Monthly Income Report August 2016: $5,163.96

It's time for a quick recap of August!

You read on every blog about making money online that summer is a slow period for earnings… Well, it wasn't for me: I've had great growth in both July and August.

That being said, I have a hard time realizing that summer is already over.

We're now entering the "ber" months that are like a countdown to Christmas season.

You might be thinking: "Hey Steven, slow down a bit, August just ended and you're already talking about Christmas?"

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Of course I'm thinking about the holiday season… But not because of Santa, snow, and reindeers.

I'm keeping my eyes on the ball, and the ball is the hottest shopping season of the year: starting around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and stretching until Christmas.

This might sound early to write about this season, but keep in mind that the main project I am working on at the moment is a niche site fueled by organic traffic.

Ranking a site for specific keywords takes time, and September is one of the last months to publish content that will rank by the end of the year to capture some of this shopping traffic.

Before I go any further about my plans for the end of the year, let's take a look at what I accomplished with my online projects in August.

Here's what happened in August

Up until the last week of August, I was holding my breath and crossing fingers in hopes of hitting $5,000 in gross revenue for the month.

It was going to be a close call and the trend for the end of the month wasn't really encouraging… And then I had 2 big days in a row that helped me reach this milestone!

I'm really excited to report a gross revenue over $5,000 for August.

This is putting me a little bit ahead of schedule and is motivating me to keep working hard to reach the first big milestone since my epic crash a few years ago.

The number I want to hit before the end of the year is $10,000 in a single month in gross revenue.

Until then, I don't give myself too much slack: I dialed down the partying and going out with friends, and will most likely keep it to a minimum until December.

Working crazy hours every day is not the fun-est part of being an online entrepreneur, but it's important to keep your priorities in check, and when you love your work it makes it that much easier.

Right now, I have only 1 goal: getting to $10,000 in a month; and I'm ready to sacrifice everything else until I reach that goal.

This might sound a little bit extreme, but without passion and obsession, you can't achieve anything meaningful in life.

Once I reach that number in revenue, I'll be ready to start the second step of my plan.

More about part deux of my big plan in the months to come.

What I've been focusing on

As with previous months, almost all of my time and resources have been focused on my niche site.

My niche site keeps growing

I started to scale up my content creation, spending about 3 times as much as in July.

I'm at a point where I'm considering hiring a VA just to do the formatting of the articles because I'm spending a ridiculous amount of time doing this myself.

The articles look great when they're fully formatted with headings, lists, images, links, etc, but it's not the best use of my time.

This is going to become an even bigger problem as I plan to double my content creation in September, which means double the number of articles to format before publishing them.

Let's take a look at how my niche site did in August:

As you can see, traffic grew by almost 10,000 visitors month over month.

In terms of revenue, that site made around $900 more than previous month. This is the money I'll be using to double my content production next month.

It's interesting to note that my RPM (revenue per thousand visitors) increased from $63.43 to $67.58. This increase is mostly due to the geo-targeting script I installed in July.

This script allows me to redirect people to the correct version of Amazon, if there is an Amazon site specifically for their country.

The resources to build that script cost me $314 (including weekly updates for a year), but they're already fully paid up and then some after only one month an a half. From this point, all money made from foreign Amazon sites is pure profit.

My other projects keep stalling

With most of my time spent working on the niche site, I wasn't able to do much with my other projects.

I've done a little maintenance and cleaning on Dukeo, but nothing major.

Close to the end of the month, I was happy to see that one of my readers took advantage of my free guide about how to start a money-making blog.

This guide was carefully written to help complete beginners get their first blog, and it's always exciting to see a new person joining the blogging family.

My joint venture is also suffering from the lack of work me and my partner are putting in. The project is at a standstill and I'm considering dropping it altogether. It doesn't make sense to keep wasting money on recurring payments for services that we don't use anymore.

The situation is very similar with my viral sites: even though these sites are making ~$50 per month on complete autopilot these days, it doesn't make sense to put more effort into them when I know I can use my time to increase the bottom line of my niche site.

What about the money?

Here is a breakdown of the money flow for my various projects.

To make this report easier to understand, I'm using a simple color code: green numbers are positive, red numbers are negative.

Please keep in mind that these figures may not be 100% accurate due to various factors such as refund requests and network adjustments. The terms for each payment may also vary. As a result these numbers may differ from the actual payments issued and received.

Niche Sites $3,972.17 ▲ $360.66 Amazon $4,876.80 ▲ $914.74 AdSense $21.47 ▲ $1.22 Content -$926.10 ▼ $555.30 Viral Sites $46.24 ▼ $1.79 Sovrn $42.34 ▲ $0.72 AdSense $3.90 ▼ $2.51 JV -$1.66 ▼ $13.03 AdSense $52.49 ▼ $12.28 Promotion -$5.15 ▲ $14.25 Aweber -$49.00 -/- Misc -$382.52 ▲ $319.79 LiquidWeb -$258.52 ▲ $4.74 Aweber -$69.00 -/- Serpfox -$55.00 -/- Income $5,163.96 ▲ $927.60 Expenses -$1,335.70 ▼ $228.39 NET $3,828.26 ▲ $699.21

Here you can see what I was talking about earlier: my gross revenue increased by almost $1,000 in August.

So much for everyone saying that summer is a slow season for website monetization.

My expenses increased by over $200 in August: I increased my content production by $550, and it was partially compensated by the payment for the geo script in July.

All in all, that led to a $700 increase in net profit compared to July, as you can see on the following graph:

As long as the gap between the green line and red line keep widening, I'll be happy. It means that my net profit is increasing.

What's happening next?

The plan for September is really simple: keep working on my niche site and double my content production.

There is a chance I'll see a decrease in net profit for the first time this year, because I'll be investing heavily in content to target more keywords in preparation for the shopping spree at the end of the year.

Will I be able to generate more than $6,000 in gross revenue next month? Subscribe to my newsletter below and I'll keep you posted with my results.

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Source: Monthly Income Report August 2016: $5,163.96