possible that some websites within the portfolio may have experienced different levels of traffic change. One site in the portfolio saw the highest individual increase in traffic, with a gain of 106.04%. This website has received significant content updates. The greatest individual loss in traffic among the websites in the portfolio was -46.24%.

It looks like the revenue for a particular portfolio in December was $578.55, which is a decrease of 19.16% compared to the previous month’s revenue of $715.68. The ePMV, or estimated pageview value, also decreased by 12.02% from the previous month. This decrease in ePMV contributed to the overall drop in revenue of $137.13 from the previous month.

The average ePMV for the portfolio in December was $7.59, where $17.03 is the max for a particular site, and an average of $1.23 is the lowest ePMV for a site in the portfolio.

Let’s compare the portfolio data at the same time of the previous year (Dec 2022 vs. Dec 2021): 

1. Total Visits (-9.78%)
2. Pageviews (-15.16%)
3. Revenue (+10.81%) 
4. ePMV(+22.82%)

2. Traffic Overview By Site

It looks like the traffic data for a portfolio of websites showed mixed results for the month of December. For most of the sites, traffic was lower than in November, but five sites saw an increase in traffic. This is, by the way, better than what we could achieve in November, as there was no update on the contents.

As I mentioned above, some sites had significant updates during the month of November, and that luckily paid off during the end of 2022. So some sites recovering from the decline add a positive sign to the portfolio, while we still need to work on content maintenance for other sites in the portfolio, and excited to see how that works out.

Here are December traffic data collected via Ezoic BDA: (compared to November 2022). The marked sites are those that heavily undergone content updates during November (still going on), and we are getting some positive output on those keywords ranking + traffic.

In December, the portfolio of websites recorded a total of 61,045 visits. The most popular site in the portfolio saw a decrease in traffic of -14.42%, with a total of 26,327 visits compared to the previous month’s total of 30,762 visits. This translates to approximately 4,435 fewer visits for the most popular site. Meanwhile, the site with the least number of visits in the portfolio received 106 visits.

In addition to the decrease in visits, we also saw a decrease in pageviews, with a total of 9,422 fewer page views than the previous month. The site with the highest number of pageviews in the portfolio in November had a total of 30,228 page views, which is a 16.29% decrease from the number of page views received in November. The site with the lowest number of page views within the portfolio received 109 page views.

As mentioned, the revenue for December is similar to that of November, with a 19.16% drop. The individual records show that fewer sections of the sites within the portfolio have experienced positive growth in terms of ePMV so does in overall revenue while other sites have a comparatively lower ePMV & revenue than the previous month.

The overall revenue statistics are directly proportional to the December pageview statistics, resulting in a total drop in revenue for the portfolio by $137.13, with a total of $578.55 compared to $715.68 in November 2022.

The highest individual revenue recorded was $327.66 in December, accompanied by an 11.58% decline in revenue compared to the previous month. The ePMV for this site was $12.45, which is 11.58% less than in November 2022. The average ePMV across all sites in the portfolio in December was $7.59, compared to $8.63 in November 2022.

The highest ePMV for a site in the portfolio has decreased to $17.31, up from the previous highest of $23.31. That’s a 25.74% decline in ePMV. We have the Ezoic AI taking care of ad placement optimization, so there’s nothing we have changed recently. The fluctuation in ePMV has the influence of lots of factors; let alone, depending on the time of year, the average site in any country may see a 3x difference in their EPMV due to seasonal fluctuations alone.

I also keep an eye on the “ad revenue index by Ezoic” which is a tool that allows you to see how changes in the overall ad index (which is a measure of the performance of ads in a particular network or market) affect the ad revenue of different sites in the network. This can help you determine whether a fluctuation in the overall ad index is impacting all sites in the network, or if it is specific to your own sites.

By looking at changes in the ad revenue index for your own sites, you can see whether a drop in ad revenue is due to changes in the overall market, or if it is specific to your own sites. This can be useful for identifying potential problems or opportunities for improvement in your own ad strategy.

So when I look at the December 2022 ad index data, it seems like there’s a decline in the global ad revenue index. Our site is obviously no exception to that, reflecting a lower revenue than in previous months.

In the ad index below, you can see during 1st fortnight of December 2022, the ad revenue index was above average and then started to decline dramatically and continues to decline until January. The red-marked section indicates the global December ad revenue status for all ezoic sites. And then, I looked at the Ezoic revenue analytics, which pretty much indicates a similar story.

