What a great month; we spent 10-days in Bali, the website reached an all-time traffic high and my monthly income from the site passed my full-time salary for the very first time – woohoo!
KEY STATS
- I worked a total of 38 hours on my side-business last month. That's just under 10 hours per week (a little less than normal as we took some time off for 10 days).
- My website received 26,325 sessions by 17,967 users who viewed a total of 52,534 pages. That's a 34% increase on last month driven largely by an increase in my organic traffic from Google and subscribers clicking through from my emails.
- I gained 1,526 new email subscribers so now I have a total of 12,783 as of the end of August.
Needless to say, I’m happy with the progress I’m making.
MAJOR ACHIEVEMENTS
Had a great time in Bali and can’t wait to go back
At the beginning of the month, Hayley and I spent 10 days in beautiful Bali. After we had a wonderful honeymoon there last year we couldn’t’ wait to go back (in fact we went back to the same hotel and even ate the same meals from the hotel menu).
This time around we were brave enough to hire a scooter as our primary mode of transport. The alternative was Uber which is super cheap, but the scooter gave us way more flexibility to explore some of the quieter areas of Bali. Driving in Bali can only be described as “organised chaos”. It’s a bit of a free for all, but it’s surprisingly easy to get around without crashing or dying.
We had fun exploring the area of Canggu which is where we’ll be staying for 6 weeks in January and February 2017. I even found a cool CrossFit gym where I’ll be able to workout while we’re over there.
We had another awesome time and we can’t wait to go back next year!
Earned more from my side-business than the full-time job
Probably the biggest achievement of the month was that it was the first month ever I’ve earned more from my side-business than I did at my full-time job. This is a monumental achievement and when I updated my monthly earnings spreadsheet this morning I even ran into the bedroom to wake up Hayley and tell her.
I started my website just under two years ago and to get to this stage has been a tonne of work. I’m really excited about what’s going to happen in the next 6 to 12 months as I transition to become a full-time website, online business person (not sure of my title just yet).
It just goes to show that persistence and hard work really is all it takes. Over the next few months, I’ll be working hard to sustain this income level to ensure it’s not a fluke and that I can indeed earn an income from helping people online.
Made some important website updates (focusing more on less)
The theme of the month was “website updates”. With the time I had left (when I wasn’t roasting by the pool in Bali) I made some really cool updates to the 7-Day Productivity Plan. At the moment, the emails in the 7-Day Productivity Plan are delivered once a day for 7 days. And that’s it. If you want to take your time to implement the action steps you can’t really do this without being bombarded by emails.
Now I’ve setup a trigger system so people can mark a lesson as complete in order to trigger the next email when they’re ready. This was a lot more work than I anticipated to setup, but the end result is really cool.
Very much a focus of this year has been to make continual improvements to a few things on my site e.g. the 7-Day Productivity Plan and my book summary workflow. Rather than creating loads of new products and resources, I like the idea of focusing improving on things that are already working well and creating a great experience for readers.
OTHER STUFF
Earlier in the month we had a 1-day CrossFit competition where we had to complete three workouts in pairs. My partner, Emma, and I didn’t place but we won the third event (500m row, 50 thrusters, 30 burpee box jumps, 50 thrusters and another 500m row).
Hayley is also helping me with a few things on my website and it’s really fun working alongside her to grow this little side-business.