Monthly Income Report – August 2016

原文链接:https://marcoschwartz.com/monthly-income-report-august-2016/

Every month, I publish a report of the business & investment income I received during the previous month. I publish these reports to show you what you can expect with an online business & unconventional investments, and I also publish them to keep the motivation to work hard & to grow this number month after month.

In every report, you will find out the details about all the business income I received during the month, all the business expenses, and also all the income I received from investments during the month.

What Happened in August

I had three goals for my business in August: completely revamp the marketing side of my business, implement paid plans on my Internet of Things platform (aREST.io), and finally launch my first ever video course on my main website, Open Home Automation.

I spent a lot of time on the marketing side on my business, by really implementing new, standardised funnels for all the websites on which I am selling something. On all those sites, the visitors then go through all the steps of a good sales funnels: signing up in exchange of a giveaway, going through a welcome sequence with a lot of value, and then introducing my products. I hope that this will give a better experience for the visitors of all my websites.

I also launched paid plans for my Internet of Things platform, aREST. This doesn’t yet generate revenues as most of the users are now trying the free Starter plan, but my goal is that some of those users upgrade in a close future.

Finally, I launched my first ever video course about building home automation systems, generating more than $1,000 the first day of the launch. I know have a dozen of students in the course, and I’ll work on marketing this course even more in the future.

On the investing side, I mainly injected more money in the real estate, by investing in new REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) and also in one more property in the UK. I am still way behind my goal of 87,500 Euros invested in REITs & real estate before the end of the year, but I am getting closer.

Business Income

Below is all the income I received from my online business during the past month:

Amazon Kindle eBooks: 1280 €

eBooks & video courses: 2076 €

Books royalties: 1538 €

Gross business income in August 2016: 4894 € (+57%)

Below is all the business related expenses I had during the past month:

Team expenses on UpWork: 135 €

Small Fiverr gigs: 94 €

Hosting: 21 €

Business expenses in August 2016: 250 € (+25%)

Net business income in August 2016: 4644 € (+59%)

Investment Income

Below is all the income I received from investments during the past month. For some investments, this is the expected monthly revenue as some investments only pay once a quarter or once a year:

Dividend growth stocks: 396 €

Peer-to-Peer lending: 471 €

Real estate: 146 €

Bitcoin investments: 110 €

Amazon affiliate websites: 1479 €

Investment income in August 2016: 2606 € (+2%)

Comment About the Report

Let’s now make the total and add my business & investment revenues:

Total income for August 2016: 7220 € (+32%)

The excellent income of this month are mainly due to the launch of my video course, and I will continue to market it to my audience during the coming month. And of course, my investment portfolio is always giving me good returns, even when I am working hard on a completely new project.

I actually had a very unfortunate event at the end of August/beginning of September: my hosting company, SiteGround, told me that I had to upgrade to a very expensive plan (more than $100 a month), because the activity on my server grew. The only problem is that the traffic on my sites actually didn’t raise that much, so it was a problem on their side that they just couldn’t fix.

After days of unavailability of many of my sites and many sleepless night, I finally moved all my sites to DigitalOcean, on which you are reading this website right now. I had a very good relation with SiteGround in the past, and I recommended it to many people, but their behaviour on this issue was just unacceptable so I had to move. My websites are now faster than ever before, and I am only paying $20/month for the server on DigitalOcean.

My other goal for this coming month of September is to continue the marketing of products I launched the last month, so the video course & also my paid plans on my IoT platform. I will also launch product on this website, one about investing your money as an entrepreneur/digital nomad, and the other about investing in profitable websites. I really hope you will enjoy those new products as they launch.

As usual, I also updated my investment portfolio page to reflect the changes during the month. What about you? Did you have a good month with your online business and/or your investments?