Every month I publish an income report…why? Good question 
1. Accountability
With all the shiny objects out there it’s easy to spend WAY more than you’re earning. Luckily I realized this early on and I’ve kept detailed records of my expenses ever since. That being said, I know that there are certain expenses that are NECESSARY when running a business. As much as I don’t want to pay for them, I need to pay for my email autoresponder, website hosting, and video hosting every month. It’s just a part of doing business. There are other things that I buy as well, but I try my best to keep my expenses SIGNIFICANTLY LESS than my revenue. If I can do that then I’m ahead of the game.
2. Integrity
On my show I ask my guests a lot of personal questions. One that frequently comes up is “How much do you make?”. I feel like I need to reveal my own income if I’m going to be asking others the same question. It only seems right.
3. Perspective
There are a lot of online marketers out there who fake-it-till-they-make-it. In other words, they fudge their numbers and exaggerate their earnings in order to establish false authority in their niche. My goal is that by watching my income grow slowly over time you’ll realize that there is no get-rich-quick button.
Here’s my results for September, 2019
6,896 page views (-933 from August)
10,785 Youtube channel views (+2,435 from August)
48,006 Youtube minutes watched (+13,261 from August)
Email subscribers: 10,935 (-571 subscribers from August)
Expenses
Launch prizes: $9,175 – This is the prize money we paid to affiliates to promote our launch
Recurring Income: $4,603 – Brett’s share of recurring commissions…plus $1k for misc. payment
InstaViral Launch income: $1,904 – Brett’s share of launch profits minus some ads
Facebook ads: $1,230.81 – This is the cost of ads for JV advertising and retargeting for our InstaViral launch
Launch graphics: $925- This is the cost of getting our sales page and OTO pages graphics for InstaViral
Virtual assistant: $800 – I have an assistant help with all my promotions, including copywriting, scheduling, and posting.
Launch retargeting: $397 – We paid Kobi Topaz to help us with our retargeting campaign for InstaViral
SendLane: $319 – This is the current autoresponder that I’m using
Convert Kit: $149 – I’ve been using this as my autoresponder
Aweber: $130 – This is my backup autoresponder
Zapier: $125 – An amazing tool for automating your business
ZenDesk: $50 – Brett and I use this for our help desk for our launches
Internet: $50 – This is what I pay for my fiber Internet in Turkey
Gusto: $45 – This is the company I use for my SCORP payroll
ManyChat: $25 – A service that I use to build a Facebook messenger list
Godaddy: $19.99 – Renewed a domain name
Resell Rights Weekly: $19.95 – Reoccurring membership fee for the bonuses I add from my interviews and reviews
Click Magick: $17 – I use this to track clicks
Audible: $15.77 – Business books to further my education
iCloud: $9.99 – I use this to store my documents online
Skype: $9.99 for premium – I do all my interviews with Skype and Ecamm call recorder on a Mac
Vault Press: $5 – A quick and easy tool that I use to backup my website
Schedule Once: $5 – This is what I use to schedule my coaching calls
Amazon S3: $4.41 – I use this to host images, bonuses, and videos
Total expenses: $20,034.91 (+$12,144.07 spent compared to August)
Revenue
Everzippy: $1,205 from review and interview with Mario Brown
Rank Snap 2.0: $841.33 from review and interview with Tom Yevsikov
Atomic DFY: $635.36 from review and interview with Brendan Mace
News Maker Pro: $577.42 from review and interview with Igor Burban
Max Profix Pro: $526.01 from review and interview with Mosh Bari
DFY Lead Pages: $425.21 from review and interview with Ankur Shukla
Lead App: $414 from review and interview with Chad Nicely
Enigma: $411.98 from review and interview with Jono Armstrong and Ryan McCinnis
VS Evolution: $391.83 from review and interview with Mark Bishop
Instant Commission Site: $342.13 from review and interview with Ankur Shukla
DFY Suite: $272.70 from review and interview with Joshua Zamora
