October 2016 Income Report

It’s a week away from my 31st birthday (Nov 8th) and I must say: I have been more excited about birthdays in the past. I’m getting old. I can’t deny it any longer 🙂

Going back 10 years, I would have never imagined myself turning 31. My imagination somehow never went past 27 years of age, as 27 – at the time – appeared to be the perfect age to be.

I did have HUGE aspirations though. I was barely 21 and had decided to become a millionaire by 25. Once a millionaire, I would buy that dream car, build that dream mansion, travel the world, marry a real sweetheart of a girl, and live happily ever after.

I certainly didn’t hit millionaire status by 25. I did however marry one hell of a girl, owned a Porsche (yeeeah… pretty sweet), and started world travel before turning 26. So, no million dollars in my bank account and also no dream villa of my own, but the 6 years that followed were pretty incredible nonetheless.

While reflecting on this today, I was once again reminded how so many people – like me back then – want to be millionaires for the lifestyle it will afford. Yet the reality is – once you boil things down to their truest form – you likely will not need a million dollars to live a pretty incredible life.

In other words, once you remove peer pressure, the need to keep up with the Joneses, and the urge to show off, it’s phenomenal how large of a life you can live without having a limitless bank account. It’s not to say large buying power isn’t nice – it certainly does afford a lot of freedoms – but I’ve discovered my dream life (at this point) does not really require it.

Bestselling author Tim Ferris talks a bit more extensively about this in his book: The 4-Hour Workweek. It’s been a while since I read it, but one of the examples he gave was, when people dream of a beautiful ferrari, they see the quarter million dollar price tag. The typical guy driving it sees a $2500 per month or $577 per week car payment. Coming up with $250,000 is hard, but once you break it down, it becomes doable if you want it badly enough.

My point is: If you have a near impossible dream/goal that you would LOVE to attain, try breaking it down into fractions. Keep breaking it down to a level where you realize “I can do this!” and then give it your all.

D.H. Hunt, one of the richest men in his day, once said this about success: “Find out exactly what it is you want, then calculate what and how much it is going to cost you to get it, and then set out and pay the price in full.”

For myself I realized it wasn’t so much the fancy toys, houses, etc. It was “time freedom” I really wanted. It wasn’t owning a $250,000 car to drive to work with, but rather having unlimited time – every day – to spend with my family.

It’s not to say I won’t own those things one day, but their significance pales in comparison to having ultimate time freedom as a result of passive income (which is something I focus 100% of my working time on these days).

First Income Reports Anniversary

I just realized it’s been one year since I started sharing the monthly income reports of this blog on here. My first one was back in October of 2015. Back then I actually wrote weekly posts for the blog despite not making much (if any) money from it. Why? Because I knew the day would come where it would make money without me having to do much (if any) writing.

To say I’ve made it with this blog would be a lie. It does make a bit of extra cash each month now and I am very grateful for that. Truth is however that this blog is such a tiny part of my collection of projects that I sometimes wonder why I keep it going. Then I tell myself it would be foolish to shut it down seeing how the income from it – although small – is 100% passive.

So here we go, starting year two of income report sharing.

SEODagger.com Income for October 2016

Before I start, here is a quick disclaimer:

DISCLAIMER: I never include earnings from ventures unrelated to this blog. I own and am a partner in a bunch of online business ventures, but – for the sake of a fair case study – only earnings directly related to SEODagger.com will be shared here.

And now, let’s look at all the numbers together.

The breakdown:

• MyeCoverMaker: $289.46
  • If you’ve been following along for a few months you will know that MyeCoverMaker has been my biggest earner on this blog – thanks to a review I wrote about it a long time ago. I’ve been beating previous record monthly earnings with them for the third month in a row now. Yay!
    They recently talked about switching their affiliate program to ClickBank (CB). So when I found out they were already on CB, I started sending all traffic to the CB sales page instead.
    Pro Tip: When you use an easy link masking plugin like “pretty link”, it is very easy to change the URL all the traffic goes to.
    Long story short, the CB page was different and the conversions were terrible. Instead of getting 1 to 5 sales per day, I got one $7.26 commission in 7 days. Needless to say I switched back to the old link… but likely lost about a $100 to this experiment. But that’s ok. You never know these things for sure until you test, test, test and test them again.
• SourceMarket: $6.48 
  • Same as last month – a bunch of random orders on Source Market that must have been placed after people clicked a link on this blog. Also, it looks like Alex Becker (the guy behind Source Market) switched everything over to a new domain and called it Konker. Looks really nice! 🙂

Total earnings that I can trace back to this blog? $295.94 USD

SEODagger.com Expenses for September 2016

Same as with income, I will only track expenses that directly apply to this blog. For example: I do have a few SEO tools and services that I pay for on a regular basis, but unless it’s an expense I wouldn’t have without this blog, I won’t list it as an expense here. I hope that makes sense.

The expense breakdown:

• HostGator: $5.97
  • PLEASE NOTE: I have a dedicated server with HostGator that I have a bunch of my sites on. SEODagger.com is also hosted on that server, so I don’t actually pay HostGator $5.97 per month to keep this site running, but am simply noting that I would roughly pay that much per month if I were to host JUST this blog with them using their basic WordPress Hosting plan.

Total expense fro SEODagger.com in September? $5.97 USD

October Takeaway

Because I didn’t spend a dime more than I absolutely had to on this blog last month, I walked away with $289.97 USD in spendable cash. In keeping with the car payment reference, I could finance a brand new Honda Civic with that (assuming the blog continues to bring that in each month). Not bad!

I didn’t just keep the expenses for this blog down though. I also kept working on it to a minimum. Meaning, aside from writing Septembers income report, I didn’t do anything on the blog. So again, not much income, but it is 100% passive. I’m not complaining.

Yearend Distractions

Historically, the last couple months of the year were always the lowest income months for me. The main reason was because I was mainly in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Internet Marketing (IM) niche.

Today I am spread out over at least half a dozen broad niches (that encompass a dozen or two sub-niches). Meaning I am not expecting this to be a slow time of year even if this blog will do horribly.

Knowing this, I have been heavily focusing on my various other projects that I know will perform best this time of year. So – although distracted from this blog – I am heavily focused on a few of my other projects. I will eventually talk about some of these in future case studies on this blog.

Thank You!

Thank you for reading this report. If you are a regular reader, thank you, thank you thank you. It is people like you that ultimately help make this blog successful.

Every time I consider neglecting this blog I get a comment, email, or other message from one of my readers that encourages me to keep it going. So I will – for you – thanks to you 🙂