April Income Report - 2017

This is my 11th Income Report in which I detail how much money I made online this month.

These reports are designed to show you that it is possible to make money online. I also want to use them to give myself motivation to meet targets, describe new challenges and achievements. Every month I’ll post reports of my google analytics, income stats and more.

Can you believe I've made 11 of these income reports already? It feels like only a couple of months ago I had started this new blogging series and now it's almost been a full year! I'm going to make an extra special wrap-up income report next month to celebrate, so check back for that!

The month of April began with me finally having finished my Pro School software and preparing to work on new updates for my other products. I like to follow the pattern of adding a new product, updating existing products, adding a new product etc. It allows for ample time between releases so I can collect user feedback and gather a list of niggling bugs that sometimes crop up.

The sales for Pro School have been disappointing. I was expecting the software to generate around 2/3 sales per week, and instead it's gotten a total of 5 at the time of writing this. Normally, new products are slow starting anyways, but usually they pick up after a while. I've gotten some good feedback and user requests for the product, so I'll be working on a small update to try and incorporate those into the product.

I managed to push out updates for both Status Checker and Support Centre. I'm currently in the middle of a new Titan update too, so that should get released by the middle of May. All of these updates were improving upon existing features and adding in your suggestions from comments and emails. I really feel like the products are ever-improving due to the user feedback I get. I'm really greatful!

In April, I did travel back to the UK for Easter to spend time with family. I'm in the final couple of months of staying in France now so soon I'll be getting ready to settle back in my home country. I have missed the UK immensely, but I have had such an amazing time abroad that it definitely has felt worth it.

I've been able to make more blog posts this month; I've been trying to get up earlier in the mornings to write out some content or read up on something interesting that I can use on my blog for later on. The new posts include an alert on the Avada Discount Sale, the conclusion of my own Niche Site Case Study and also I put a lot of effort into my Improving Avada SEO article (it's over 2300 words long!).

I also worked on my own WordPress Plugin! This was just a small bit of coding I wanted to do for my Road To Elite blog post. I'm fast approaching becoming an Elite Author on Envato and I wanted a way to show a countdown of how much I need to sell to reach that status. The plugin doesn't do much really; it just connects to my database which has already pre-calculated how much I need to sell using the Envato API.

I did have some spare time this month to work on a small secret project. For a while now, I've been wanting to track the amount of sales on Envato. It can be quite frustrating to see your sales go completely dead for a random week and wonder whether it's your items or Envato's traffic being slow (such as some kind of holiday happening). So I made program to log all the items on CodeCanyon's PHP category and calculate how many sales have been happening each day. I still need to do some testing on it, but I can show you the last half of April results for PHP Sales on CodeCanyon:

sales data php envato

It doesn't take into account Support Purchases or whether or not the sale is an extended license, but it does give a good indicator of when sales are dropping at certain periods (you can see that during the weekend). Should I make the program start logging all CodeCanyon items? Would anyone be interested in this data? I checked with Envato staff to see if this was allowed and they didn't seem to mind me doing it so I'm happy to program it as long as it doesn't break any rules.

Earnings Report

Source	Earnings	Last Month
CodeCanyon	$2,021.75	-15.9% (-$384.62)
Freelance	$1110.00	+382% (+$880)
Amazon Affiliate	$5.99	+29850% (+$5.97)
Total	$3137.74	+19.06% (+$=501.352636.39×100">501.35)

A really good month for me in terms of earnings. Although CodeCanyon sales were down (the easter holidays were a very dry spell!)

I managed to pick up some freelance work which helped push this month's income report over $3,000!

My Amazon Affiliates income increased this month too. I only have these links on a few pages, so it's not very optimised for the site yet. I'm not planning on trying to grow this revenue stream until my blog traffic increases a lot more.

Traffic Report

Traffic for April 2017

My traffic has increased again this month. The content I'm writing is getting picked up in search engines and ranking, so it's bringing in a lot more organic traffic.

I'm trying to increase my social media presence a bit more... I just feel like I have nothing else to write about! I'm taking a look at the social media platforms I'm not too familiar with such as Pinterest, Stumbleupon etc to see what I can learn from them and if they can be a source of traffic.

Time Report

time results patchesoft

Unfortunately, a week before I was due to fly back to the UK for the Easter Holidays, my laptop charger decided to stop working. This meant I was without power on my main working computer and I lost about a week's worth of work time. It was very frustrating to say the least. And when I got back, the internet was down for several days so I lost more time there.

Overall, not a good month in terms of time spent working. The massive fluctuations in time spent is concerning for me.

I use Titan - Project Management System to manage my time.

May Plans

May is going to be my last month abroad! I'm not sure if I'll be taking time off work to enjoy my final month since I'll never get another opportunity like this again. Either way, this month could either be very productive or very procrastinated.

My main objective for this month is to get the new Titan update out. I've improved the product a lot, taking on a lot of user suggestions and adding in my own ideas. I have wanted to improve some of the core sections of the product to make them more useful and intuitive.

Once Titan is complete, I'll be working on pushing out some updates for my Pro Login and Pro Login Content products. These will be more small so I don't expect them to take too long. And then I'll either be adding a small update to Pro Schools or begin work on a complete revamp of the Live Chat product to be more inline with my other products.

Blog post wise I haven't made any plans yet. I am thinking of going through some of my older content and updating them, making them more useful and readable. I've learnt a lot about SEO over the last few months that I've actually been thinking of making some kind of SEO product, but I have yet to decide on this.

Hope you all have a wonderful month and I'll see you next time for the 12th income report!