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!

August was the type of month I like most where I felt like we were pushing hard on lots of fronts and risking more then we have been recently and the result was some big wins and some big failures!

As an old ski racing coach liked to say…

If you are not falling occasionally you aren’t trying to go fast enough!

Another month and another little canoe trip! 3 done this year and only 1 left.

Below is my income and business report for Aug…

Hopefully, this post will shed some light on how I build/operate my online business and gives you some useful insights. There are plenty of areas for improvement in my business and I try to highlight these as well! (more…)

Any month we are able to hit our targets is a good month.

July was a month where it felt like a couple businesses plateaued and a couple were able to break free from previous plateaus to new heights.

Summer is in full swing and I was able to get away a couple times for 2 canoe trips in July. On a conference call while in the middle of the woods was a fun time.

It was also the first time I was able to take my 4yr old son on a Canoe Trip and he had a blast!

I am in a constant battle for balancing speed and control… for some projects, I like to step on the gas while others need a little more infrastructure built up to handle the growth.

Thoughts on Team Building:

A VERY large amount of my time in July and Aug has been on thinking about building my team and when to hire locally or remotely.

One critical thing I have decided is…

Hire in house for culture fit / ambition / work ethic / raw intelligence AND pay for skill sets on the open marketplace. What I mean is I would rather have a hard working ambitious, intelligent great cultural fit who never heard of SEO then a poor fit that has all the skills. All the “skills” in this space can be purchased on UpWork.

Below is my income and business report for July…

Hopefully, this post will shed some light on how I build/operate my online business and gives you some useful insights. There are plenty of areas for improvement in my business and I try to highlight these as well!

Hope your summer is going well and your business is growing J

The Business “Divisions” For My Online Business:

1. Money Site Portfolio
2. AuthorityWebsiteIncome Blog
3. Services – Web Development, Content Marketing & Link Building:
   • Domain Finding Service (buy domains that meet my metrics)
   • Done for Your Private Blog Network (let my team build you a personal PBN)
   • LightningRank (get access to the most powerful PBN available!)
   • Brand Builders (FBA Branded Site Creation & Affiliate Site Creation)
   • Content Refined (Your in house content marketing team)
4. Amazon FBA Business
   • Brands 1-6 – All have specific targets for 2017
   • ListingEagle – Amazon FBA Hijacking and Suppression Monitoring
5. Put Outside Capital to Work Efficiently in the Online Asset Space

Key Successes

1. Portfolio Earnings – There were a handful of sites that really showed substantial improvement in $/visitor.
2. BrandBuilders – Continued product/market fit is evident and we are having a lot of fun helping the team Andrew has built grow the business.
3. Content Plan – It has been too long but I finally have a solid content plan/schedule for AuthorityWebsiteIncome.com.

Key Failures

1. High Potential Low Probability – There were a couple projects/deals I put some effort into that had great potential but ultimately nothing came of them.
2. Facebook Ads – Similar to last month I had another failure trying to get some paid traffic working to one of my services. My thinking has shifted that I now just need to hire an agency or specialist to handle this for me. If you know anyone that is a killer with paid traffic please have them email me.

2017 Business Goals

Below is my businesses main goals for 2017…

Part 1 – Passive Authority & Niche Website Income Profit/Loss

3 Goals in 2016 for my Website Portfolio Business

1. Everyone Win at the Mortgage Crushing Competition

July Update – It is tough to understand the performance of this site right now with the number of 301 building blocks I have applied to it plus some spikey articles.

• Traffic = 15,071
• Earnings = $97.53

2. Buy 1 Site Per Month

July Update – One little AdSense site purchased and one small productized service business purchased. I will be talking more about the one soon enough (some people may have already received an email about that story).

• GOAL = 1 New Website Purchased
• ACTUAL = 2 New Website Purchased

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

I have found the right sellers are those…

• Desire a simple/efficient/non-invasive sales process (no option is easier to sell to)
• Looking to sell FAST (under 24hrs has been accomplished!) (shorter time for due diligence on my end increases risk for me)
• Not wanting to spend a lot of time on the sales process (analytics and income proof is all I need)
• SEO done to the site can be questionable and that increased risk will be reflected in the sales price
• Understand that the benefits of the bullet points above means the sales multiple will be lower than if you went a more traditional route

If you have a profitable website you are looking to sell fast please let me know

3. Scalable New Site Creation Strategy adds $5k to Portfolio

July Update – Although it doesn’t really show it there has been some good progress on increasing the earnings per visitor on several properties associated with this scalable new site creation effort for the year. Traffic continues to move in the right direction and I need to still substantially improve the earnings for several more properties.

