Passive Income Report September 2016

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

Welcome to my monthly income report for September 2016!

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 12th month reporting my accounts and I simply love it! I just celebrate my first year reporting income reports!

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

• Income Report October 2015: $75.91
• Income Report November 2015: $117.61
• Income Report March 2016: $376.70
• Income Report July 2016: $710.84

IMPORTANT THINGS GOING ON IN SEPTEMBER

After my crazy wedding is Spain, finally I can set up things properly.

As a part of my PhD this month I have been in Montpellier (France) at a very prestigious conference. I presented part of my research work and I received very good feedback.

I also met new people on my engineering field and shared a bit of knowledge. It felt great!

I got all the trip expenses covered thanks to an award I received last month, $1,300. So I could eat and enjoy as much as I wanted!

I went to the beach and I did quite a lot of sightseeing.

I also enjoyed french food and wine. I tried their cheese, pâté, saucisson and seafood. The photo below is from a day I had unlimited oysters!

A New Project: Niche Site 2

In June I started a new project, which from today onwards I’ll name Niche Site 2.

I’m not reporting Niche Site 2 stats this month just yet since there is not much to report. But it’s getting interesting and it’s starting to receive some organic traffic.

The next month I will make an “in-depth” report about Niche Site 2 and the strategy I follow

Forums And Social Media Engagement

This month I registered in some forums related to online marketing, plus I became more active in the ones I was already registered.

To give some exposure to my website I have started to be more social in forums and Q/A sites.

What I normally do is helping people by answering their questions. Then, I leave a link in my signature with the hopes that they will click it.

How normally works is, if you really help with your answer the chances are high to receive visits.

Here is a list of the forums/sites I am registered to and how many posts did I do:

• WarriorForum: +32 posts (143 in total)
• BlackHatWorld: +20 posts
• TrafficPlanet: +6 posts
• DigitalPoint: +6 posts
• Quora: +8 answers (35 in total). My answers received 1,115 views this month (13,652 lifetime views)

I did receive very good feedback from Nargil from BlackHatWorld, he is an expert in SEO and he was very kind to review my link building strategy and my Content Samurai review.

I encourage you to use these forums, people there are amazing and always happy to help you out.

A total of 72 posts in forums and Q/A sites which brought some quality traffic to my blog.

BuzzBlundle

This month I started using the free version of BuzzBundle. I watch a couple of tutorials but still, I am not very used to it.

It seems it has potential, but I just can’t figure out the best use of it.

This month I will spend some more time to go through it. I heard wonderful things about Buzzbundle and I really want to know why is that people like it so much.

Survey Companies And Cash Back

In September I joined a lot of survey companies, and I started being more active in some of the ones I already was registered.

Why did I do that? Because I’m on an express plan to save enough money to pay for our first house and every little help!

I’ve tried quite a few sites, but I finally stick with: American Consumer Opinion, Vindale Research, Ebates, Qmee, Inbox Dollars, Inbox Pounds, Swagbucks, TopCashBack and Quidco.

If you want to make some extra money you should also try.

10% Earnings Donation To Children With Disabilities

This month I made an important decision, a decision which will change the life of many people. From today onwards I will put 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

As usual, I didn’t spend any time updating this website during August, because this Niche Site is running by itself. I just checked that everything is running fine and that the server doesn’t have any problems.

However, I am planning to add some fresh content on the next month. I’ve been 9 months without adding anything new and I worry that the Google rankings might decline.

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

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

Also, I answered few comments and I did a bit of maintenance. I spent no more than 1 hour in total.

Passive Income Wise

This month I updated all my income reports, I was 3 months behind my schedule and that’s why I published them for June, July, and August.

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

• Content Samurai Review – How To Create Engaging Videos In Minutes (Grab now your 50% discount coupon)
• 25+ Ways To Save Money $800 Per Month

The first one is a review about Content Samurai, one of my favorite tools. Since I started using it in my Niche Site 1 it’s helping a lot to increase social media traffic.

The second one is an article with all the small tricks that I use in order to save more money every month. My wife and I are starting a saving plan so we can buy our first house soon. So it’s not only a matter of earning more but spend less.

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.

Another of they key tasks this month was to update the 100% white hat link building tutorial which it took me nearly 10 hours.

It is always good to spend some time reviewing old material, and in this case was particularly important after the Penguin 4.0 update.

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): $64.13

• Previous Month: $41.10
• Difference: + $23.03

Monumetric Ads (from niche site 1): $241.15        Start with Monumetric for free if you have more than 80k pageviews

• Previous Month: $147.62
• Difference: + $93.53

PadSquad mobile ads (from niche site 1): $245.72

• Previous Month: $174.55
• Difference: + $71.17

Paid surveys: $14.32

• Previous Month: Not reported
• Difference: + $14.32

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

Freelance Work: $72.50

• Previous Month: $107.50
• Difference: – $35.00

Other Income:

• YouTube (from niche site 1): $0.30
• Amazon Affiliate Program: $7.96
• ShareASale Affiliate Program: $2.02        Click here to read my post about ShareASale
• Grammarly: $0.40        Click here to start using Grammarly for free
• Qmee: $0.50        Click here to read my post about Qmee
• Bluehost: $0.00         How to start a blog with WordPress and Bluehost
• Redbubble: $7.72        Design and sell T-Shirts
• Disqus (Ads in comments): $3.35

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 $65.00. 

• Freelance Work Expenses and Charges: $14.50

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: $660.22 – $79.50 = $580.72

• Previous month: $404.44
• Difference: + $176.28 (+43.6%)

September has been the best month so far in terms of net total balance. The expenses keep low and now I’m ready to do some investments. Next month I will purchase a couple of premium plugins for my blog. And I am even considering to outsource somebody for a logo. What do you think, should I add a logo?

The freelance 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 $70 this month will help to cover the VPS expenses.

This is my 12th 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 $580 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

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

From this month, every month I will share how much money Passive Income Wise is giving to help these families.

Income Donated This Month: 10%($580.72) = $58.07

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

TRAFFIC AND METRICS

After 6 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 September I didn’t write any new content. In fact, the only thing I did was answering some comments and make 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.

So, in fact, the number of sessions in total would be something like 40,087 + 20,637 = 60,724

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): $0.93
• Clicks: 70 with a total of 209k of impressions
• Page RPM: $1.43

10 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 x4? 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 8 months ago, since then, I multiplied by 3 my advertisement income. Just compare the RPM from Adsense and Monumetric (almost 3 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.

However, next month I will do a small experiment and I will deactivate it from my Niche Site 1. Instead, I will use the new technology provided by Monumetric, “Flight mobile ads”.

They promised to have better results than PadSquad, so next month we will have a comparison between these two ad networks.

Quite satisfied in particular with the metrics:

• Publisher eCPM: $1.29
• Publisher RPM: $5.89
• Average Session Duration: 2min 55 sec

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

Passive Income Wise

This blog has increased the traffic compared with the last month. The traffic is very stable, a couple of days I received some extra traffic because of viral content.

The traffic sources are:

• Social: 733 visits
• Direct: 605 visits
• Referral: 115 visits
• Organic search: 62

Interesting numbers. Organic and referral continue increasing compared to last month. Being more active have a positive effect in Google searches.

The most visited posts during September are:

It seems that people like income reports, 3 out of 10 of the most visited posts are income reports. The second favorite post is the saving challenge, which is a compilation of more than 25 tips to save extra money every month and that I do every day.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I  only report social media related with PIW.

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

• Likes Page: 215
• Friends: 1,610

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

• Followers: 1,518

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

• Followers: 1,882

Email List.

• Subscriptions: 126

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 September. 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 September 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.