June 2016 - MAKE APP Magazine

23 Bloggers Who Share Their Income Reports

Personally I find it very useful that some bloggers share their income reports. Pat Flynn I think started this trend of transparency and his openness has garnered a lot of success in terms of gathering a large and trusting audience.

Starting out in business I find it is such a mental game. The belief that you can actually make an income online is something that you need to believe in the core of your soul, so that you can push through the difficult starting times and ultimately realize your goal.

For me, being around people or reading blogs such as those listed below, have helped me see that people ARE making money online and that it can be done. They are normal people, like you and me. Some might be more intelligent, some less. Some more charismatic, some less. Some betters writers, some less. The major trait I find that’s important is persistence and consistency.

So feel free to explore the blogs below and see that it is possible with a bit of perseverance to create a passive income business online.

List of Bloggers Publishing Income Reports

Entrepreneur On Fire (EOFIRE)

Income: ~ $200,000 per month
Business Podcast
Major Sources of Income: Podcast Sponsorship, Freedom Journal (physical product), Online Course (Podcaster’s Paradise), Affiliate Income.

Smart Passive Income (Pat Flynn)

Income: ~ $150,000+ per month
Blogs About: How to make money online
Major Sources of Income: Affiliate Income (Bluehost, internet business related)

Project Life Mastery

Income: ~$90,000 per month
Blogs About: Making money online, goal setting, motivation, productivity.
Major Sources of Income: Kindle Book Publishing, Courses (Morning Ritual Mastery, K Mastermind (for Kindle Publishing), Course on Kindle Publishing).

WP Curve

Income: $65,000 per month (last reported)
Business: Wordpress Assistance as a Service
Major Source of Income: Core business

Pinch of Yum

Income: ~$60,000 per month
Blogs About: Food, Blogging.
Major Sources of Income: Affiliate Income, (AdThrive, Bluehost), Food Photography eBook, Workshops.

Making Sense of Cents

Income: ~$60,000 per month
Blogs About: Blogging, Budgeting, Personal Finance
Major Sources of Income: Affiliate (Bluehost / How to Start a Blog, Online Survey Companies), Advertising / Sponsorship on Site.

Just a Girl and Her Blog

Income: ~$50,000 per month
Blogs About: Home Organization & Decoration.
Major Source of Income: Online Course (Book Boss – Write and Launch a Profitable eBook in 90 days or less), eBook on Blogging, Affiliate Income (BlueHost / How To Start A Blog).
Minor Sources: eBooks related to Home Organization & Decoration, other affiliate commissions related to blogging niche.
Major Breakthrough: Launched eBook on How to Launch a Blog.

Melyssa Griffin

Income: ~$50,000 per month
Major Sources of Income: Online Courses (internet marketing related)

Mike From Maine

Income: ~$40,000 per month
Business: Product Reviews
Major Sources of Income: Affiliate Income, Online Course.

Authority Website Income

Income: ~$20,000 per month
Major Sources of Income: Amazon FBA, Service Business, other.

Johnny FD

Income: ~$20,000 per month
Major Sources of Income: Affiliate Income, Drop-shipping Sites.

Shout Me Loud

Income ~$20,000 per month
Major Sources of Income: Affiliate Income

So Over This

Income: ~$20,000 per month
Blogs About: Finance, other.
Major Sources of Income: Ad Revenue.

True Valhalla

Income: ~$10,000 per month
Business: HTML5 Games

30 Streams

Income: ~$10,000 per month
Blogs About: Making money online
Major Sources of Income: Amazon FBA

What can you learn from this?

Affiliate income is extremely significant (with two notable Affiliate programs being BlueHost and AdThrive).

Most of these bloggers make money from teaching people how to blog.

Exceptions to the above is Kindle Book sales (as well as teaching people how to sell Kindle Books), Amazon FBA, Online Games.

Update: January 2016

Came across this site which summarizes very nicely all the bloggers who report their income online! Check it out: http://www.incomereporters.com/income-reports/2016/

Focus

Focus is critical to your success.

When you start out in business you may not be focussed, and that is natural.

You need to fire shots in lots of different directions and see what hits.

As soon as you have found something that works you need to focus.

I know, its hard.

Especially with entrepreneurial ADD.

But you need to.

And you will find that it is so freeing when you finally make the decision to focus on one project.

