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Blog Income Report – March 2015

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It’s time again for my official Blog Income Report blog post again, this time for the month of March 2015.

This has been yet another ultra busy and ultra productive month in my Blogging business.

Let’s jump into the stats.

Blog Content Report – March 2015

In March I wrote 31 blog posts in 31 days, maintaining my average of one blog post per day.

Here is a recap of all the blog posts I wrote this month:

In March I once again participated in the 21 Day Blogging Challenge put on by Empower Network, which is available to all bloggers regardless whether they are a part of Empower Network or not.

What’s awesome about the 21 Day Blogging Challenge is that you get to participate in a challenge with other like-minded people, which helps you to build the habit of blogging consistently.

Being a part of the 21 Day Blogging Challenge also gives you an opportunity to gain some extra exposure, to connect with other bloggers who are also doing the challenge and to get ideas for the types of blog posts you can create.

If you want to jump-start your blogging career, I highly recommend doing the 21 Day Blogging Challenge.

Blog Traffic Report – March 2015

In this third month of running this new blog, here are some of my stats for the month of March 2015:

  • Total Users: 2,104
  • Total Sessions: 2,983
  • Total Pageviews: 4,531
  • Avg Session Duration: 1 minute 20 seconds

These stats actually show that I’ve had a decline in Blog traffic as compared to February.

I haven’t had a chance to dig into these numbers to identify the exact reason behind this, but if I had to take a guess I’d say that it was because my focus for this month was more on increasing the consulting income from my Blog rather than focusing on building my traffic.

Here’s a comparison of the last 31 days ending on March 31st, as compared to the previous 31 days:

 

Although the numbers dropped this month, I’m not worried about it at all as that wasn’t my focus.

Now let’s take a look at where my traffic has been coming from.

Blog Traffic Sources Report – March 2015

As you can see from the charts above, my blog traffic distribution chart was almost identical to the previous month.

  • Direct Traffic – 1,478 sessions – 49.5%
  • Social Traffic – 454 sessions – 15.2%
  • Referral Traffic – 418 sessions – 14.0%
  • Organic Search Traffic – 621 sessions – 20.8%

Now let’s move onto the fun part. 🙂

Blog Income Report – March 2015

Okay, so let’s get to the actual blog income report part of this post, and then I’ll explain all the changes.

Before I start talking numbers though, just a quick income disclaimer.  My results are not typical, not guaranteed in any way, and you should check out my income disclaimer if that sort of thing floats your boat.

Okay, now that we got that out of the way, here are my stats:

Total Gross Income – $2,943.51

Total Expenses – $1,744.51

Net Income: $1,199.15

Alright, so let’s dive into what has been happening this month.

Affiliate Income

My affiliate income this month was just over $330.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, affiliate income is my favorite income as it has the potential to become passive or semi-passive in nature once it’s setup and running.

If you’d like to learn how to build up your affiliate income, check out my previous income reports where I’ve covered this topic in more detail, and also check out this video here.

Mentoring / Consulting Income

My second favorite income, after affiliate income, is consulting / mentoring income.

One of the things that most people don’t realize when they start a Blog is that there are so many different ways to monetize a Blog — you are NOT limited to just putting up banners or AdSense ads or other forms of advertising income.

Besides of course affiliate income, one of the easiest ways I have found for quickly building up the income from your Blog is to start offering Mentoring and Consulting Services to your audience.

Life coaching, mentoring, technology consulting, marketing consulting, selling artwork and selling music are just a few examples of other ways you can make money with your Blog.

The cool thing about being part of the Empower Network is that even if you have ZERO experience with marketing online, just by joining Empower Network and plugging into our training and our weekly hangouts and webinars, you can become an online marketing expert VERY quickly and offer those services to businesses as a consultant.

The truth is that most local businesses right now are struggling to learn how to market themselves online, and with just a few weeks worth of training you can know a tonne more than 95% of the local business owners out there and could easily approach them to offer your services as a consultant, if you wanted to.

Of course Blog / Internet Marketing / Website consulting is NOT the only type of consulting you can offer on your Blog!

As I mentioned last month, my wife offers energy healings, psychic readings, and various different workshops on her Blog.  She started her blog back in 2009 and it wasn’t long before she was able to quit her day job to work from home offering those services she loves helping people with.

It really doesn’t matter what kind of services or products you’d like to offer people, starting a Blog is an awesome way to build your brand and to develop a client base!

Now, let’s briefly touch on my expenses for this month.

Expenses

As you can see from my report above, my expenses for this month have stabilized compared to last month.

In fact they actually dropped a little bit.

This pattern is very common for a new business.

You might start out having to invest more money than you make at first, so for the first while your expenses might actually be higher than your income and your business might lose money.

For brick-and-mortar type businesses in the “real world” this period of time could be as long as 2-5 years!

Sometimes even longer!

As someone who has ran and built brick-and-mortar businesses in the past, I *KNOW* how long it takes for such a business to become profitable, which is why I have a much different perspective in my online businesses than most people do.

