October Income Report 2016
In October the numbers are starting to feel a little different…what I mean is that as I have transitioned out of the day job and added additional staff the business is starting to continue to become more formalized. The added costs and effort we have been putting forward since leaving my day job seem to be starting to show results and there are plenty of growth projects which have taken a lot of time and money but have not added a dollar of revenue (yet) 🙂
The business has been very fun to operate lately with a lot of focus on taking care of the base systems by digging into every little failure and systematically improving the systems while at the same time putting a LOT of effort into new projects which I will be sure to share more about.
The Business “Divisions” For My Online Business:
- Money Site Portfolio
- AuthorityWebsiteIncome Blog
- SEO & Expired Domain Services:
- 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)
- Amazon FBA Business
- Brand #1 – Sold 2/3 stake in business I grew off the back of one of my affiliate sites
- Brand #2 – Work with investors and purchase an affiliate site and then convert to FBA
- Brand #3 – Brand vision first (not launched)
- Brand #4 – Product first (not launched)
- – Amazon FBA Hijacking and Suppression Monitoring
Key Successes
- Growth – Several growth projects are starting to pay off and a couple more are knocking at the door! I definitely have a lot of fun building new projects and believe both the services and FBA projects that will be getting rolled out will be their industry leader and I am very excited for those!
- FBA Products are Awesome! – 2 new FBA brands have taken longer than planned to get to this point but both brands have products that I know are the best in the world for their product category. Unique design and functionality and I believe with the vision for one of the brands we have the potential to go much much bigger.
- Team and Systems Handle Increased Sales – One of the challenges with growth is continually needing to fix systems that fail as the business grows. This month saw an increase in sales and as we reviewed the systems they have all seemed to respond well to the growth.
- Reinvestment – Between putting capital to work with FBA businesses and acquiring some new sites I believe I am starting to solve the ongoing problem of being able to put capital to work efficiently and if I am able to keep focused on growing the base business and manage the reinvestment engine well I believe it will represent an inflection point for the business.
Key Failures
- FBA Timing – For all three of my newer FBA brands the timing has been longer than I would like. For my one brand we are out of stock and the other two have taken longer to get to market than I would like. Even with all the FBA changes and delays within these businesses I have very high hopes for this arm of my business.
- Communication Timing – Typically me and my team are able to respond to people within 24hrs however this slipped for a few days twice last month. So although all the systems have held the one part of the system that seems to be reaching some limits is me and my main team members time. Right now my plan is to solve it by working more efficiently and harder. I am sure people will say that is the wrong approach but that is fine, a little hard work builds character.
- Bouncing Around My Teams Priorities – I personally need to continue at getting better with not bouncing around my team from priority to priority. There is clearly room for improvement with my management of my team to keep them focused on the few big goals and not bounce them onto something different everytime I have an idea.
2016 Business Goals
Below is my businesses main goals for 2016…
Download This Easy to Edit and Printable Goals Template – FREE
(Note – FBA Brand #2 Has Been Replaced With my SAAS Business)
Part 1 – Passive Authority & Niche Website Income Profit/Loss
3 Goals in 2016 for my Website Portfolio Business
- Systematize Top 20 Sites in Portfolio
Oct Update – Great progress here with my new in-house project manager really getting dug into this process! The confidence that sites have an appropriate amount of oversight and management allows me to make bigger moves in terms of site purchases and sitebuilding/growth plans. Whereas before I would have a plan for building out a site but knew my split focus would not give that task the appropriate amount of oversight so I would shelve the plan.
- Buy 1 Site Per Month
Oct Update – With my post discussing ways to sell a website there were a few decent deals that came my way with 2 being larger unique deals that should have everyone come out ahead!
- GOAL = 1 Website
- ACTUAL = 2 slightly larger sites that I believe both have some serious potential upside!
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…
- 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)
- Site making $100-$1,000/month typically the right fit
- SEO done to the site can be questionable and that increased risk will be reflected in the sales price
- Site being associated with a banned Amazon Associate is still possible to sell (but STEEP discount!)
