December Profit Report / 2015 Year in Review Shane Labs

Wow, with 2015 behind us I realized that I’ve been blogging here for exactly 2 years now! From my very first post in December 2013, to making up to $1,083 in my most successful month, it’s been quite the adventure. And now that I’ve been able to spend more time on my side projects due to my freelancing career switch, things have been moving like never before (too bad the earnings aren’t matching). Yet at the end of the year I like to look back and reflect on the progress I’ve made as a year.

But first, let’s quickly touch on this last month.

December 2015

December was an extremely slow month. Advertisers usually spend more during the holidays and that is a nice boost on my niche adsense sites, but since I’d been focusing on AmpedSense it was sad to see no one spending money on wordpress plugins. I don’t blame them, I like to use the holidays to relax and catch up with family. But it was disheartening to switch to a new business model (AmpedSense is freemium now), and see no difference in sales.

Take a look at the detailed stats by site:

Compared to the previous month, traffic was down by about 3k visitors, and earnings down about $150. This is not the trend I’ve been hoping for!

Looking back at 2015

I put together this quick chart showing my profit month-by-month for the year:

I’m no economist, but shouldn’t the $ be trending upwards? This graph is showing me that I’m doing something horribly wrong. How is it that the more time I spend, the less I earn? Should I have just not touched a thing??

What’s interesting is that my two best months, March and September, had completly different reasons they were successful. March was attributed to AmpedSense ($549), while September was due to HostBenchmarker ($409). Is it normal for things to fluctuate this much month-to-month?

Looking forward to 2016

I have about 2 months before my reserves run out and I have to increase my consulting hours. I’d hate to do that since it’s really nice to finally have some time to spend on my side projects. Hoping things change soon.

I’m going to be strict about only doing activities that bring in revenue. For example, reaching out to new AmpedSense users and helping them get set up could create a paying customer, so I’m all for that. But posting to this blog does not directly earn my anything, so things may be a little behind here (hence why it’s the middle of January and I’m just now posting last month’s earnings).

Another thing that I’m hoping will help me is I joined a mastermind group (run by Nick Loper). It’s a group of 6 like-minded entrepreneurs that meet weekly to discuss our struggles, successes, and hold each other accountable for actions we were hoping to accomplish. I think I’ll also get some fresh advice on some of the things I could be doing better at. Just had our first meeting last night, and I’m excited to be a part of it.

Next month’s focus

So as you can see, releasing a free version of AmpedSense didn’t immediately triple my sales (of course, it didn’t). While I am excited about the increase in new users (about 5 per day), I now need to convert them to buyers. How do I do that? Here’s my plan:

Polish my email autoresponder series (I have a few basic emails that get sent when someone starts using the plugin) so that users are encouraged to upgrade to premium.

Reach out to users individually and learn about their experience using the plugin.

Reach out to users that are using other ad plugins and convince them to give AmpedSense a shot.

Continue to reach out to potential affiliates. Not sure why I’m having such a hard time recruiting affiliates – now I finally understand why some companies have dedicated affiliate managers.

If you can think of anything else I should be doing, please comment / email me. No suggestions are bad and as you know I really need all the help I can get this month!

Thank you, and happy new year!!!