March Income Report - 2017

This is my 10th 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.

March has been my most productive month so far this year. I've had zero distractions and zero days where I've had to postpone work for one reason or another. As someone who works for themselves, I find it to be very easy to get distracted and lose a day or two to some event.

With having a very productive month I managed to reach my goals of finishing the Pro School software on CodeCanyon. This has been in development for around 6 weeks and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. It's the first time I've made any kind of school management software, so I'm looking forward to the feedback and implementing new ideas and features.

With the increase in sales, I'm getting more and more support requests. This takes up a lot of my time and whilst I try my best to respond to them as soon as possible, sometimes the issues can build up. A lot of the time the issues are simple fixes which don't take too much of my time, but I also can get some very time consuming ones. I want to start building up my support documentation and making sure the common issues clients have are documented with fixes so they don't have to wait for me to reply to them.

I also want to work on an auto-installer. Currently, when you buy a product, you have to modify the config files with all your information. This is fine if you've seen any type of code before, but for some clients who don't know any programming can find this a bit intimidating. So my plan is to make a script which will allow you to enter your details and then it automatically modify the files so you don't have to.

With every new product I make, I improve upon the basic core features that I start out with. I can then apply these changes, sometimes quickly, to my other products so they all benefit. With Pro Schools, I recoded the way User Roles worked so that it's super easy to make different Roles on the system. It uses some nice new JavaScript which allows you to drag and drop permissions. I'll be rolling this out, and other improved upon content, to my other products in their next updates.

I have been able to also write a few more articles. I finished my FullCalendar PHP CodeIgniter series. I made a change to how early I get up in the morning and I've been using that time to research and write content for my blog. I want to target some project management system content next, so you may see a few blog posts on that.

Another new source of income has arrived: Amazon Affiliates. I finally got my first affiliate revenue ; it's insignificant in terms of money but it's an amazing feeling because I've been working on this blog for over 2 years now and it's finally made it's first profit. Blogging is a very crowded and competitive area to make money online, but it's something I really enjoy doing. In fact, I'm not really in it for the money- I just like to show off my own progress, so any extra income is a bonus!

Earnings Report

Source	Earnings	Last Month
CodeCanyon	$2,406.37	+59.2% (+$895.68)
Freelance	$230.00	-42.5% (-$170.00)
Amazon Affiliate	$0.02	NEW ($0)
Total	$2636.39	+37.98% (+$725.70)

I believe this is the most money I've reported I've made online since I began doing Income Reports. I had strong sales all month from Support Centre, as well as Titan (though it fluctuates from high to low). Considering it's over $1000 more than last month, and I haven't released any new products, it can be very hard to predict income for CodeCanyon.

I picked up some small Freelance work too that helped supplement this Income Report as my highest earnings ever. I want to build a new computer so I may take on some more extra work to help with this.

Traffic Report

Another increase in traffic from last month. My tutorial articles really seem to be helping increase my traffic, since those pages are ranking high in google search. I want to try and target some keywords to do with my products over the next few months, but those keywords are really competitive so doing that will take a lot of work.

Time Report

I mentioned at the beginning that I had a very good month in terms of consistent working. You can see from my time report that I managed to work over 110 hours, which has been the highest since I began recording them. Considering in February I reported that I only worked 50 hours, this feels like a step in the right direction.

Next month I'll be working on updates to my other products, and sometimes that can mean a loss of focus and wasted time. If I can reach over 100 hours next month I'll be very happy.

I use my project management system - Titan for tracking my time.

April Plans

In April I will be flying back to the UK for 2 weeks. This will be my final trip back before the end of my journey in France. The weather in France at the moment is beautiful, reaching highs of 24 pretty much every day. I've been able to go to the beach at least once a week too. It's a very different way of living compared to life back in the UK, where the weather right now is just above 10c and a bit miserable.

As for work, my target is to put out new updates to my best selling products, including the Support Centre, Titan and Pro Login. I also want to push out a new update to the Status Checker to incorporate some of my user's feedback.

My next big project is going to be my Live Chat product. It hasn't been updated in over a year and it really needs a revamp. I'll probably be recoding it from scratch and implementing lots of features from my other products.

I've been researching into building my own computer; it's something I've never done and I've become a bit addicted to learning all about the different parts. For someone who has programmed since their mid-teens, it seems kind of strange not to know the inner workings of a computer. The computer I want to build is quite expensive and so I might need to take on some more freelance work in my spare time to help pay for it.

Hope you all have a great April and I'll be back to report then!