june 2016 monthly report

June 2016 Monthly Report [TPP#41]

It's been another action-packed and successful month. I'm very pleased with the progress I'm making with my website. I feel like I'm reaching an inflexion point where things are about to take off…

KEY STATS

  • I worked a total of 67 hours on my side-business. That’s just under 17 hours per week.
  • My website received 17,507 sessions by 11,998 users who viewed a total of 35,481 pages. That’s about 15–20% more sessions than last month.
  • I gained 1,002 new email subscribers so now I have a total of 10,776 as of the end of June.

MAJOR ACHIEVEMENTS

The entire month I was focussed on launching my new ebook, Guidelines. The launch finished just the other day and I’m really pleased with the response.

This was an interesting experiment for me. Until now, my revenue has come mainly from my Personal Productivity Toolkit, which is a higher priced product ($150 – $250). In comparison, Guidelines sells for a lot less (I launched at $9 and $14) and so it was interesting to see how the different price points perform. Naturally, I was able to sell a higher volume of Guidelines and there were a total of 147 downloads during three and half day launch sale.

When it comes to generating sales, email was the clear winner and converted at about 14.3%. Twitter was also surprising and converted at around 8.2%. For me, social media is important and definitely has its place in online business. I think its great for building brand and connecting with your audience. But when it comes to sales, email can’t be underrated.

What else can I say about the launch? One of the things I’ve learned is to focus on making something you can validate that people really want and get value from. When coming up with the idea of what product to make next, I thought about how my users currently find me, which is through my book summaries. I can clearly see there’s demand for “summary” content where people can quickly learn about books and their main lessons. This gave me a lot of confidence when writing Guidelines and the success of the launch proves that finding building something that resinates with your audience and their needs is super important.

OTHER STUFF

This month I finished off the accreditation process for becoming a mortgage adviser. This means I can now submit lending applications to the major banks in New Zealand and give advice on how to manage your mortgage. So, yeah, that’s pretty cool…

Hayley and I are making great progress planning our 2017 travel trip. We’re really looking forward to taking some time off and changing up our routine for a bit. I’m half thinking of vlogging the whole experience and sharing what it’s like to live and work on the road. If you think this is a good idea, let me know!

Hope you had a good month. What are you up to right now? Let me know in the comments!