Fifty Seventh Income Report – December 2017 ($1939.74)

Are you curious about a half-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.

---

I spent December 2017 in accordance with the saying “work hard and play hard.” The first 20 days of the month were pretty intensive. The last 10 days of the month I spent mainly on a family get-together in the Polish mountains, and I did very little business-wise.

AMS Analysis

I continued evaluation of my old campaigns. December brought a rise of prices in AMS ad bids.
I have a theory that the pre-Christmas period is more of a time for browsers than buyers. I mean, my price per click didn’t rise significantly, but I got many more clicks and not many more sales. There were often days that I paid over $50 for ads and barely made it back in book sales.

I determined that re-creating old successful ads was a shortsighted strategy. Yes, those ads were guaranteed to get a nice initial traffic. Unfortunately, this honeymoon period was very short, and new ads were then performing much below the level of the old ads.

All this ads shuffle resulted in several more keyword templates for my customers. My son created about 400 ad campaigns in December 2017.

Real Artists Don’t Starve Challenge

On 12th of December, the 30-day publishing challenge ended for me. I succeeded at publishing a new piece every single day, although I cheated a bit and sometimes re-used my old content. I was writing every day anyway, so I thought I could afford this small “change of rules.”

The results were quite extraordinary, and I summarized them in the Real Artists Don’t Starve Facebook group.

My Medium traffic increased about 10x, and my Quora traffic more than doubled. I got hundreds new followers on both platforms.

However, the challenge was quite taxing. I had been spending about 1-2 hours every day on preparing my content for publication: editing, correcting, formatting and looking for relevant stock photos. I pretty much maintained the pace right after the challenge, because I had content coming from my proofreader. But once I went to a holiday break, I published nothing.

I was able to face the challenge only because I wrote only half an hour a day, not one hour as I used to write.

Laptop Lifestyle

On 22nd of December, we drove for a family get-together in the Polish mountains. On the way back, we visited our friends, so we were back at home on 30th of December, and the next day was Sunday.

I spent 10 days doing nothing. Well, “nothing” in my case meant that I wrote for half an hour every day and checked on my coaching clients. I had only about 10 of them at that time, and half of them had holidays as well. Because of the multitude of holy days in that period, I wrote as much for my novel (leisure writing) as the other content (mostly the summary of my goals from 2017). Oh, I also diligently downloaded my customers’ ads data.

Despite my low activity for 10 or 12 days in a row, my revenue remained stable. Having a look only at my numbers, you wouldn’t have noticed that I was doing next to nothing.

Of course, it wasn’t because I am so bright but because of the nature of businesses I built. My ads are running on autopilot, so my books sell “on their own.” Ads of my customers also run on autopilot, and because they are profitable, they earn me money every day around the clock.

My coaching fees aren’t directly correlated to my activity, that’s one thing. The other thing is that my coaching is asynchronous. I don’t have to report at a specific time. An Internet connection is everything I need to provide value to my coaching clients.

Family Time

So, for 10 days I spent time with my friends and family. I also slept a lot. For 9 days in a row, I slept 7 hours or more. It was the first such streak since I started tracking my sleep in July 2013.

On a get-together, we were missing only one of my sisters who lives in Canada, and one cousin who has a special care toddler and couldn’t travel with him.

We had an awesome time. I had an awesome time. We celebrated Christmas together and were hanging together for a few days eating, chatting, sightseeing and enjoying a sauna.

That time left nothing but good memories in my mind.

 

On the way back, we visited my friend, Gabis. He is one of the three friends I dedicated “The Art of Persistence” to, and it was so cool to gift him a paperback copy of the book.

 

From time to time, something extraordinary happens, and it hits me how my life has changed in the past few years.

On 12th of December, I noted down in my journal:

At 9:30 am, I had a coaching call with my new coaching client, a small business owner from Australia.

OK, I’ve read the above sentence and still felt a pang of surrealism. I, Michal. Had a call with a new coaching client. The guy is a small business owner. And he lives in Australia.

It reads almost like a fiction story for me. Coaching wasn’t on my radar 5.5 years ago, nor 3 years ago.

AMS service

In December 2017, I was still getting inquiries from authors and corresponding with them. Not much came out of it. I got one new customer for my advertising services. Admittedly, it was a good client. I finally got a grip on who my ideal customer is, and I tried not to waste my time on less than ideal customers.

One author finished a cooperation with me in December. He reverted to selling his book for 99 cents, and I couldn’t guarantee profitability of my ads at that price point.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €907.23 ($1088.68)
CreateSpace royalties: €858.22 ($1029.86)
Coach.me fees: $540.93
Draft2Digital royalties: $29.27
Audiobooks royalties: $83.66
PWIW personal coaching: $167.87
AMS service remuneration: $517.12

Total: $3457.39

Costs:
$29, Aweber fee
$20, InstaFreebie fee
$94.94, royalties split with co-author
$27.14, my editor’s share in profits
$1044.97, Amazon ads
$91, RAs’ (RAs = Real Assistants; my sons 😉 ) remuneration
$101, proofreading
$70, ClockWork
$39.6, AMS course of my friend

Total: $1517.65

Net Result: $1939.74

---

Previous Income Report: November 2017