- Understand that the benefits of the bullet points above means the sales multiple will be lower
If you have a profitable website you are looking to sell fast please let me know
3.Sell Websites Strategically for $100k Total
Oct Update – The unique website lease/sale deal is still going to plan.
PRIMARY GOAL – OVERALL INCOME FOR WEBSITE PORTFOLIO ABOVE $10k/MONTH
Oct Update – The loss of the Amazon Associate account is definitely negatively impacting earnings. However, with a few properties showing improvements and some acquisitions I am looking forward to seeing what we are able to do with this arm of the business!
Part 2 – Authority Website Income Blog Profit/Loss
3 Goals in 2015 for AuthorityWebsiteIncome.com
- Post Once Per Week
Oct Update – Basically achieved with the 5th post being this one published two days late.
- Plan = 5
- Actual = 4 (however, this income post today is actually the 5th)
2. 10x my Outreach
Oct Update – Even with the increased time available to me I have not done as good a job as I would like!
3. Site Redesign – Completed!
PRIMARY GOAL – GROW TO 30k VISITORS PER MONTH
Oct Update – 18,578 users which represents a +82% year over year increase. Although time is definitely running out I still intend to push hard to achieve the goal of 30k unique visitors per month! My most popular post was talking about my Amazon Associate Account Closed.
Part 3 – Services Business Profit/Loss
- Systems Overhaul/Refresh
Oct Update – The greatly improved team organization and tracking sheet has yielded some great improvements in some parts of the team. We now can see what parts of our system have the most opportunity for improvement and this goal is still left un-achieved!
- Improve email marking and sales automation
Oct Update – not done yet.
- BrandBuilders.io Becomes The Go-To Resource for Done 4 You Amazon FBA Private Label Websites and Done 4 You Amazon Affiliate Sites
Oct Update – Great month at BrandBuilders with some substantial orders coming through!
PRIMARY GOAL – STAND ALONE SYSTEMATIZED SERVICES BUSINESS IN 2016
Part 4 – Amazon FBA Business
- Brand #1 – Sell FBA Business for 30x with 3+ Solid Months
- Oct Update – With me still owning a 1/3rd stake in the business and running the majority of the affiliate site we will be seeing it
- Launch Brand #2 – Investors – Affiliate Site Focused (External Traffic Focused)
- Oct Update – Sales stayed solid and funding secured for larger inventory order. We spent most of the month out of stock unfortunately! ~500 units in various stages of being delivered and hope to have a strong Nov, Dec and Jan for this brand.
- Launch Brand #2 – Partner – Brand Vision Focused (Brand Vision Focus)
- Oct Update – 1,000 units being manufactured and very excited to get this product into the hands of influencers to try and help drive this businesses results.
- Launch Brand #4 – Partner – Product First Focused (Unique Product Focused)
- Oct Update – 1,300 units are on route, an interesting affiliate site play is in progress for this site and I will be sure to talk about it on this site.
- LE – Hijack Monitoring Service
- Oct Update – Slow and steady is the name of the game right now with LE. Most of our efforts to find a scalable path to customer acquisition have failed. To date our best strategies continue to be content marketing and affiliate marketing with influencer outreach. Both are great passive strategies but we are still searching for a way to reliably scale customer acquisition. Overall the business is profitable and is a very useful service so I am happy to keep it ging lean while at the same time running the occasional test to be able to scale customer aquisition.
Overall Income Update
Original Monthly Net Income Target (original goal $15k/month reliable income by age 35)
- Target Net Income = $9,875
- Actual net Income = $36,767 (new record)
- 2016 Average Monthly Net Income = $30,089 (stretch goal is 30k average for the year)
Gross revenue is a vanity number for my business and I do not share it.
NOTE – FBA numbers will be underestimated in the graph above
Final Comments
October was definitely a great month for the business with the money site portfolio performing solid despite the big impact of losing the affiliate account and even though the earnings for the month were very solid a lot of time was able to be spent on growth projects which have not started to pay off yet!