And then, I looked at the Ezoic revenue analytics, which pretty much indicates a similar story. So it’s ideal for recording a lower portfolio eMPV and overall site revenue considering the global ad index status.

4. Expense

With the decline in overall revenue, your net profit is marginal when we have to cover the editor, writer, and AI copywriter tool costs to run the Ai content system. The portfolio overall had a great month despite the drop in Ezoic revenue; the affiliate commissions and revenue from sites that are not focused on Ezoic keep on coming, which makes it exciting as well as optimistic that with the Ezoic revenue back on track, the overall revenue growth of the portfolio would continue to increase.

In terms of Ezoic, though, the December revenue is slightly better (7.34% profit) than what we have invested in production and tools. It’s still amazing to look at how much content we have produced and updated during the month and sorrowed a significant revenue loss on Ezoic but still be able to stay on the profit side, which would be a worst-case scenario for the month of December in the whole 2022 year.

The introduction of Open AI to the AI Writer team and them finding it compatible & efficient to work with has greatly influenced the AI copywriter expanses we earlier had with this project, it turns out to be a savior for the month of December if we consider only Ezoic revenue for the portfolio.

Here’s what the portfolio December total expanse compared to revenue generated with Ezoic Ad revenue (again, this data excludes other revenue sources & expanses for sites that do not run Ezoic) looks like:

Ezoic PnL (Key data for December 2022):

1. Total expenses: $539.00
2. Total Revenue: $578.55
3. Profit (with Ezoic revenue): $39.55
4. % of profit Ezoic revenue brings in: 7.34%

5. Changes & Focus

In December, we noticed the drop in traffic and had to go through multiple checks to find out possible reasons behind the traffic and revenue drop. We typically tend to be more concerned with declines in performance than improvements. Here are some of the key factors we looked at and could be useful for yours:

#1. Traffic drops with revenue decline (which was our case)

Google often updates its search algorithms to improve the quality and relevance of the search results in its returns to users. These updates can have significant effects on the visibility and ranking of websites in Google’s search results. It is not uncommon for Google to make multiple updates to its algorithms in a given year. Some of these updates may be minor and go unnoticed, while others can significantly impact the ranking of websites.

#2. Algorithm updates and impact

We noticed Semrush flagging some high activity days in the previous months, which is where exactly one of our major sites started to lose a major part of its traffic. Recently in December 2022, there could be another update that we haven’t noticed a huge impact on, but that is when some of our updated site contents started to recover their positions.

We also dug into some of the high-traffic landing page data and analyzed the traffic ratio with the previous month. Certain sites have many landing pages that lost their highest positions, while some other sites (surprisingly, where we have worked on updating the contents) have many new keywords in the SERP + have many high-traffic keywords that recovered their rankings.

This has motivated us to work on content updates, and we believe improving the content quality should be able to help the sites recover their lost traffic to a certain point.

#3. Page layout change and impact on ad revenue

We are also aware of the impact that changes in theme and design would have the impact on ad revenue, which stands true for some of our sites in the portfolio… and we had to recheck the ad placeholders and their revenue records and compare them to the record of couple months ago, just to ensure we have not messed up with the recent design updates.

#4. Open AI and content plan + Niche IQ to produce content

We have mentioned Niche IQ in the previous monthly report. Topics is a very helpful tool for discovering relevant content ideas for our websites. It also provides all the necessary keyword research information, simplifying our keyword research process. Normally, we have to spend a lot of time finding new batches of keywords, but Topics make it much easier for us.

Now that the keywords are shorted out, the AI writers can pick their assigned keywords and research the topic before planning their content structure and then use OpenAI to create an article that has quality, offers the solution to people, and well optimized for SEO to try and do best in SERP, at a significantly lower cost.

This could be a content creation workflow to help AI writers sync with the procedure instantly. (just a demo)

Conclusion:

Overall, our website portfolio had a successful month of December, with total earnings of $1,661. This represents an approximate 7% increase compared to the previous month in total. Most of our income came from affiliate revenue, which accounted for ~60% of total earnings. Advertising brought in ~ 30% of total earnings.

You can clearly see traffic to our websites declined significantly in December compared to the previous month. Since most part of our site traffic is organic search traffic, our traffic status heavily relies on SERP performance and ranking activities on Google.

Looking ahead, we plan to continue optimizing our websites for search engines, expanding our affiliate marketing efforts, and introducing new products to drive further revenue growth. We are confident that with these strategies in place, we will be able to maintain and build upon the success we have seen this summer.

