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!

There are a lot of great articles going in depth about how to do due diligence when buying a website. Many of these are more in depth than you want to do for an initial pass. After doing this quick check a lot of these deep dive articles are great to checkout put out by brokers… EmpireFlippers & FEInternational.

There are even great companies like Centurica that for a fee will do a deep dive into a site. I have used them in the past to scale due diligence and they are great.  

In this post I am going to provide the quick initial check that can be done in under 5 minutes (if all the information is available) for you to see if there are any red flags. 

In addition to the checklist and screenshots I will do a review myself on a public listing at flippa so you can watch over my shoulder. 

We use a lot of tools for this process totalling over $1k/month! If you want to save the costs and pick up a content site in the $2.5-$75k range checkout the sites listed at MotionInvest.

Here are the tools we use…

• MajesticSEO
• ahrefs
• SEMRush
• CopyScape
• Archive.org
• MarketMuse

This is the quick 5 minute FAST preliminary due diligence guide. 

1. Income Verification
   1. Images can be faked – video of earnings is best
   2. Earnings per visitor is reasonable – a joke site earning $0.1 per visitor doesn’t make sense while a high ticket focused amazon associate review site earnings that same amount per visitor does make sense. 
   3. Expenses if any are reasonable
2. Traffic Verification
   1. 6 months to 1 year of traffic – steady growth or stable is the ideal
   2. GEO Location – Making sure the traffic isn’t all from an area that can’t be monetized or faked
   3. Time on site & Device – If the traffic is faked the time on site and the device used isn’t a normal distribution 
   4. Traffic claimed and traffic shown by 3rd party service like SEMRush are reasonably aligned.
3. Backlink Analysis and Red Flags
   1. Check all 301 redirect – make sure the site hasn’t been moved from another location and the end result would be you own a domain with no traffic
   2. Are the links “Real” and “Relevant” links? – Simple enough but you want to make sure there are “real” links put by someone to help their audience and are from “relevant” sites. 
   3. No unusual concentration of spammy links or rate of link acquisition – See video for explanation
   4. No overuse of any single strategy (blog comments, scholarships, donations, PBN, paid links, widget links etc) – If all the links are from one strategy it is not ideal (see “real” & “relevant” rule of thumb above) – here is a more in depth backlink analysis tutorial
4. Content Check
   1. Plagiarism Check – Running a quick plagiarism check to make sure the content is unique is great. 
   2. Quality – is the content answering the searchers queries? Maintaining content has a cost… if the starting point of that content is low then you will need to factor in a lot of updates/re-writes to that content. 
      1. Pro Tip – You can use MarketMuse to see the quality of the content relative to the competition. 
5. Archive & WhoIs Check
   1. Has the site had a “colourful” past or different then what the traffic/earnings would suggest? See video for more details.  – Note I find Archive doesn’t work for some sites, here is a wayback machine archive alternative.
   2. Does the history of the domain name transfer make sense

If the site passes this FAST preliminary check it is time to do a deeper dive! The deep dive analysis will be the subject of another article… stay tuned for that.

If you are interested in Content Sites that are earning right now and have passed this preliminary a deeper due diligence process checkout MotionInvest!

What is your favourite red flag when looking at a website to potentially buy? 

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 a very busy 1.5 years in my business with the majority of my personal focus being on the blockchain ad tech project adbank.network. Today we have launched something new and I wanted to share the story behind it on the first day it launches (despite the ironic timing this is not an April fools joke).

 

You can see the result of the last year of work here – BLADE ad block & reward extension (just went live)

Download Chrome Extension HERE

(note please use referral code – c0903255-a8b2-32f6-3466-7d96fce1b64f)

The total amount people will earn for browsing the web with BLADE installed is estimated to grow to ±$15/month – enough to cover a streaming services cost!

 

The rest of my businesses have mostly continued to run well (especially the ones where a great manager/team was in place – Kelley, Maddie, Laura etc). However, some of the projects have suffered… my personal portfolio has had some struggles with limited oversight on management (more on that in another post).

Today I want to share some of the exciting work that is being done by adbank and how we think it will change the landscape of digital advertising…plus how it can directly benefit you!

 

The Big Question We Have Been Wrestling With…

If digital advertising is the monster industry it is and you the end user/audience are a significant part of the value created why don’t you have any control over the process?

• Why don’t you directly get rewarded for the ads you see?
• Why aren’t you in control of the tracking done to you while browsing?
• Why aren’t your incentives aligned with the other actors in the digital advertising transactions you participate in daily?

Seems like we should have more control over the process.

If you want to learn more about what BLADE is you can check it out here but here is the simple explanation…

 

Be In Control & Get Paid!

The simple story is once you install the browser extension (BLADE) you will start getting rewarded for seeing ads in Cryptocurrency.

 

 

Download Chrome Extension HERE

(note please use referral code – c0903255-a8b2-32f6-3466-7d96fce1b64f)

Free to download and use + earn crypto (ADB) for browsing the web like you normally do!

 

Incentive Alignment – BLADE (Blockchain Advertising Ecosystem) built on adbank

I often talk about incentive alignment when working on any business and really like what Charlie Munger says…

Within the BLADE ecosystem here is how each of the actors are incentivizes…

 

How Users / Audience (anyone who installs and uses BLADE) Benefit:

• Browse the internet like you normally do and get paid in Cryptocurrency for the ads you see
• Turn on/off ad block functionality
• Experience a faster internet with the most obnoxious ads blocked

 

How Advertisers Benefit:

• Pay a smaller fee to middlemen
• Real users view your ads (not bots and reduced ad fraud) due to KYC required for users

 

How Publishers Benefit:

• Currently publishers receive no direct benefit if a visitor to their website has an adblock extension installed. Some of these adblock extensions have over 500 million installs! With BLADE we record what sites a visitor was on when they earned ADB and keep track to reward the publisher as well.

 

For such a simple concept… ad block extension that rewards you for viewing ads… a lot has gone in to make it happen.

For those interested here are a few of the challenges the team overcame.

 

Some of the Innovations to allow BLADE to happen.

To give you a little behind the scenes on what we have built to make all of this work there are

1. AdBlock Extension That Places an Ad in Your Browser – Not just a standard adblock extension was needed but also one that identified the size/location and could place a relevant ad on your browser without impacting the user experience.
2. Ad Server Connected to the Ethereum Blockchain – To ensure transparency and allow the rewards to flow through to all parties the ads are served on an ad server (adbank.network) that is connected to the Ethereum Blockchain.
3. Cryptocurrency Efficiently Sending Rewards – Sending micro-payments to over 100 countries and thousands of users on a monthly basis is a financial system nightmare. However, with BLADE integrating a unique solution with a couple smart contracts makes this process automatically happen with minimal transaction costs!
4. Patent Pending AI to monitor blockchain transactions for ad fraud – I won’t get into the details here but you can read about it here. Bottom line is as digital advertising moves onto a blockchain solution there will be a need to monitor those transactions for fraud and applying AI/machine learning to monitor will prove to be very valuable!

Checkout BLADE on the first day it is live HERE!

(note please use referal code – c0903255-a8b2-32f6-3466-7d96fce1b64f)