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!
December is often a slow month for online business. Unless you are in an industry that can take advantage of the Christmas shopping period, you might see traffic dip quite significantly.
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
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.
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…
List of inspiring income report posts and how they earned their profits
Recognize motivating people showing not just telling people the results they are achieving
Learn from others – What the key learning is from the people
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)
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!
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!
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!
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 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…)
It was a month that started out very poorly and with my increased staff costs it was looking like it would be a tougher month than I would like. But… a strong end of the month for a few of the businesses really turned it around.
The team stepped up nicely and really pushed the business through the middle and end of the month.
Several parts of the business are not performing where we want them to be and we are working on making adjustments so we are more reliably hitting our goals!
The traffic to our money sites is growing very very nicely but our monetization is still weak. (more…)