The portfolio has completed another month, and the anticipated rebuilding of these once-neglected sites seems to go in the right direction. It’s obvious to face some ups and down with the overall growth of the sites, but given the sites are running on a combination of GTP-3 tools + human edits, it’s not going to skyrocket in the next month.

In the previous month, we shared the traffic, revenue, expansion, and overall PnL, which defiantly portrayed a marginal profit, and we will share the same for November 2022. Overall, we are happy with the output, and steady growth in at least one of the crucial terms makes sense, if not on all sides.

Lately, adding additional AI copywriter tools (like Jasper.ai) during the major discount season has helped us reduce the content production cost by a great margin. We are excited to see how it impacts Ezoic revenue and PnL overall in the upcoming months.

1. Traffic & Earning Overview (Covering Ezoic)

The portfolio sites rely heavily on search traffic, and for the month of November received about 7031 fewer users than the previous month. Most parts of this traffic drop occurred on highly AI content-reliant websites. However, other AI content sites have gained a maximum of 28.14% more traffic than the previous month individually. 

So it’s safe to say the traffic fluctuation does not directly come from the AI content being recognized by google; rather, it’s the content quality we might need to improve in the coming days to stay up top and compete with other pages with the same intent.

The overall portfolio traffic declined in November by 9.30% (68,539 compared to the previous month of 75,570), and we have noticed an obvious decline of 8.79% in page views (80,643 to 88,413 pageviews in October 2022).

The revenue is quite similar to traffic and page view data. The total revenue for the month of November has a 2.90% of decrement to the previous month with the help of a 22.10% boost in Ezoic ePMV. 

The total revenue for the portfolio in November was $715.68, compared to $737.01 in the previous month (October 2022), with an ePMV change of +$0.74. The slightly higher ePMV (+9.39%) has helped the portfolio to maintain a closer total revenue while there are 7,770 fewer page views than the previous month.

If we look at the yearly comparison, the AI sites have expanded a lot in terms of traffic and revenue they are generating. 

The portfolio growth data (Nov 2022 vs. Nov 2021): 

1. Total Visits (+17.60%)
2. Pageviews (+7.13%)
3. Revenue (+109.01%) 
4. ePMV(+77.73%)

2. Traffic Overview By Site

Individual traffic data for the portfolio sites had ups and downs. For most of the sites, the traffic for November was lower than in October, but three sites with a boost in traffic in the last couple of months managed to get more traffic than in October. Similar to October, some major sites continue to lose traffic even though we have recently updated the top-ranking pages, which might help those sites to recover a certain % of the traffic lost recently.

Some of the sites that we believed were tanked started to recover traffic this month which could prove to be a good sign that the AI content updates have been helping as long as done correctly with quality maintained.

Here are November traffic data collected via Ezoic BDA: (compared to October 2022) 

The maximum pageview record for a site within the portfolio in November was 36,109, which is again 13.02% less than what the site had received in October 2022, and 142 being the lowest pageview data for a site within our content sites.

3. Revenue Data Per Site

As mentioned, the revenue in November is close to what it was in October, with a -2.90% drop, but if we look at the individual records, more sites have shown signs of growth thanks to the boost in RPM/ePMV. The overall revenue stats is directly proportional to November’s pageview stats meaning there’s a drop of $21.35 in total revenue for the portfolio, with a total of $715.68 compared to $737.03 in Oct 2022.

The highest individual revenue recorded was $433.07 in November, which comes with a 9.15% boost in ePMV to the previous month, and the exact ePMV was $14.08. The average ePMV was $8.67 in November compared to $7.93 in October 2022 across all sites in the portfolio. 

The maximum individual ePMV has also increased to $23.31 compared to the previous best of $21.03 and registered the minimum ePMV of $1.20 for a site.

With some ad position optimization, we could lift the avg—ePMV by +9.39%, which was -1.69% between September and October.

4. Expense

Publishing content on all the sites on a regular basis is never easy. As we mentioned multiple times, the AI machine was put together in a way that can be cost-effective to run content on all sites while we follow certain standards to maintain the output quality for the content to be competitive on search engines.

We managed to build an effective team of writers who understands the guidelines, knows how to tackle the content’s objective, how to plan a content structure, and then use AI to reduce the time needed to create content that still has a good balance between the answering what people are looking for and the arrangement. Then we also need to take care of SEO; without optimizing the content, it becomes more difficult for search engines to prefer those copies to put on a higher position.