I am excited for the team, the pile of work and opportunities stacked in front of us! Lots of hard work to do over the coming months to keep improving our core offerings at LightningRank.com while at the same time maximizing the potential of our growth opportunities.
Sir how to know the website which is getting sold is from a banned amazon account.
Hi Swapnil, the best way is to do a screenshare as they login to their Amazon Associate account and if it is banned there will be a big red banner saying that it is.
Hi Jon, I just recently found out about your site from cloudliving, you can say that I am binge reading some of your stuff, thanks for the share.
On other note, so there are websites being sold from banned amazon account? kinda sleezy though lol.
Thanks for the resource and wish me luck on my niche sites.
Hi Jeremy, I believe in my case the site that got sold hadn’t had the ban hammer drop until after the sale but the previous association was enough for the contagion to spread to my site/account.
Solid work Jon, Keep it up. I struggle with the same problem of moving my teams focus every time I have a new idea, I have to be really careful about emailing them new tasks to work on, because I need them to focus on the core goals and keep working and improving them.
My next big focus is getting a system of guest posting outreach and linkbuilding outreach in place so I can create links on demand (at least to a point) because right now that’s my biggest expense is linkbuilding so I’m trying to bring it in house.
Keep up the good work!
Hi Mike, yah definitely a challenge! Good to hear about your next plan… hard to pull off so would be great if you can!
Hi Jon, now that you are not making any Amazon Associates income, what is the $10k income made up from? Surely, not just adsense? Or are there sites that weren’t affected?
CPA offers for some finance sites, AdSense, Clickbank, shareasale (to other ecommerce stores), education lead gen are the primary monetization sources.
Do you have any suggestion to get traffic?
I’m truly impressed with your report. I wish I could be half as organized as you are. I am doing much better now than a decade ago but still have a long way to go. What I really envy though is your ability to delegate tasks and manage a team. I can manage teams in other spheres but haven’t quite made the move to doing that with my flagship site. I know I should, though.
Anyways, thanks for sharing that! I posted my own report today as well.
Thanks Anne, having the monthly post to write everyday month certainly helps keep me organized. For me the team management is a lot of work but with the model of a 1:1 meeting + spreadsheet with follow up list and schedule seems to be able to work well across all kinds of different setups (partnerships, direct reports, investors) this flexible 1:1 mtg + spreadsheet approach isn’t the slickest in the world but seems to work for me ok.
Hiring ahead of the curve is always tough because the expenses come immediately but that growth takes time to come, and it can be tough going, wondering if you’re actually going to see the other side. When you do come out the other side though, things tend to skyrocket. Sounds like you are starting to reach that point now too!
Hi Dom, most of the revenue is coming from existing businesses right now while most of the effort and money on building new stuff is going into new projects for my new team member… so nothing yet has been launched… but we are getting close 🙂
Have you recovered your account from ban status? Anything else you take care while buying new websites? I mean in terms of linked to banned amazon account.
Thanks in advance and hope to get a reply. 🙂
Hi Tushar, thanks for the comment. I have not had my account un-banned… one additional thing you can do to help reduce your risk when buying a site is to login and see that the account is still in good standing.
Jon, Great work and thank you for the inspiration. I was wondering what your definition of “net income” is? Thanks
Hi Andrew. Net Income does not include taxes or reinvestment in new businesses… so I think the best definition would be seller discretionary earnings. My accountant does the official books while my wife updates my daily profit/loss spreadsheet to help us keep an eye on all the businesses.
I wondered how you find out if they were selling due to issues with Amazon and were just getting rid. Screen share as they log in, its amazing how you try to thing of all these ways to check and the best solution is the simplest!
Congratulations Jon for new record. You always been inspiring for me. I am just starting out.
I’ve been trying to compare myself with other blogs and try to find a reason for my failure (ok, being a little harsh with myself here). A reason for why my sites haven’t been that succesful. I internally been blaming lack of time because of having kids and such. So my question to you is: how many hours do you sleep at night?