Most people who start an online business or an MLM business have a mindset where they think that if their business doesn’t make them a profit in the first few weeks, that it must mean that that business model is no good.

That is *NOT* how business works.

That is how *JOBS* work.

At a job, you go to work for two weeks or a month, and then you get a paycheck.

The idea of putting forth an effort into something and that thing not paying you an income after 2-4 weeks is very foreign to most employee-minded people, and that it why they continue to work at jobs they hate, because they just don’t understand how entrepreneurship works.

They’ll start a business, and their expectation is that they THINK they’ll make like $5,000 in the first month.

When their business doesn’t make them that much money, they think it’s a failed business concept, or a scam and they blame that business model and quit.

Then a few months later they start another business and again they THINK they’ll make like $5,000 in the first month.

And of course once again they don’t make that much money, and so they think it’s a failed business concept or a scam and they blame that business model and quit.

Then a few months later they do the same thing again and again, each time getting more and more jaded thinking that everything is a scam.

But the funny thing is that in each of those businesses that they were in, there ARE people making good money!

Why is that?

Well, the reason is because those people didn’t come in expecting to make a billion dollars in their first week.  Those people who ARE making money approached the business opportunity with a BUSINESS / ENTREPRENEURIAL mindset!

One of the reasons that I am putting together these Blog Income Reports is to peel back this curtain of misinformation and to show you guys what it really takes to make money online!

If you go back to my January Blog Income Report you’ll see that I actually LOST MONEY that month!

This is what entrepreneurial REALITY looks like.

You might have to invest some time and money up front before you start making money.

In my first month blogging every day I lost money, my second month I more or less broke even with a little bit of profit and only now in this third month I actually made a profit.

Because this is not the first time I’m building a business I have the PERSEVERANCE to stick it out, where most people give up… and that is why they fail … and that is why they are stuck at their jobs.

See most people think that investing a few hundred dollars or even a few thousand dollars into an online business is “risky” compared to having a job…

… LOL …

Really?  Tell that to the 1,500+ Future Shop employees who came to work a few days ago to find the doors locked and their employment terminated when Future Shop shut down all their stores!

Tell that to all the Sony Store employees who also just lost their jobs last month when Sony shut down all 14 of their stores across Canada.

These are just a few examples from literally THOUSANDS of corporations that are laying people off every single day.

Building a business is not risky!  Having a JOB is risky!

But I do understand that running a full time business is not for everyone.  Some people enjoy being employees.

If you’re one of those types of people who likes working for someone else, what I would then recommend is to start building an online business as a secondary income stream!

Why not?  You can use the money to upgrade your car, have more fun on your vacations, pay off some debts, or just to buy some cool toys.

In fact, when you have a full time job which covers all your monthly expenses, that is the BEST time to build a business in your spare time on evenings and weekends because then you won’t be under financial pressure for your business to make money right away!

You can take your time, build up your business income steadily over time and eventually might have a nice passive or at least semi-passive income stream to augment your job income.

And in the event that you come to work one day to find the doors locked and the company shut down at your job, that extra business income might just be the thing that saves your butt until you find the next job!

My Blogging Goals for March

Here were some of my main goals for March:

  • Participate in my 3rd 21 Day Blogging Challenge – Check!
  • Continue on with daily blogging – Check!
  • Clean up my email list – Check!
  • Get a few more mentoring / consulting clients – Check!
  • Become more of an expert in YouTube, Instagram & Pinterest Traffic Strategies – Check!
  • Increase my Blogging business profits – Check!
  • Start doing FREE Weekly Hangouts for my Empower Network Downline – Check!
  • Grow my Empower Network Team and Income – Check!

Summary

To summarize, while my blog traffic dipped a little bit, my blog income went up while my expenses went down a bit.

All in all, I made a net income of $1,199.15 from my Blog business this month, which is about a 600% increase in income as compared to last month, so I’m really happy about that!

You may remember that in January I wrote a post declaring my intention to build up my blog business income up to the point where I can get a Free Car from Blogging.

In March my wife actually ended up getting her brand new car which her home based business pays for.

Here’s a short video of her new baby!

Now that my Blog business income has gone up, I think it’s time for me to start looking to see what kind of car I want.

I’ve actually started looking already at different cars, but it’s actually not as easy I thought it would be to find a car that I like.

I’ll write a blog post update on my car search soon. 🙂

Final Words

If you’re one of the people who recently got laid off, or if you do have a job which just isn’t paying you enough, or you’re just bored with it, why not consider building a business making money online?

Do you actually have to DO something in order to make money?  YES!

Will a billion dollars just pour out of the sky and will a Ferrari magically appear in your driveway out of thin air five minutes after you start building your online business?  Not unless you’re a Jedi or something.

It does take a bit of effort and it does require a bit of an investment of money and time on your part, but building an online business can be a LOT of fun and it IS possible to make quite a lucrative income if you just keep learning, keep applying what you learn and keep moving forward.