Then there is a need for editors, someone with expertise in certain niches (because the portfolio sites cover different subjects), and uploaders to make sure content is being published regularly to run the entire system smoothly. In addition, we have additional expense with AI copywriter tools that comes with certain word credit.

This all might sound like a lot, but we have managed to run everything on a profit so far, particularly because the content production quantity, I would say, is still at the lower end of its potential when we grow more in the coming days.

Here’s what the portfolio November total expanse compared to revenue generated with Ezoic Ad revenue (again, this data excludes other revenue sources & expanses for sites that do not run Ezoic) looks like:

Key data:

1. Total expanses: $640.00
2. Total Revenue: $715.68
3. Profit (with Ezoic revenue): $75.68 
4. % of profit Ezoic revenue brings in: 11.83% 

5. Changes & Focus

Although these focuses have always been part of the portfolio development, we have updated the approach recently based on the output in recent months.

• Content Updates: We worked with outdated content that we’re still doing great on SERP, and a well-researched update could have kept them higher in the SERP to keep driving traffic to the sites. We designed a workflow where we collected the most traffic-driven keywords from GSC and Ahrefs keyword analysis. We cross-checked the top-ranking pages on the websites to target those pages that need to be updated as soon as possible.

• SOPs for different types of content: The next approach that significantly helped us to let our human writers who control the AI copywriter tools maintain a certain standard across the content, whether it be list-based content, generic blog posts, or tutorials, is by providing them standard SOPs for each type of content. The SOP does not limit the writers in terms of creativity; instead, it focuses on helping the writers have a primary structure in mind to maintain the hierarchy and design across all contents of a site. We have decided to frequently update these SOPs based on the additional requirement we uncover during content publishing. This strategy has helped us to manage the writers more efficiently and reduce the editing burden by a decent amount.
• Ezoic placeholder update: although Ezoic has the AI to place placeholders automatically, we wanted to test some above-the-fold ads after bringing some changes to the site design to see if that can boost the ePMV and overall revenue. Based on the revenue data we have for the month of November, it seems that way, at least for now. Here are the top placeholders for a site that generates the most revenue for the site.

• Good site health score: Maintaining the site health score has always been our goal to make sure the sites do not get stuck with technical issues such as missing metadata, link issues, inappropriate redirects, schema-related issues, etc. Such minor details can be when you want to rank higher up in SERP with more competition from the other sites. We want to keep our sites ready so the content has the freedom to try and rank in top positions. We use Ahref to monitor our sites, and the dashboard view has been really helpful in keeping an eye on what’s happening to the sites all the time. Recently one of our major portfolio sites has encountered some internal issues, and we are witnessing a downfall in terms of ranking afterward. We are still fixing the issues and hope this will help the site recover the positions as soon as possible.

• Site speed and web vitals: As mentioned in the previous monthly report, the site speed and web vitals continue to be one of our primary objectives in this project. With the speed upgrade, we noticed a 6x better-crawling record for the sites and those sites that are passing web vital and page experience according to Google Search Console continues to do well & improve in search engines as well. So we are highly focusing on page performance as a key factor to push the site to do well in search engine rankings. Overall putting everything together in great condition makes a healthy site grow efficiently is the bigger picture. Here’s one of the best web vital records we were able to maintain during the previous month for a certain site in the portfolio.

• Utilizing Ezoic’s Niche IQ: Ezoic always comes up with something to be excited about. Niche IQ is an excellent addition that has helped automate certain things to reduce the overall time investment we had to do without it far. NicheIQ combines an On-page SEO tool, a site health monitoring tool, and a done-for-user keyword research tool. We like to use Topics because it discovers highly relevant content ideas for our sites and provides all the necessary information related to keyword research. This relieves our keyword research process because we usually have to find batches of new keywords for at least 3 sites per day.

Conclusion:

Without an appropriate strategy, it could be a mess to try and run many sites (where new sites are continuously joining the portfolio) with the content being published every single day, but thanks to a well-designed plan, ready-to-use tools + the right people in the right place make it much easier to manage the portfolio.

This income report series aims to share our growth and the fundamentals that helped us reach here; minor details we work on per month to try and improve the overall growth of the portfolio that can encourage you to build your AI-driven website’s portfolio at a significant lower cost.

These online entrepreneurs continue to adapt. Although the future is difficult to predict, many are now comfortable with their new direction after all the world changes. Many have found success in catering to their customers’ new lifestyles, which includes a lot of staying at home!

Many of these entrepreneurs continue to work at the strategies that they adapted during these turbulent months. Although many of them found different methods to succeed, it definitely helped that they were in the world of online commerce and content. They have taken advantage of a time where many people were on their computers, and have found a way to shift their offerings to cater to people’s specific wants. 