Social Video Adz: $264.50 from review and interview with Ryan Phillips
AdvertSuite: $263.10 from review and interview with Luke Maguire
Repwarn reseller (CLOSED): $248.50 from review and interview with Walt Bayliss
Video Reel: $162.50 from review and interview with Abhi Dwivedi
CB Automator: $115 from review and interview with Ankur Shukla
Tv Boss Fire: $103.16 from review and interview with Craig Crawford
Send Engine: $100.50 from review and interview with Petru Iacob
Fusion by Dropmock: $89.70 from review and interview with Jamie Ohler
Tube Rank Machine 2.0: $70.54 from review and interview with Ankur Shukla
Viddyoze 3.0: $70.30 from review and interview with Joey Xoto
iPassive: $52.33 from review and interview with Mark Furniss
Proximity: $52.11 from review and interview with Anthony Mancuso
Ascend Pages (CLOSED): $46.50 from review and interview with Andrew Darius
Easy VSL 2.0: $40 from review and interview with Mark Thompson
Digi Funnel Lab: $38.38 from review and interview with Glynn Kosky
Vid Chomper: $35 from review and interview with Brendan Mace
Stock Nation 2.0: $33.50 from review and interview with Gaurav Madaan
News Profix Pro: $32.78 from review and interview with Mosh Bari
Convertri 2017: $29.10 from review and interview with Andy Fletcher
Video Vibe Pro: $24.48 from review and interview with Joshua Zamora
AdReel: $22.20 from review and interview with Ryan Phillips
Real Specific: $18.50 from review and interview with Shane Brooks
eCom Pages: $16.45 from review and interview with Mo Aguel
Rebrand.io: $15 from review and interview with Nick James
Vidgeos: $13.50 from review and interview with Josh Ratta
Video Marketing Blaster: $13.50 from review and interview with Ali G.
Press Play 2.0: $13.50 from review and interview with Mark Thompson
Jvzoo Academy: $11.10 from review and interview with Sam Bakker
HydraVid (CLOSED): $9.98 from review and interview with Walt Bayliss
Traffic Magic: $9.43 from review and interview with Art Flair
Shopabot: $5.99 from review and interview with Cindy Donovan
Site Contact: $4.98 from review and interview with Cyril Gupta
Total revenue from interviews and reviews: $8,069.08 (-$1,512.77 from August)
InstaViral Launch profits: $16,096 – This is the profits from the launch before paying out Brett
Recurring income with Brett: $7,256 – This is my recurring commissions before paying Brett half
Webinar: $1,006 – My commissions from a webinar we did with Greg Kononenko and Stefan Ciancio
Prize money: $1,000 – I received this but sent it to Brett as it belonged to him
Google Adsense: $94.76 – Earnings from Youtube
Resell Rights Weekly: $42.61 – This is a website that has a ton of products that you can use as your own
Social Robot JV commission: $8.34 – This my cut from a launch I did with Joshua Zamora in early 2015
Total from OTHER streams of income: $25,503.71 (+$17,758.73 from August)
Total Revenue: $33,572.79 (+$16,245.95 from August)
Total Profit: $13,537.88 (+$4,101.88 from August)
So I’m finally writing a proper income report after many months of falling very behind on them and just barely being able to catch up. It gets quite daunting when you’re months behind and once you miss one it’s easy to miss another.
I honestly believe that doing income reports has been one of the key reasons behind my success. From the start back in October, 2011 when I made just $355 in profits, I’ve been able to keep track of what was working for me…and what wasn’t.
So let’s get back to doing regular reports.
What happened in September?
Email Problems
After a very slow August where I made a little less than $10k while on vacation, I wanted September to be a better month. Unfortunately I started having issues with the emails I was sending with Convert Kit going to spam. I contacted their support, but they weren’t very helpful.
I had heard some good things about Jimmy Kim’s SendLane autoresponder so I decided to give it a try. I went from hitting the spam inbox with ConvertKit to going to the coveted “updates” tab in Gmail using Sendlane. I cancelled ConvertKit.
I’m currently using SendLane as my main autoresponder but I still have Aweber as a backup.
