Passive Income Report October 2016

THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE READ MY DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO

Since October 2015, every month I publish a detailed report with all the accounts for my online businesses. On them I include the earnings and expenses, I tell a little bit about my personal experience and what new things I have been trying during this period of time.

I explain as well what my future targets are and if the previous ones have been achieved or not. Why doing this?

1. It helps me to keep track of my personal finances. In any moment of time, I can look back at my reports and see what steps and results I got from determined strategies, like a log book.
2. Increase trusting. I also want to show you that I am a real person starting from the first step. There are many amazing bloggers out there reporting their incomes of thousands of dollars, but I found very little bloggers reporting low amounts of money like me. I think this can help to starters and to people who are not decided yet to start their own online business.
3. Motivation. Writing here my results will put me on that kind of uncomfortable position in which I need to demonstrate that I can go one step further instead of getting lazy and rely on excuses. My finances are open to everybody!

I know that every month I say the same, but it’s the truth. All earnings here reported are coming from Passive Income sources. I am not including any kind of outsourcing because the intention is you show you how far I can go with only passive income sources.

This is my 13th month reporting my accounts and I simply love it! I can’t believe I started this month one year ago, it just feels great =)

You can have a look to some of my previous monthly income reports:

• Income Report November 2015: $117.61
• Income Report January 2016: $228.33
• Income Report March 2016: $376.70
• Income Report August 2016: $491.94

IMPORTANT THINGS GOING ON IN OCTOBER

October has been a chill-out month. During October my wife and I have set up few things at home and spent the weekends doing stuff for ourselves.

One of the goals I made for this month was to eat healthier, that was eating less processed food and a more balanced diet.

This month I also spent some time for myself. It has been more than just work, work, and work. I’ve visited some friends and had some fun going out for drinks.

I’ve even carved my own Halloween Pumpkin, I hope you like it!

I also spent some time helping my wife to set up her own blog. In fact, she figured out all by herself but in some aspects, she used my help in particular for SEO purposes.

I can say her blog looks so nice and you might want to visit it. She writes about food recipes, makeup, fashion, traveling and a lot of other stuff.

If you want to have a look, check Daily Surprises, which is her blog.

Niche Site 2 is taking off.

In June I started a new project, Niche Site 2. This project relies on income from advertisement.

This month is the first time I report Niche Site 2 stats. It’s getting interesting and it’s starting to receive some organic traffic.

Focus On Pinterest

On October I spent quite a few time on Pinterest. I heard that many bloggers use it to promote their articles.

This month I wanted to give more importance to Pinterest and see if I can generate traffic out of it. I already had an account but I’ve never promoted it very well.

What I did is to join as many boards as I could on topics related to my website. Then I shared some of my content and other blogs content on these boards.

The most important here is to create Pinterest friendly pins, this is vertical pins with some colored text. You can visit my Pinterest profile here, so you know what I’m talking about.

My New Traffic Strategy: Tailwind

Tailwind is basically a Pinterest pin scheduler. It allows you to schedule your pins at specific times and in different boards. It saves me a lot of time and I can do bulk schedule in less than 30 minutes.

I already used the free trial which allows you to schedule up to 100 pins, but I wanted more. So this month I paid the membership for Tailwind and it has been a total success. My traffic has increased by x4, you will it below in the traffic section.

If you want to start using Tailwind you can get 2 free months when paying for 12 months by using my link.

Extra Effort On Twitter

This month I promoted my Twitter as well. I put extra effort on this and it paid very well.

My blog got so many new followers and visits from Twitter. You will see more details of my Twitter strategy below.

10% Earnings Donation To Children With Disabilities

Last month I made an important decision, a decision which will change the life of many people. From September onwards I’m putting a 10% of my monthly earnings aside.

This money will be donated every month to different charities. I want to help children with life-threatening, terminal illness or learning disabilities.

With this blog, I want to be successful but also I want to make a difference in other people lives.

But, why?

My wife has a little dream since she was a child, she wanted to build schools in China (from where she is from) for children with problems and learning disabilities.

