The first income report of the month is usually supposed to be one of those “What we’ve got planned for the upcoming year” type of posts, but I actually made one of those last week by talking about our new way of doing niche sites. I also only recently published the end of year income report, and that talked about plans for 2016 in it as well.

As such, I’m going to keep this month’s report on topic and stick to January matters only. Luckily there is a lot to get through!

What Happened During January

This was definitely an interesting month. For a start, I spent three weeks of it travelling around New Zealand. It was a real test of the company’s ability to operate without me sat behind a desk the entire time; although I did check emails once or twice daily.

The team I’ve built work well together and take the initiative without me when necessary, so it means that as long as I’m there once or twice a day to respond to urgent matters or reply to customers, things will go ok.

Which is good, because the internet in some parts of New Zealand sucks. Did you know that Mt Doom and The Shire are only a couple hundred kilometers apart? I know hobbits have short legs, but if they had better wi-fi coverage they could have got the ring to Mordor two movies early.

Lame jokes aside, New Zealand was an interesting test because it also showed what I still need to work on business-wise. It’s pretty clear that too much goes through me, and if I’m away from the computer for a couple of days, emails start to pile up. This is no way to run a growing business, so it’s something that needs working on.

As it happened, a member of my audience (and a customer) reached out to me during January to see if I needed any help building systems, since that was where some of his experience lay. I guess he could tell we had some growing pains and saw an opportunity.

We’ve already begun working together on some things, and am looking forward to implementing more systems for the year to come.

Damn, I guess I did end up talking about what’s in store for 2016.

To sum up January, I’d say that it was a month where I had mixed feelings about where I’ve come and the state of the business. On one level I thought, I should clearly be more removed from the day to day operations and I’d rue the fact that I was on holiday, yet still forced to work every day.

Other days though, I’d praise the fact that I’d built something I was able to do from anywhere in the world (as long as it had internet), and would also pay for me to travel. I guess it’s natural to have mixed feelings about a lot of the important things in life.

A Sale And An Acquisition

As I detailed in this post, I sold one of my niche sites for over $25,000 in January. I will spare the finer details here because I’ve talked about them in the post.

I also bought Authority Azon off Tung Tran for a slightly higher fee. It was the acquisition of AuthorityAzon that prompted me to sell the niche site in the first place, I knew I’d be able to fund it and essentially “upgrade” a niche site for free (AA has more potential than that niche site did, and is more in line with HPD than the niche site).

As they say, out with the old and in with the new!

You can read more about the acquisition here.

January 2016 Income

Income-wise, it was interesting to see how January went. Usually when I’m at home and getting ready to tally up the income for the month (I should really hire a bookkeeper), I have a rough idea of where I’m at, but as I was on the road for most of the time, I really have no idea what the income was like.

Hopefully I earned more than I spent!

HPD Income

As I explained in a previous post, from 2016 on I will only talk about HPD income, but my personal niche site income or other business (such as AuthorityAzon) income. I may include some income reports on AuthorityAzon though.

I may also talk about affiliate income in separate posts from time to time as well, to give people an update on my portfolio.

Additionally, in previous months I would report “net profit” for the services, and only talk about the miscellaneous expenses of the business, but from now on, I will report Gross Revenue and then Net Profit, as this is what most people do. It makes sense to do it this way too.

So if you see the Gross Revenue figure and think it’s a massive jump up from previous months, you should instead check the Net Profit figure.

Done For You Websites: $24,656 (9,500)

Articles: $3,612 (1,683)

SEO: $2,241 (600)

Gross Total: $30,509

Affiliate Income

This is for affiliate commissions the HPD blog or services earned.

Long Tail Pro: $7

Wealthy Affiliate: $302

Jaaxy: $60

Thrive: $33

The Hoth: $1,430

Bluehost: $0

WebHostingHub: $700

RankXL: $175

Total: $2,707

Grand Total Gross Revenue: $33,216

And now for the expenses.

The expenses are made up of the following:

• Cost of fulfilment (How much it costs us to perform/create the services and websites we make).
• Subscriptions (Various things like Majestic, Serped.net, SECockpit, and other tools we subscribe to).
• VA Fees (Fees paid for Project Managers, Editors, Writers, And Web Development)

Total Expenses: $13,043

Net Profit January 2016: $20,173

And I was thinking it looked so bare without the affiliate site incomes.