Some of you might be curious as to why I’m not using my partner Brett’s MyMailit self-hosted autoresponder…and you’re right to be curious. Well, I personally prefer paying extra and having a company run my SMTP for me. However, in the future there may be a NEW version of MyMailit with SMTP included…so we’ll see how I feel about it then 🙂
InstaViral launch…eh
We did about $40k in sales after refunds. After giving away prize money to affiliates, sales page costs, retargeting costs, and fees…Brett and I each made about $2,000 in profits.
Neither of us were very happy with this as it was a lot of work for very little profit.
We did around 760 front end sales, which means we probably added about 200 to 300 new people to our email lists. But this simply isn’t very exciting compared to our Vidyz launch in February that did over $250k in sales and had 1,755 front end sales.
So what went wrong with this launch?
We used what’s called “blind copy” on this launch. Essentially we emphasized the “free viral traffic” part of the offer and didn’t really talk about the features. Unfortunately this didn’t work and resulted in low conversions on the front end. If an offer doesn’t convert then even big prizes can’t save it.
I also wrote the sales copy for this one. Yes, I also wrote the copy for our Vidyz launch, but I really struggled with this one. Perhaps because this wasn’t a “problem-solution” product. Meaning that it wasn’t something that solved a big problem that people have in a very concrete way.
I think the marketplace is leaning towards products that they can understand a bit more when they see it on a sales page. They want to see the features along with the benefits.
Beach house birthday business
For the entire month of August I was in Bodrum, Turkey at a beachhouse we rented to celebrate my daughter’s first birthday. I knew going into this that I wanted to spend most of my time relaxing and take a real vacation. That being said I still did some work in the mornings and did some promotions. I even did a webinar.
But all in all, I didn’t have much time to concentrate as my father came to visit for 10 days, we had guests, and then my wife’s family came for a couple weeks. This “time off” definitely affected my business, and I made less than $10k for the first time since May, 2014. I have to say I wasn’t too pleased with this.
That being said, $10,000 more than paid for my vacation, and I’m super grateful to be able to have this type of freedom. I think it’s just difficult sometimes when you’re consistently making more to see results that are not typical to what you’re used to.
In September I was able to get back to work at home again. The beginning of the month was a bit slow, but then I had a product launch in the middle of the month that keep me busy. I ended the month with a few decent promos, but it was still a fairly slow month.
That’s it for September. Thank you so much for reading, and feel free to update us all below on how your September went.
Hi Mike.
Thanks for being so transparent and detailed about your earnings.
Very Refreshing.
It is almost a training product in itself.
It was interesting that even though you and Brett launched a great product the amount of profit was very small.
Even as an affiliate you had to promote heaps of products.
Certainly a reality moment for me.
Thanks
You’re very welcome, Terry.
Most of our launches make more than this, but unfortunately this one didn’t sell very well. Good thing most of our other launches have done much better. I guess they can’t all be winners.
Some of those affiliate commissions come from older promotions, which is nice as you can get paid over and over again for work you’ve done years ago.
Hi Mike
I like reading your income reports and of course your reviews too. I was thinking of making a review type of blog (similar to yours but with written reviews). I was planning on buying solo ads to build my list and sending out daily emails containing a link to my honest product reviews. Do you think this is feasible? If I remember correctly, I think you did something similar when you started this blog.
I’d recommend being very careful about buying solo ads. Yes there are buyers on solo ads lists, but you need to make sure you don’t get ripped off.
Hello Mike,
This is truly transparently amazing. Open my eyes & mind wide open. Thanks for sharing it.
I don’t have such list of subscriptio, tools & revenue. So nothing to report here haha..
Just 1 question. Is that the only cost for amazon s3? $4?
Yes, I use Amazon s3 to host my bonuses. It’s very cheap.
Hi Mike,
In your report you mentioned Recurring Commissions, are those form an affiliate product or which kind of commissions are those?
Those are from recurring products that we’ve sold in the past. They are our products not affiliate ones. However I make recurring affiliate commissions as well.