Well I’ve made it to round 2! Welcome to my online income report February 2019!
For those of you who don’t know, this is the space I use to report my earnings from both this blog and any other online money making activities that I partake in.
This money is separate to the salary that I take from my own business (social media agency).
At the moment it just provides me with a little extra pocket money to go towards special treats (usually holidays).
February was a good month for me, but boy was I flat out.
I’m still recovering now (mid-way through March) to be honest, and this blog has definitely suffered as a result.
I think I only managed to write one post, which was my January’s income report!
The other two posts were sponsored content so I didn’t really have to invest any time into them, apart from editing and creating the featured images.
The reason I was so flat out is because my Fiverr freelance business nearly doubled in size thanks to a huge project, that was actually very easy, just time consuming.
It only took a couple of hours per day to complete, but for some reason it seemed to take up a lot more, and definitely drained a lot of my energy.
So without giving any more information anyway let’s jump straight into the numbers.
Online Income Report February 2019 – £1003.13 ($1,327.42)
I broke the £1000 mark, whoop!
Like I said, this was mainly to do with the expansion of my small Fiverr business but I did also see increases in other areas, including this blog’s earnings.
Let’s get into the details and look at what came from where.
Matched Betting – £0 ($0)
I didn’t do any matched betting (again). I know!
But before you get on at me for not doing any I can confirm that I have resumed in March so there will certainly be something to report on that front in the next income report.
I only have a few of the big bookmaker accounts left, so I am very limited with what I can make, but I’ll be happy with an extra £100 a month or so to put into my investment pot.
If you want to trawl through my story of turning £500 into £5000 in less than a year with matched betting then make sure to head on over to the challenge page here.
Of course, you won’t get very far without the help of Oddsmonkey (sign up with code SMARKETSZERO to get 7 days’ access to premium for just £1!).
Fiverr Freelance Writing Business – £642.03 ($849.35)
Well my freelance writing side gig is progressing nicely.
I managed to land a big website content client which saw me pumping out 3500+ words a day for pretty much every working day of February.
Ok, that’s not strictly true, it was a task that involved rewriting different passages, so I was tweaking that amount of words daily, rather than writing them afresh.
I have also acquired two new repeat clients on the platform who each give me weekly orders.
They are bloggers like me so I know exactly what they are looking for and I can write their posts much faster as it’s so similar to what I do on here.
If you are getting stuck with your content or just need a few blog posts writing because you don’t have the time, don’t be afraid to reach out via my Fiverr gig here, and hopefully I can help you out with your content needs.
Advantaged Life Blog Income – £361.10 ($477.71)
The income on this website is split up between ads, affiliate commissions and sponsored posts.
Sponsored Posts – £340
A nice £100 increase on last month’s total, the back end of the month seemed to be an absolute frenzy, and I think I know why.
But it’s not a good thing, in fact this is the last time in a while (or maybe ever) I will be posting income relating to sponsored posts.
You’ll have to keep reading until the end to find out why.
Affiliate Commissions – £14.28
My affiliate commissions through Oddsmonkey have remained at their same levels, and I am about to hit the minimum payment threshold of £50 which will be a nice little Brucey Bonus when I withdraw that money as I don’t really count it in my personal monthly budget.
As I eluded to in last month’s income report, it’s stupid that I only really promote one affiliate product and I will work to improve this in the future.
In fact, you may notice more content with affiliate products that I use on a daily basis and just don’t talk about for no good reason whatsoever.
Hopefully, you’ll be able to use them as much as I have to grow your online profits!
Advertising – £6.82 ($9.09)
As you will have noticed I run ads on this blog, not really sure why considering how little they bring in, although this number reflects a 3x increase on January’s efforts!
I use Media.Net who seem to return pretty fair RPM on views, since Google Adsense is off the table because I talk about matched betting a lot.
My Thoughts On February 2019
There’s no doubt that February was a really positive month for me.
I did have to spend more time on my side businesses, but they reaped more reward in return.
However, this positivity quickly faded in very early March.
There was a reason the sponsored posts were coming in thick and fast at the end of February.
It was to beat the update to Moz’s DA ranking system. DA (Domain Authority) is what a lot of people (including guest/sponsored posters) use to judge how valuable a link is coming from that website back to theirs.
How much “link juice” a website can provide is closely tied to its DA.
Before the update I had a DA of 21 and rising, usually by one point each month.
But when March rolled around the DA 2.0 ranking system was rolled out, and instead of seeing my website increase to a DA of 22, it tanked.
Massively.
Tremendously.
Soul-Destroyingly.
After the dust had settled, I was left with a DA of 7. I hadn’t just lost a few points, I’d lost over two thirds of my entire ranking!
As we speak all sponsored content has dried up (unsurprisingly) and therefore my next income report will reflect the £350ish hole left by this source of revenue evaporating.
However, I am looking at the positives, which, first and foremost means I regain creative control.
Let’s be honest here (not moaning here at all), the sponsored posts are a great source of income but they are pretty crappy articles.
They don’t do my website any favours, at the end of the day they just want their link back to their website and outsource the writing to some content farm somewhere in Asia.
They are also a NIGHTMARE when it comes to SEO, they mess with my carefully created silos (if you don’t know what a silo is, stay tuned to this blog), and they often are written about keywords which I want to target with my own content later down the line (if I ever get around to it).
There are two things I have taken out of the experience:
1. It’s given me a business idea which I am about to test (hopefully have an update on it for you in March’s report) which could hopefully replace the lost income.
2. I am never going to accept guest post/sponsored content in the future even if my DA does continue to rise and qualify me again for this sort of opportunity. I want full editorial control and the hassle they cause is not worth the money they bring in. Unless someone offers me a ridiculous price, I mean, come on, I’m not that self-righteous!
March 2019 Goals
At the end of my first ever income report I set myself some goals, looking back I did in fact achieve all but a few of them.
But I’m not going to publicly set them anymore.
Now, don’t get me wrong, goal setting is a very important part of any successful endeavour.
However, I am just going to keep them to myself for now, mainly because I know anything I set will likely be missed if anything else catastrophic happens
I don’t think it would be heathy for me to continuously report back on missed goals and targets. My mental health is fragile enough as it is, I don’t need to add any fuel to the fire!
Instead my goal for you guys to keep me accountable to, is increasing my online income month upon month.
I should mention a short disclaimer noting that I know I am already going to report a slump in my profits for March as a direct result of the aforementioned DA-related catastrophe.
But hopefully my little side project that I am about to start will start to replace some of the lost income.
I’ll let you know in April how March went, and how much I was able to limit the damage by!
