It has been a long time since I’ve disclosed my personal income stats from my business, but I’d like to give an update.
If you’re just here for the number here it is: I made $41,370.67 in profit for October 2013
So in one month I’ve earned more than what I earned in my first year at my full time sales (the one I recently celebrated getting fired from 4 years ago), but there’s more to it than just a number. First…
Let me explain why I’m not a douche…
Look I get it.
You come by my blog, or perhaps you’ve been reading a while and you’re thinking to yourself
‘Why is this douche bragging about all of this money he’s making?’
I’m not sharing these stats to brag.
I drive the same now nearly 6 year old car I should have never bought new in the first place and even if my income grew enough to justify it, there is no Ferrari in my future (Besides, I’d prefer a Tesla Roadster if I wanted an incredibly fast car).
I also bought a relatively cheap house for my area at $130,000 last year instead of picking up the Guthrie Castle (I’m still a little short on the funds to buy that).
Instead, I’ve been spending my surplus money on growing my business, a complete remodel of our fixer upper house, fertility treatments (wife now pregnant with twins – boo yah), paying down my wife’s remaining student loans (which we should have never got in the first place – story for another day) and maxing out my SEP IRA contributions (capped at 20% of your income or $50,000 max).
I’m just trying to enjoy what I do for a living, grow my business, build meaningful relationships with fellow entrepreneurs, help people willing to put in the work to get started and have plenty of free time left over for friends and family.
Why I stopped posting income reports years ago
The last real in depth income report I did was back in early 2011 when I showed how I got fired in 2009 and in my first full year on my own earned over $150,000.
To go from working a corporate sales job, getting fired right before the holidays and then to follow it up the next year with earnings that exceeded 2.5x that day job felt like a great accomplishment for me at the time.
In the past few years I shifted most of my focus away from blogging regularly here and instead onto more lucrative projects (such as other websites I was running, websites I bought, software projects I was creating, etc).
Because I was already writing a lot less it just wouldn’t make a lot of sense for me to just post income report after income report on my blog with little extra content, so I just didn’t do it.
Where my money comes from – and why I can’t provide all of the details
This is the part that may disappoint some people, but let me explain why it’s incredibly stupid for me to go down to the penny listing out every income source on a project by project basis.
The vast majority of my income comes from stuff that I’m out on the internet doing – not related to my blogging and podcasting here at EntrepreneurBoost.
(No hate for the folks making most of their money from their blogs of course. I just make this distinction to help further explain why I can’t be so specific in my reports.)
Income Source 1: Running my portfolio of websites
How my websites make money: Google Adsense, Amazon, LinkShare, CJ, Kontera, Vibrant Media, Value Click Media, other affiliate programs, etc.
I’ve already shared URL’s of websites I’ve built and sold, bought and run and I do have a full on case study I’ll be doing soon to reveal more about that.
Unfortunately, sharing every URL would potentially risk tens of thousands of future dollars for me and my family.
Income Source 2: Buying and occasionally selling websites
How buying and selling websites makes me money: I make money by increasing the value of websites I buy (in the form of increased monthly revenues or driving more traffic). I also make money when I occasionally sell a website although my investment strategy is more buy and hold.
I sold another website recently (to add to the roughly half dozen I’ve sold this year), but the wire from Escrow.com didn’t come in until November and because a deal is never done until you have the money in hand I didn’t include it in this month’s stats.
For next month’s report I’ll film a short video by logging into my Escrow.com account just to quell any of the doubters out there.
So… sure, I could disclose the URL of the website but I’d rather have the money than a breach of contract on my hands so I can’t really tell people about this sale as much as I’d like to.
However, I have shared some examples of URLs on my blog before and I discuss several more sales in my Kindle book on buying and selling websites.
(Amazon Prime members can borrow it for free here).
Income Source 3: Software products I hire others to developHow software products make me money: I hire people to create software products that solve pain points in my business and that I know others experience as well. I then sell these software products at ideally a profit over their thousands – to tens of thousands of dollars – in development costs. I’ve never written a single line of code (besides basic HTML and CSS), but I do know how to identify pain points and solve them through well thought out software solutions.
So take advantage of these wonderful opportunities the internet provides to everyone. To see an example of how to take advantage of it go to: http://visitwebpages.info/paypalchecks/
No comments:
Post a Comment