• Traffic – 53,202
• Earnings – $276.52

PRIMARY GOAL – OVERALL INCOME FOR WEBSITE PORTFOLIO GROW TO $15k/MONTH CONSISTENTLY

July Update – The portfolio performance doesn’t look way better then other months but for the first time in about 6 months we had a month I was satisfied with in terms of our efforts showing clear results. Looking forward to continuing to improve the performance here!

Part 2 – Authority Website Income Blog Profit/Loss

3 Goals in 2015 for AuthorityWebsiteIncome.com

1. Post Once Per Week

July Update – A “perfect” month… no missed posts and me and my team put a lot of effort into trying to provide as valuable posts as possible!

• Plan = 5
• Actual = 5

2. Systematic Promotion of my Content and Building of my List

July Update – No Progress

3. Increased Intelligence with Email Automation

July Update – No Progress

PRIMARY GOAL – GROW TO 30k VISITORS PER MONTH

May Update – 12,456 which is lower than I would like to see! Need to continue to push

Part 3 – Services Business Profit/Loss

1. Systems First Focus

July Update – Seeing the team come up with procedures without me prompting them and it being fundamental in everything we do is starting to pay off. We are seeing a new problem where the rate of procedure creation and the organization of those SOPs is not where we need it to be.

2. LightningRank.com – Quality and Efficiency Improvements

July Update – This is moving into becoming a new offering that will open up natural link building to even more people! We are continuing to see great results for clients on both the Done For You PBN and UseMyPBN service.

Visit LightningRank.com for Link Building Services!

3. ContentRefined.com – 20k MRR by June & 40k MRR by End of Year

June Update – A weird billing nuance where anyone who signed up on the 31^st got billed on the first showing up in July vs June has this number a few thousand less. CHURN is the enemy of any growing recurring subscription business! For us we were experiencing some awesome growth numbers but with a big push last month and then some normal/happy customer churn we have seen this growth slow.

• Planned MRR = $23,313
• Actual MRR = $27,919

Visit ContentRefined.com for Content Marketing Services!

4. BrandBuilders.io Structurally Well Setup & New Offering Launched

June Update – Achieved – The TurnKey affiliate sites ready in 24hrs are selling out in a handful of hours every time we launch!

PRIMARY GOAL – SYSTEMATIC GROWTH!

Part 4 – Amazon FBA Business

• Brand #1 – HG – Running Lean and Spinning off Cash
  • July Update – Distribution received – always a good month when we can do that!
• Brand #2 – CF – Quarterly Dividends Ahead of Baseline
  • July Update – Continuing to perform well and need to setup for SOLID Q4!
• Brand #3 – NT – Path To Strong Market Position and Successful Pillar Product
  • July Update – Waiting to sell out of stock and then kill entity (first failed FBA project)
• Brand #4 – CK – Systematic Growth to $20k/month Profit
  • July Update – Performing okay… not where we want it!
• Brand #5 – PC – Successful launch and $5k/month Business
  • July Update – Despite pushing heavy on this business and great reviews it seems to be SLOW to move!
• Brand #6 – SE – 4X Value Expansion with Dream Team!
  • July Update – One more hail-marry attempt here coming up!
• ListingEagle.com – Hijack and Listing Suppression Monitoring Service
  • July Update – Steady/boring SAAS business

Part 5 – Put Outside Capital to Work Efficiently

July Update – We are working on another larger deal at a discount. The Due Diligence for this one has a little more “hair” on it then we would like!

Overall Income Update

Original Monthly Net Income Target (original goal $15k/month reliable income by age 35)

• Target Net Income = $11,450
• Actual Net Income = $53,983
• 2017 Average Net Income = $47,109

Gross revenue is a vanity number for my business and I do not share it.

Final Comments

July was a solid month… there continues to be a LOT of opportunities on the go and I am continuing to try to best balance everything that is in front of us.

The extra help from the co-ops this summer has been great and their contributions will be missed!