The first time she told me, I felt so touch that I made a promise to myself, a promise that I will never forget: if one day I make enough money to build a school, I will do it.

So, why to wait until that day? I can start helping from today.

That’s why from today I promise myself and I make it public to you that a 10% of the money earned with any of my websites will be destinated to support people who really need it.

So the more I grow my online business the more I will help children facing problems.

What do you think, do you like the idea?

CONTENT CREATION

For the purposes of this section I will include the posts/pages created for each of my Niche Sites and then for the PIW blog:

Niche Site 1

This month I’ve spent some time updating Niche Site 1 with two new articles. However, this site is running by itself. I also checked that all is running smoothly and answered some comments.

I’ve been 9 months without updating Niche Site 1 and I’ve decided to add 2 new articles every month to keep it fresh.

Niche Site 1 has been ranking on the first page for 3,100 organic words.

Referring pages are now more than 200 but it seems they stopped growing since August, another reason to do some more work on it.

Niche Site 2

I’ve added 5 new posts with a total of 53 posts so far since I created it in July. The site is growing little by little but it needs more articles.

Niche Site 2 has been ranking on the top 100 organic search results for 18 keywords. This is very little compared to Niche Site 1, but still is a good progress.

Referring pages are now nearly 30 with some ups and downs.

This is the first time reporting referring pages for Niche Site 2. The graph above suggests me to work on SEO in order to increase the number of backlinks.

Passive Income Wise

This month I created a lot of new images for my Pinterest boards and also for Twitter and Facebook.

Also, I’ve been working on a couple of posts which you will enjoy.

• 7 Free Online Survey Sites To Join For Extra Cash
• 12 Things I’ve Done To Make Extra Money (most visited post in October)

The first one is a review of some online surveys I’ve been using to make extra money. I tried so many survey sites before but these are the best ones in terms of payouts and legitimacy.

In the second post, I show some of the things I’ve done in the past to make more money. Some of them are passive income ideas, but others talk about my past life before blogging. So if you want to know more about me, you will find this post interesting. You can also apply some of these ideas in your life.

I also started a new series of posts, the income roundups. Every month I will publish a summary of all the most influential bloggers and their income reports. So if you don’t want to miss them, I suggest to you to subscribe.

I also updated some of my old posts. I included extra information to provide more value and improved readability:

• 25+ Ways To Save Money $800 Per Month
• Extra Income: +35 Passive Income Ideas
• Why Passive Income Can Change Your Life

It is always good to spend some time reviewing old material.

And now… let’s start with the interesting part. I know you are here to check out my numbers 🙂

INCOME REPORT

Google Adsense (from niche site 1): $55.80

• Previous Month: $64.13
• Difference: – $8.33

Monumetric Ads (from niche site 1): $225.50        Start with Monumetric for free if you have more than 80k pageviews

• Previous Month: $241.15
• Difference: – $15.65

PadSquad mobile ads (from niche sites 1 & 2): $166.01

• Previous Month: $245.72
• Difference: – $79.71

Paid surveys: $36.14

• Previous Month: $14.32
• Difference: + $21.82

The websites I use to generate this income are American Consumer Opinion, Swagbucks, TopCashBack, Vindale Research and Qmee.

Consulting Work: $208.00

• Previous Month: $72.50
• Difference: + $135.50

Other Income:

• Bluehost: $65.00        How to start a blog with WordPress and Bluehost
• Content Samurai: $22.09        Read my Content Samurai review
• YouTube (from niche site 1): $0.37
• Amazon Affiliate Program: $0.00
• Sage One: $8.00
• ShareASale Affiliate Program: $1.00        Click here to read my post about ShareASale
• Grammarly: $0.00        Click here to start using Grammarly for free
• Qmee: $0.57        Click here to read my post about Qmee
• Redbubble: $9.97        Design and sell T-Shirts
• Disqus (Ads in comments): $5.12

EXPENSES

In February I needed to upgrade the hosting for my Niche Site 1. Before I was using a shared hosting with a limitation of 150 GB of transfer data, now I have my own VPS in where I have up to 5,000 GB and I can host an unlimited number of domains. A total of $64.00. 