At a certain stage in our business, we were firing in all sorts of directions.

And then we decided to focus on one particular business (in our case, social casino).

If someone tells me about some cool new opportunity, I know that I won’t chase after that new shiny object.

If someone wants to partner with me on a project, I’ll immediately and politely say “No” and “thank you for thinking of me, but I have all my focus on one project at the moment.”

It is liberating.

And it also gives you a chance to succeed.

Invest in (Online) Businesses Instead of Traditional Investments

One thing meditation has helped me do, is step a bit outside of the narrow line of thinking that is ingrained in us. I do think a lot about investment and something just doesn’t sit right with me.

Recently I opened up an online investment account, fully intended to do the “recommended” thing of buying several diversified index funds to “track the market”. This would be money that I would put away and basically never touch again. At best I could hope for about 5-7% return per annum.

This is what we are supposed to do. People go to university and study for years how to properly do asset allocation.

The thing is though, the world has changed.

Once, it was very difficult to start a business. You needed a lot of capital, you’d need to beg a bank to lend you money.

These days you can start a business from your laptop, run it from anywhere in the world and hire an army of freelance workers from sites like Upwork, while you rake in a passive income stream.

Nowadays, I’m fully involved in growing our social casino business, Megarama. But a long time ago when I was just starting out in business I created a couple of interesting little experiments that have returned an amazing ROI (small amount of cash, but nice return).

One was a website I created which was really an effort to SEO another site. It’s basically an informational site for doctors in Israel who are interested to learn aesthetic medicine and in particular Botox administration for cosmetic use.

The site looks like the most crappy site you’ve ever seen, built on Google Sites. I can’t remember how long it took me to create, but it wasn’t a massive effort (couple of days??). I spent a bit of money on SEO for the site – can’t remember how much but probably around $200.

It didn’t take too long before my site was ranking #1, 2 and 3 for the key very niche search terms (in hebrew) for “botox course for doctors”. I put a crappy email form on the site and started to collect leads. Then I reached out to a number of people who were running such courses and came to an agreement regarding selling leads (again, wasn’t hard).

This was about 4 years ago I think. Since I signed the lead selling agreement the site has consistently been making over $500 per month. Again, not significant. But the effort that went into it was not huge, the cost was minimal. Lets say I spent around $500 and my time was worth lets say $100 per hour at the time (3 days work lets say), that’s a cost to launch the site of about $3,000. The return on this is $6,000 per year, or 200%!!!!

That is a hell of a lot better than a 5% return per annum.

(Oh, and BTW, the ONLY work I do on this site is send a monthly invoice. I LITERALLY do no other work).

It’s my personal experience that these online, passive sources of income can have tremendous longevity. Obviously each business is different, but there are ways to maximize longevity and minimize risk.

I’m just using this as a case in point. I had a similar outcome with another small website I created around the same time.

The concept for these online business investment vehicles would be as follows:

(1) It needs to be TOTALLY hands off. i.e. I need a team of people who can execute on my ideas. Obviously there will be initial set up costs. But imagine that you could put together this team… To use an old cliche, “where there is a will, there is a way”.

(2) The system needs to be able to scale. You need to find a repeatable business model that works and then be able to pour lots of money into it and see commensurate returns.

And there are two ways you can go about it:

(1) You can start a business from scratch.

(2) You can buy existing businesses (hopefully undervalued) and then uncover value to further improve the ROI.

Consider for a moment that you are able to build the team and system which can execute this with minimal or no daily involvement from yourself, in terms of ROI you can’t even compare it to any other asset class.

Especially if these are businesses you understand and have a degree of control over, the risk as I see it is minimal compared to riding the waves of the market.

Here are some interesting articles for further reading on the topic:

“Why a Website Should Be Your Next Investment”

“How To Invest In Websites In Your Spare Time”

“I was given $25k to invest in websites; here’s what I did : Entrepreneur”

“How to Sell an Amazon FBA Business”

Marketplaces or Brokers

Here is a list of some marketplaces and brokers for buy and selling various types of online businesses. Mind you, probably the best deals would be found “in the wild” and not on these sites. It is doable for sure.

Fliptopia

App Business Brokers

Flippa

FE International (This company also offers management services…)

Empire Flippers

Jungle Flippers