Are you curious about a 3-month delay? I explained it in my first income report.


Seventy First Income Report February 2019February 2019 was a month of serious hustling. I didn’t slow down January’s pace. I give quite a chunk of the credit to the 12WeekYear coaching group I was involved in. I diligently planned my weeks a few days ahead at the time… and then diligently moved the items around my days when plans changed rapidly and often.

As I said in the previous report, I used 12WY more as a tracking tool than a planning tool. However, both elements were very useful for maintaining my output.

The best part of the coaching setup was an accountability group I shared with a few other guys from my mastermind. I had to report everyday and it provided the necessary focus for me.

Medium Fail…, err…, Learning Experience

At the end of the first week of February, I finally trained my wife in formatting Medium articles. Since that day we produced an article a day almost daily. I had a nice backlog of fresh Quora answers which I reused for that purpose.

I published 42 articles on Medium in February. I earned $48.

Ugh, that wasn’t according to my plan. In the end, it was a shiny object syndrome. I probably could’ve scaled up my Medium output and presence, but I simply didn’t have enough time for it. I was juggling my day job, coaching practice, developing Resurrecting Books, starting a company in Poland, family responsibilities, writing, book advertising, my church community responsibilities and everything else.

I tried to quickly create a new income stream reusing what I had. It wasn’t that simple. So, I decided to back off from the Medium Partner Program. If publishing articles behind the paywall daily wasn’t enough to make money there, I decided to publish whatever I produced in front of the paywall. That way I could reach more people.

The only positive output of that experiment was that I taught my wife to format articles on Medium. Thanks to this, my Medium articles workload was cut in half.

Well, I got another result two months later. One gal read my article, discovered my blog and liked it very much. She shared it with her husband who hosts a ‘Dealing with Depression’ podcast. He interviewed me in April. I got a podcast interview basically ‘for free.’

This is really why writers publish their works online, on Quora Medium and similar outlets – to generate such opportunities.

I also saw a small bump in traffic from Medium to my blog.

Resurrecting Books

February was a busy month for my book advertising service too. I got several new promising prospects and corresponded with them furiously to make their book pages marketable before we start with ads.

At the beginning of February, Dave Chesson contacted me and said he has a promising prospect for me, but I’d better do a good job since this guy has thousands of authors on his email list.

I didn’t do especially good work with him. The process and the system are the same. But I got lucky. Joe had a book that is selling like hot cakes. I started running ads for him on the 22nd of February and they sold 49 copies in a week!

And don’t you dare ask me how come. I have no idea. Amazon loves that book like crazy.

I onboarded a few more customers, and two of them stuck with me.

Resurrecting Books Processes

February was huge for business development for me. I delegated some stuff and made more space on my plate.

I trained my sister to download and crunch the data from the UK market. Well, I had to process the data myself this time too, but I recorded a video of it. Nonetheless, my sister generated and downloaded the reports, and it saved me a few hours.

I showed my son how to calculate profits for my customers at the end of the month. I spent maybe half an hour explaining the process to him and it saved me several hours in March.

Thanks to my son’s help, I processed all calculations in April within 2.5 days. The best thing? Delegating those two processes will spare about two working days in my schedule. Every. Single. Month.

Awesome!

Speaking of My Schedule

And my schedule was full of hustle. I had enough to do on a daily basis without processing UK reports or calculating profits once a month. Every day I published a Quora answer. Every day I worked on my Medium content, either sending my wife more articles to import and format or polishing her work and submitting articles to publications.

I kept with the content calendar for my blog – 3 posts and two email broadcasts. I kept with my 12WY tasks, including delegation of tasks in the Resurrecting Books business. I diligently massaged my shoulder blades with a tennis ball and stretched. I also got one medical procedure done to my right shoulder, so my shoulders got better. I even beat my burpee record a few times. They were the first fitness records I beat in quite a long time.

LLC in Poland

Setting up a company provided me with a few more obligations like I didn’t have enough of them. I created company bank accounts in January but had to make sure that my debit cards are operational and add them to my AMS accounts. Also, my bank picked February to make a significant upgrade to their system and I had to spend a couple of afternoons fixing the mess. All the history disappeared, I had no old data, no bank account numbers in the system. I had to once again connect my private and business accounts under one umbrella…

Another additional task was sending all the invoices to my accountant. With so many income sources and ways I pay for services, it was quite a juggling act.

Podcasts

I was interviewed for podcasts a couple of times in February. Now, both interviews are live:

Book Marketing Mentors with Susan Friedmann and Building the Business that Lasts with Jay Owen.

I had great fun doing them. The process wasn’t very taxing. I needed to provide my photo, bio and for one of them also a few suggested questions. That was my whole workload.

ROI on Podcasting

I don’t think I earned back more than $100 in return for my five podcast appearances. And I invested over one grand to get them.

One of the interviews was a bummer, I didn’t connect well with the host. Besides, it is still not up yet. I’ll have the fifth interview in a week. The three remaining podcasts helped me sell maybe an additional 50 copies of my book.

One of the hosts became a customer of Resurrecting Books, but there is no money in that deal. Amazon hates his book’s guts.

I consider the connections I built to be the best return on that investment. As I said, we didn’t click with one of the hosts. But all the others were awesome. There are some joint business opportunities looming on the horizon. And they have an amazing network of contacts as podcast hosts. Besides, I still have one more interview to perform. The final judgment about the value of this venture is not yet announced.

Sales

Both my sales and my customers’ sales dwindled quite significantly in February. I created new ads only for new customers. I had no time for anything else. I still couldn’t create new ads under my account. We all rode a dying out wave of traffic from old ads.

It’s enough to say that I made $2,932 in Amazon royalties in January versus about $2,080 in February. That’s almost 30% decline.

Family Life

On the interview for Business that Lasts, I admitted I was doing a poor job balancing my business and family activities. My mastermind buddies helped me realize that I’m too harsh for myself most of the time.

February 2019 was a crazy busy month. Yet, I managed to keep my time commitment to my kids and wife. We were hanging out together quite regularly. I even had some extra me-time and visited a sauna a few times.

I also involved my family members more in the business. My wife, sister, and son took some items off my plate and that gave me time to do other things.

An entrepreneur’s life is a difficult balancing act, but I love the freedom that comes with it. Nowadays, I can at least make an effort to reorganize my priorities and spend more time with my family. When I was at my full-time job I had no such luxury.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:
Amazon royalties: €3905.06 ($4451.77)
Coach.me fees: $186.33
Draft2Digital royalties: $19.09
Audiobooks royalties: $135.35
PWIW personal coaching: $290.31
AMS service remuneration: $1582.91

Total: $6758.68

Costs:
$49, Aweber fee
$212.55, my editor’s share in profits
$62.55, royalties split with co-author
$730.03, Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$271.63, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$100, proofreading
$200, 12WY coaching
$30, SiteLock fee
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC

Total: $2250.86

Net Result: $4507.82


Previous Income Report: January 2019

Seventy First Income Report – February 2019 ($4,507.82)

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