• Consulting Work Expenses and Charges: $41.60
• Tailwind (1-year subscription): $114.18

The initial investment for the hosting and domain name (for PIW) was done in October and this one is already running for free. Next month I will need to renew it.

Net Total Balance: $803.73 – $219.78 = $583.95

• Previous month: $580.72
• Difference: + $3.23 (+0.5%)

October has been the best month so far in terms of income and net total balance. The expenses have been a little bit high compared to other months. The main reason has been the purchase of Tailwind but the results have been amazing.

I try to spend around $100 every month in plugins and other useful stuff to improve my blog performance. Next month I would like to purchase ThriveLeads.

The consulting work is coming from people who contact me to hire my services. It seems some readers like the way I do things. Great! More than $200 this month will help to cover all of the expenses.

This is my 13th month reporting my accounts and it seems to keep growing little by little which makes me so happy. Obviously, it’s nothing to compare with other famous bloggers, but for a starter like me, it’s considered an important milestone. I am having nearly $600 profit and this is starting to be very exciting.

Imagine what would you do with an extra $583 per month?

The graph below shows my income and expenses since I started with my Niche Site 1 in February 2015. It seems incredible that I’ve been on this for more than one year!

The graph below shows the balance or profit which is calculated as:

Balance = Income – Expenses

October is the second month I am donating a part of my income to children with health issues and learning disabilities.

Since September, every month I’m sharing how much money Passive Income Wise is giving to help these families.

Income Donated This Month: 10%($583.95) = $58.39

Nice! One step closer to build a school in China!

TRAFFIC AND METRICS

After 7 months, I am back reporting my traffic and metrics. And I do it because of you.

I received emails, comments, and even a phone call just asking to continue reporting my traffic.

I will report the metrics from my different sites one by one.

Niche Site 1

In October I only wrote 2 new posts. I also answered comments and made sure that the VPS is working.

It is important to mention that these metrics are only for desktop visits. Since I’m running Padsquad (ads for mobile), the plugin used tracks all the visits and create events in Google Analytics.

In the image below you will be able to see the mobile traffic. During the first week, Padsquad didn’t report anything because I switched it off. I tried a different ad network, but it didn’t give as good results as Padsquad so I switched it on again.

So, in fact, the number of sessions in total would be something like 63,956 + 17,415 = 81,371

The more interesting about Niche Site 1 traffic is that is coming from Google, it’s purely organic and I don’t need to worry about promoting in social media or paying advertisement.

People come to my site because Google indexed it as a relevant site within the niche.

The main reason why this happened is that since the beginning I targeted low competition keywords with high search volume.

I did keyword research using Long Tail Pro and selected over 100 keywords. Then I just wrote an article for each of them.

Niche Site 1 is at the first of Google for more than 3,000 keywords. And this is just the beginning!

Google Adsense

I would really like to share more data from my Adsense account but since the politics of Adsense are very restrictive I will post the maximum I can.

• Cost per click (CPC): $0.67
• Clicks: 84 with a total of 192k of impressions
• Page RPM: $1.01

11 months ago (December 2015) the CPC was $0.24 and the RPM was $0.55 (check here Dec 2015 Income)

How I managed to increase the CPC? There are 2 main reasons, the first is because Google loves established sites which have been for a while. The longer is the age of your domain, the better results you will get from Adsense.

The second reason and perhaps more important was the Adsense strategy I followed in order to increase my CPC.

Monumetric

Here are the earnings from Monumetric ads. I hope they don’t kill me to share this data with you!

I joined Monumetric 9 months ago, since then, I multiplied by 3 my advertisement income. Just compare the RPM from Adsense and Monumetric (almost 2 times difference)!

If you are already using Adsense I recommend you to change to Monumetric, you will have your own account manager which will be reachable FOR FREE with you 24/7.

Why not try it? To join Monumetric, click here. If you receive more than 80,000 page views per month the setup process will be completely free!