#1 Takeaway – Stay the Course – In the past few months, we focused on how these online entrepreneurs shifted to the changes in the world economy. Now, they are sticking to these strategies and seeing their efforts pay off. Sometimes, success is all in the follow through. Keep doing what’s working, and you’ll see it pay off. 

• Don’t Be Afraid to Stay Put – Sometimes, there is the constant need to always adapt. Always try that new thing, or move in a new direction. But if something is working, why change it? Often, your best bet is to continue doing what made you successful. This is not to say that you can’t continue to innovate, but sometimes the best innovation is to recognize what’s working and keep doing it. 
• Constant Evaluation – Of course, this strategy comes with a requirement. You need to be able to recognize the reason for your success. You should be constantly evaluating your own strategies, so that you can recognize what’s working and what isn’t. This is a major reason that these entrepreneurs write these income reports in the first place. Not only does it hold them accountable, but it forces them to dig deep into their business practices each month to see what’s working and what isn’t. 

Quick May Update on my End:

• Posts at AuthorityWebsiteIncome.com
  • 15 Digital Marketing Strategies reviewed
  • 4 Unfair Advantages to Grow your Online Business
• Lots of family bike rides and first swims in the bay, although much turmoil in the world it is great to get out and enjoy the outdoors 
• MotionInvest – We worked on the plan to launch the Marketplace which has us selling sites for people that meet our high standards but we don’t buy ourselves. This combined with our Dutch Auction approach to site valuation has resulted in a record number of listings available for sale at MotionInvest!
• ContentRefined – Maddie is off on Mat Leave (congrats) and the new team has done an amazing job transitioning into her role. Narcis in particular has taken on some additional responsibility and is performing extremely well. 
• LightningRank – We have soft launched to a small group an ecommerce focused network of real sites (traffic, earnings etc) that are available for relevant links. Response has been great and 
• BrandBuilders.io – A big giveaway is being planned that is going to be exciting. Brady has done a great job increasing the rate of marketing content creation with a growing YouTube channel. 
• Super Secret Software Project – It is coming soon 🙂
• AdBank – Relay.digital was launched off the back of the adbank tech to help work from home companies continue to communicate the important but never urgent messaging around company culture and values. 

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 3.5 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 for stopping was my online world and “real” worlds became more connected and it was becoming very odd to share these numbers.  

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

In this post 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 – $13,246.20

Name – Ron Stefanski

Website – onehourprofessor.com

Business Model – Authority Affiliate Site      

Income Report – https://www.onehourprofessor.com/may-2020-monthly-income-report/

Key Lesson(s):

• Ron had a bounce back month, and he expects the growth trend to continue in June. 
• Most of his websites bounced back, but two primary Amazon affiliates continue to suffer due to low affiliate commissions. He also struggled with the new Google algorithm. 
• Ron continues to focus on his YouTube channel, and it continues to grow. He now has a positive ROI. 

Checkout the video I did with Ron and be sure to read his gripping story here!

Last Month Profit – $8,738.29

Name – Johnny FD

Website – johnnyfd.com

Business Model – Mixed – Dropshipping & Investing

Income Report – https://www.johnnyfd.com/2020/05/income-and-expenses-during-lockdown.html

Key Lesson(s):

• Johnny continues to live in Sri Lanka. 
• Johnny had a great month and actually made the most money he has in a while. 
• Johnny has seen his dropshipping stores make great sales this month. He still attributes his success to Anton’s Method of Dropshipping, even seven years later. 
• Johnny was doing so well this month, and living the easy life on the beach, that he decided to create a 100% free dropshipping course just to give back. 

Ryan Robinson

Last Month Profit – $28,152.62

Name – Ryan Robinson

Website – ryrob.com

Business Model – Authority Website (affiliate earnings)

Income Report – https://www.ryrob.com/blog-income-report-april-2020/

Key Lesson(s):

• Blog income rose a good deal for Ryan in May, primarily due to increased affiliate commissions. 
• Ryan gave his writers as much work as they wanted to take on, which is keeping him stocked on content for months. 
• Ryan expects traffic on his blogs to keep increasing into June, which should see even more increased profits. 
• Ryan invests in long-form, in-depth content, which is what he attributes to why it is so actionable. 

