September-October 2014 Profit Report: $584, $151 Shane Labs

(Every month I reveal stats about my side projects, which includes how much I’ve earned. The info below is slightly censored. For the full financial figures, sign up in the sidebar to the right.)

This month you get two profit reports in one! Bonus! Actually it’s more of a bummer that I had you wait an extra month before releasing September’s results – but that’s what a baby will do to you. Thanks to everyone for understanding and being patient while my crazy family life has been able to recover 🙂

I mentioned in my last post that my schedule due to a newborn was completely thrown off. I went from having a steady routine, complete with at least 6 hours of weekly side project time, to 3 hours for the entire month – that’s barely enough to just check my stats! I had to learn to quickly prioritize what was important, and the few hours that I had were spent maintaining my existing sites, not developing anything new or blogging about them.

At the beginning of September I had made a goal to bring in an additional $1,000 in revenue, just by focusing hard and really putting my heart into my side projects. Well the bad news is that I didn’t meet that goal 🙁 But I did have the most profitable month ever! In fact, if you ignore the expenses of my latest site which is a work in progress, I had a total revenue of $689. I’m pretty proud of that! Even though I failed my goal, I did learn that you really do benefit from an outlook that you NEED your side projects to succeed to survive.

A couple other noteworthy things for September, which I’ll expand more on later:

Purchased advertising on the Warrior Forum for AmpedSense

Reached out to a few niche site industry leaders, and even had a Skype call with a niche expert demoing the plugin

Gathered lots of feedback from existing and potential customers, and revamped AmpedSense to incorporate those changes. It’s now WAY easier to use that before.

Here’s September’s stats:

Compared to August, I had a decrease in traffic (-13k) mainly due to not promoting this blog much. But AmpedSense had its best month ever, bringing in $255 and bumping my monthly profit up by about that amount. September has been my highest earning month to date!

But then October came, along with our amazing baby. I had pretty much no time to work on side projects, and my revenue reflects that.

Here’s October’s stats:

As you can see compared to last month traffic is about the same, but profit down about $400. Ouch!

The good news is that it’s nice to have some of this income be passive. Take a look at EasyDbs. Haven’t touched that site in about a year, and yet it still brought in almost $200. That’s pretty cool.

Another reason profit is way down is due to a hefty expense I made for AmpedSense. I realized that if I have no time myself, I’m gonna need to outsource activities. So, I paid for some article writing that will hopefully increase my SEO for that site. The articles have yet to come (should be here in a couple days), but I’m hoping they’ll be worth the cost in the long run. I normally hate to outsource tasks I can do myself (especially writing), but when I have no time I feel like I’m forced to.

Anyway, that about wraps up the last 2 months. Going forward I should have a little more free time, so while there still won’t be an influx of activity here, I promise I won’t be completely absent 🙂

How many other sidestrapping parents are out there? Tell me I’m going to eventually get more than 3 hours a month of project time…*fingers crossed*

Did you miss any articles?

If you haven’t been to my blog in a while, here’s what I posted last month:

Any questions, suggestions, or feedback about this breakdown? Would love to hear from you with a comment below!