If you’d like to learn more about getting started with making money online, click here to learn more.

How to Reply to an Email With Video

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Recently I’ve started to use videos when replying to certain types of emails that I get from people.

For example, when someone emails me or even sends me a message on Skype or Facebook chat, asking me a question about something I have been finding that a lot of times it’s easier to just shoot a short video answering their question than it is to write out a long email.

This is especially true in regards to answering an email question where a screenshot video would be best to use.

The challenge in the past has been that making a screenshot video was time consuming and clunky, but there is a software out now called Jing that allows you make this process very simple.

It’s actually not a new software, I first heard of it way back in 2008, but it has gone through a lot of improvements lately that make it way easier to use.

Here’s a brief introduction to it:

The software now allows you to shoot up to a 5 minute video and upload  / host it on their servers and the to easily share that video with someone via email or by sending them a link via chat.

I’ve now started using this a way to communicate with people much more easily that typing out long emails.

You can also shoot short video clips using your webcam software and attach those to your email as well, or upload a quick video to YouTube and then send someone the link.

I’ve found this WAY more effective at communicating the message than sending a longer email which most people kind of skim through and end up missing certain key points.

The cool thing too is that Jing is a free software ( click here to get it ) and so is YouTube, so you can either use Jing to do a screen capture of your computer screen or shoot a quick webcam video and upload it to YouTube and then email someone a link to watch the video where you answer the email questions on video.

I have actually found this to be faster than typing out an email, and people LOVE the engagement they get from a video rather than just TEXT.

Try it out if you haven’t already. 🙂

 

The Real Secret to Making Money Online

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In this second episode of “Driving with Paul” I talk about the real secret of making money online.

The real secret isn’t some crazy ninja marketing strategy or some hidden secret sauce that only a few people know about.

Here’s what I believe the real secret to be:

If you enjoyed this video, hit the thumbs up button and leave a comment below.

 

How to Stop Being a Perfectionist as a Blogger

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For quite some time now I’ve been wanting to start a “Driving With Paul” video series where I drive around in my car and discuss various topics related to Blogging and making money online.

However, I’ve been allowing the “perfectionist” mindset to stop me from getting started by allowing various excuses to trip me up.

In this today’s episode I discuss the perfectionist mindset, and how it can stop you from blogging and from achieving success online.

Check it out here:

If you enjoyed this video, give me a thumbs up, and leave a comment.

 

The Key to Effortless Manifestation

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One of the key desires of most Law of Attraction practitioners is to learn how to manifest things in their lives with less effort.

I’ve been consciously aware of what the Law of Attraction is for about 13 years now, being first introduced to the concept by a book called “The Science of Getting Rich” by Wallace Wattles.

Ever since I read that book, I’ve been fascinated with the Law of Attraction, how it works, and how to utilize it more effectively in my life.

One of the interesting things I discovered about the Law of Attraction is that in many ways in order to “activate” it or to get better results with it in our lives, we have to often start thinking in opposite ways than how social conditioning has trained us to think.

For example, we live in a society and our conditioning from childhood onwards teaches us that being selfish is bad.

As little kids we hear statements like “You’re being so selfish!” or “You’re just being selfish!” with a negative connotation associated to it.

Because of this, and because most of us don’t inherently want to be “bad people”, we create a conflicting set of beliefs inside of our minds where a part of us wants what is best for us (Selfishness), while another part of us doesn’t want to be Selfish.

This inner conflict is what creates a lot of problems in our lives, and is the source of a lot of suffering.

Being Selfish means that you are more connected to who YOU truly are – your True Self – and not only is there nothing wrong with that, it is the ultimate kindness you can do for the world.

The world would be a *MUCH* better place if everyone was just more Selfish – meaning more connected to their True Self and it’s desires.

Recently I watched a video by Abraham / Esther Hicks which explains this concept much better than I ever could, so I recommend you check out this short video:

Pretty interesting how the exact thing (being more Selfish) which would connect us to a more effortless ability to manifest more positive things in our lives has been perverted and distorted by the mass media and our social conditioning to be somehow portrayed as a BAD thing…

… almost as if the ultra wealthy elite on this planet knew that true manifesting ability comes from Selfishness (connection to your True Self), and so in order to disempower us they started a social conditioning campaign / trend where Selfishness was to be painted as a negative / undesirable character trait.

Of course, at the same time as the middle class / poor are made to feel bad about being Selfish, the ultra wealthy manifest the things they want in their lives with less effort by being more Selfish. 🙂

And then, just to show how programmed we are growing up to see Selfishness as a negative character trait you’ll often hear people who are not wealthy saying things like “Pfft… yeah that person is rich, but look how Selfish they are!”

And then the other person they’re talking to will say “Yeah, no kidding…pfft… totally Selfish… who wants to be like that???!”

If you want to manifest with less effort in your life, I recommend exploring your beliefs around Selfishness and watch the video above for a more thorough explanation from Abraham / Esther Hicks.