Yeys

Last Month Profit – $5407

Name – Anne

Website – www.yeys.com

Business Model – Web Publishing Blog

Income Report – https://yeys.com/may-2020-traffic-revenue-report/

Key Lesson(s): 

• Anne finally made a profit in May, after months of hard work on her project. 
• She saw traffic go up 52%, and revenue go up 54%. 
• Three of her blogs make up the majority of her growth, and continued to grow into May. 
• She makes money with these blogs primarily from display ads and Amazon affiliate links. 
• This month, she experimented with a/b testing on call to action links. She enjoyed this strategy for gaging the success of her links. 

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.

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

Several this month didn’t publish so I wasn’t able to include but will again when they publish. 

It was 4 years ago today as I write this that I didn’t go to work at my at my “9-5” day job for the first time. 

Every year I like to reflect on the decision to make the jump and any learnings. 

Before leaving I had worked for 8years at Imperial Oil in a variety of jobs and although I for the most part enjoyed my job and appreciated the skills I was developing leaving has been incredible for both myself and more importantly my family. 

Here are the new learnings from this year…

4 New Learnings this Year

Illusion of Job Security 

When I left the day job I felt like I was increasing my family’s financial risk level significantly. Despite having planned it out with runway I and many others thought that my decision to leave was increasing my family’s financial risk. 

However, given the current economic outlook and specifically the outlook for the Oil and Gas industry I am certain my family’s financial security is far greater than if I had stayed at my day job. Layoffs are likely and job prospects within the industry are weak.  

Talking with many of my old co-workers the outlook is not great. Although many of my businesses have done well over the last 4 years others have not but on balance it has been a good 4 years financially. However, even if it was not the options and skills I have developed I believe will make me more employable/able to generate income then if I had continued on the career trajectory I was on. 

Many large employers are great at creating the illusions of job security but once you get outside of their intentionally created bubble the realization is that it was just an illusions and the perceived security is not as solid as you think

Kids Grow Up FAST! 

It is such a cliche to say they grow up fast but so often it is true. 

This Image was a large part of the reason why I wanted to pursue online entrepreneurship.

Having the ability to get to spend time with both my family and some of the active activities I like (skiing & mountain biking) is something that simply would not have been possible

At the time of me leaving my day Job this was the timeline to retirement vs my age and my oldest Childs age. 

Basically by the time I was 65 my oldest child would be 36 (my age) and the number of hours I would have spent with them would have been minimal. 

Being able to work around the weather and get to go on an adventure (mountain bike ride, hike or trip to the cottage) during the summer is something I am extremely grateful for. 

Embrace New Opportunities and Optionality 

One “tip” or “suggestion” suggested to me multiple times is to focus on a single business. Although I believe this is likely good advice most of the time. 

This year has been another reminder that launching new projects can increase my capabilities, allow me to tap new markets/diversify and learn new things. 

Launching MotionInvest has been both fun and gone very well.

My thinking over the last year has evolved to have me focus not on reducing the number of new projects but focus on making sure any new project is tested as efficiently as possible. Testing new projects is great if it can be done efficiently and that is the new focus. Quick inexpensive tests of business opportunities with an unfair advantage to its first customers and ideally have some overlapping benefit to existing projects is the focus.

Focusing on a single project is likely good advice but I have both had fun and some success working to launch other projects since leaving. 

My learning this year is to not fight this but work on getting better at building organizational capacity to launch these tests.

Invest in Compounding Improvements

Another evolution of my thought over the last year is to try and really focus my personal time on compounding improvements. 

As the window of time since leaving my day job grows my timeline really stretches out.

If my focus can be on any of these improvements that have a compounding benefit over time I know I am adding value…

1. Improved systems (like morning meetings, Trello kaizen board as a to-do list, OkR goal tracking all integrated into the Traction system etc.
2. Auditing systems to make sure they are working as intended and improving the SOPs are things that all have a long term payoff.
3. Most importantly investing in getting the best people on the team possible whether formally employed or strategic partnerships

Hustling for the next deal was something I had done for years and still do but making sure I am more focused on implementing improvements that will pay back over years and years as I extend out my time horizon is key.

Summary

Tracking my monthly income numbers was something that gave me a lot of focus while I was working to leave my day job.

Reflecting now on why I started down this journey is a very rewarding experience while also helping to shape some of my new learnings.

My hope with this post and serious is it provides a framework for others looking to make the job for them to know it is possible and ideally shortcut the long process I took.

Other Posts in this Series:

I Quit My Day Job – https://websiteincome.com/quit-my-job/

1 Year – https://websiteincome.com/1-year-quit-anniversary-what-has-changed/