PadSquad

PadSquad is the mobile advertisement network I am currently using. I am very happy with the results.

This month I did a small experiment, I tried Monumetric, “Flight mobile ads” and deactivated Padsquad during the first week. Hence, the increase of Monumetrics earnings during the first week and zero earnings from Padsquad.

The winner is Padsquad, their RPM in mobile ads is higher than Monumetric, which I think makes sense because this company is specialized in mobile ads.

Quite satisfied in particular with the metrics:

• Publisher eCPM: $0.92
• Publisher RPM: $4.86
• Average Session Duration: 2min 56 sec

And you, what type of mobile advertisement are you using? Share with me and drop a line in the comments section.

Niche Site 2

In October I wrote 5 news articles with a total of 53 posts so far since I created it in July. This is the first time I report the traffic for Niche Site 2.

I’m very happy to report that most of the traffic is organic (which is the aim of this project). Referral traffic is mainly from Reddit and forums.

I did keyword research using Long Tail Pro and selected some keywords. Then I just wrote an article for each of them.

Google Adsense

I would really like to share more data from my Adsense account but since the politics of Adsense are very restrictive I will post the maximum I can.

• Cost per click (CPC): $0.88
• Clicks: 2 with a total of 2.9k of impressions
• Page RPM: $1.11

Not great earnings, but it’s starting to pay its bills (host and WP theme).

PadSquad

First time trying Padsquad on Niche Site 2. The results are promising. I generated much more from mobile ads than from AdSense for desktop.

A booming $7.41 isn’t bad, right?

Once I reach the 10k pageviews I will apply to Monumetric for the desktop ads.

Passive Income Wise

This blog has increased the traffic compared with the last month. The traffic was very stable until the last week when I started using Tailwind.

On the 28th I did a migration to a new host and hence the website was down for almost 3 days (it took longer than expected the propagation of the DNS).

The traffic sources are mainly coming from Pinterest and Reddit. Last month I didn’t receive any traffic from Pinterest and this month it’s my main source of traffic thanks to Tailwind and the pin scheduler tool.

If you want to try Tailwind for free you can do it following this link. It offers auto scheduler for 100 free pins at optimised times depending on your audience.

Interesting numbers. Reddit traffic continues increasing compared to last month. Being more active in the Reddit community have a positive effect.

Google/CPC is traffic coming from an ad campaign, I used a free voucher from Google to spend in ads ($150). I scheduled a budget of $5 per day which will last for up to a month.

The most visited posts during October are:

It seems that people from Pinterest like tips to make/save money, 3 out of 10 of the most visited posts are related to these categories. The favorite post is my list of thing I’ve done to make extra money in the past, which is a compilation of 12 things I’ve done since I was young to make money to pay my college.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I  only report social media related with PIW.

Twitter. If you don’t want to miss any of my new tweets follow Passive Income Wise on Twitter

• Followers: 2,492 (+974)

Pinterest. Check out my new Pins by following Passive Income Wise on Pinterest

• Followers: 2.031 (+149)

Facebook. Support Passive Income Wise Liking us on Facebook or with a Friend Request.

• Likes Page: 222 (+7)
• Friends: 1,613 (+3)

Email List.

• Subscriptions: 144 (+18)

Now I am using a free plugin for my Opt-ins. Next month I want to try Thrive Leads which is a premium plugin which hopefully will help me to increase my email list.

That’s everything for this past October. I wanted to publish also my targets for the next month, but you know what? I keep it for myself for now. If for a couple of months I see that I achieve them I will share here with you 🙂

Did you like my October Income Report? Are you interested in earning income online?

If you are thinking about starting your own blog, I created a tutorial-guide that will help you start your own blog for cheap, You need very little investment, starting at only $3.95 per month (this deal is only through my link) for blog hosting. Additionally, you will get a free blog domain (valued at $12-15) through my Bluehost link, only if your purchase is for at least 12 months of blog hosting. My recommendation is for you to be self-hosted. This is important if you want to monetize your blog because your website will look more professional.