Welcome to our May/June/July and August (!) combined monthly travel income report!
Once every two months (in this case 4 months as this is the first report and we want to explain everything that has happened from the start), we will be writing a detailed report about our online earnings while we travel. We’ll be doing this not only to help us keep track of our own progress but also because essentially, we want to be as honest as possible with you.
We want to lead by example by showing you how possible it is to make an online income in movement. It’s easy to say you can do something but it’s another to actually do it. So we’re going to walk the talk.
Moreover, we also believe that it will encourage engagement, new ideas and more opportunities. So feel free to leave a comment with anything that comes to your mind – even if you think it’s a terrible idea and never want to speak to us again.
We are going to begin by describing the things we’ve done within the previous month(s) (with regards to our travels and online work) that may have had an impact on our income.
Then, we’ll spell out each source of income to the cent in which our new company is making and then go on to finish off with a reflection and how we can improve for the next month.
This report will be based on the income for Adireto Ltd, a new company started up in Hong Kong in April 2014. For the purpose of this case study, any other business or personal income made will be excluded.
This is a brand new business, starting out from scratch. We aim to work on a number of online ventures to help grow the business and we want you to be a part of it. Come on this learning curve with us, find out what works and what doesn’t for us and discover how possible it is to make an online income in movement (hiking, rollerskating, roadtripping, etc. ;-))
For the moment we have 6 websites actively operating under Adireto Ltd plus a few more that don’t get attended to at the moment. Active sites include:
1. www.storyv.com – our venture/travel blog.
2. www.femininex.com – an online magazine for women.
3. www.wordpresstemplateshospedagem.com – tips on how to use WordPress + sales of Premium Themes in Portuguese and as an affiliate.
4. www.nomadan.org – Dan’s personal blog helping others to learn technical skills to make money online and travel more.
5. www.moneis.com – a platform to connect professional bloggers and help them focus on creating content.
6. www.galeriadeblogs.com – a bloggers platform to add their blog and ranking service (all in Portuguese).
7. It’s a secret for now! An old site of Dans that we will uncover later on in this post series.
We are building up a readership for all of these websites together by producing content. Over time, this will open the opportunity to create a few different online income streams from services such as consulting and products such as digital information and learning tools.
Let’s get going on the combined income report for May, June, July and August!
What’s been happenin’
Shall we rewind 5 months to the end of March?
StoryV
It was in Chiang Mai, Thailand when we began getting our asses together for our new venture travel blog, StoryV. We’d been brainstorming all sorts of ideas, names and logos in the prior weeks but found our direction changing often. Eventually, we came up with the name StoryV.
The direction we were orginally heading in was sharing valuable stories around the world. So we planned to travel, meet inspiring people and tell their stories. Which is where the name came about – Story (self explanatory) and V for many relative words including venture, vista, view, value and virtual.
As soon as we agreed on the name, we promptly snapped up storyv.com as shorter domains are becoming harder and harder to find. In fact, we did our research and found out that all possible combinations of 4 letter domains have been taken! So we were pretty stoked to find even a 6 letter one.
To protect our brand, we also bought the .org and .net extentions. So for $33.79 on Dreamhost (use “STORYV” promo code for $37 discount!) we had 3 of our own domains.
As a client of Dreamhost since 2006, Dan has used their service mostly as a domain registrar, but does have one website under Adireto Ltd that is fully hosted by them: http://www.wordpresstemplateshospedagem.com.
We spent approximately 2 weeks bickering over logos after both trying to come up with some and design them ourselves. It turned out we had very different ideas and tastes when it came to design and establishing our image so we took to Freelancer and posted a contest.
189 designs were entered and we had to choose one! Once we went through the interesting process of choosing a design, we then worked with the designer to tweak the logo a little until we were completely happy with it. This was a $200 investment out of our own pocket.
Hot tip: If you plan on setting up a contest, you need to communicate your thoughts and ideas extremely clearly and frequently. This ensures that the designs will reflect your needs. Don’t be afraid to ask for a strong concept and encourage creativity.
Hot tip two: The chosen designer was actually one that we found ourselves and invited to the contest. We didn’t know about this functionality on Freelancer until a few days in. However, if we knew earlier, we definitely would have invited more high profile designers to be a part of it.
So then we got stuck into writing content about travel on our blog and for our new eBook ‘Travel More’. This free eBook has been the biggest experiment we’ve done so far for StoryV and has helped us to attain over 160 new subscribers in the last few weeks. It’s a start and we’re happy with that – we haven’t invested any money into advertising yet. This is purely just the response we got from our Facebook friends.
The eBook is basically a beginners resource for learning how to travel more. It goes into ways you can save and earn in movement as well as how to overcome the common fears that hold many back from leaving their comfort zones. To keep it professional, we outsourced the task of creating the book cover to a freelancer Dan regularly works with.
Based on the feedback that we receive from the information we have provided, we’ll be going on to create and sell further valuable information products in the near future. The idea of this is to strategically show you how to put together a plan of action to consequently be able to travel as much as you desire.
As we believe that publishing content online can open many doors in the online world, we put together a quick video to teach you how to create a website in just a few minutes. Take a look:
Meanwhile, we’ve been making a few small commissions from our affiliate partnerships with Bluehost, Hostgator (Portuguese market) and Freelancer but we’re not primarily focused on making an income from StoryV yet, although we believe this happens naturally, indirectly.
Between the months of April and August we were travelling the UK by van. This was a fantastic experience and really took us out of our comfort zones, however it didn’t allow us to have any kind of stability. By this, I mean to get any work done we were constantly on the lookout for cafés with WiFi and power points and this was often difficult in more rural areas. This did have a somewhat negative effect on our productivity as we were limited for time and resources.
At the end of August we moved to Amsterdam and found a room close by to the city where we can now settle and utilise our surroundings to be more productive. More on that in next November’s report.
Femininex
Femininex was actually a project we decided to take on quite all of a sudden while we were starting the business over in Hong Kong. Out of curiosity Dan was searching through www.flippa.com (a marketplace to buy and sell other websites via auction) one evening and came across Femininex, an online magazine for women.
Of course, beauty, fashion and muffin recipes weren’t exactly Dans thing (I didn’t mind) but he purely looked at it as an investment. The site was up for around $7000 and came with a well established Pinterest account (where most traffic was coming from) and was making around $200 a month from Adsense (Google Advertising). After exchanging emails with the Macedonian seller, we closed a deal for $2600!
Plans for this site were to grow the income from Adsense to $1000 a month fast. However, because of our living conditions over May, June, July and the beginning of August, we were struggling to even dedicate enough time to building up StoryV, leaving the site a little bit in lingo. The earnings even went down. I did write a few articles and then we reached out to some writers on Freelancer to write a few more but it wasn’t enough content to grow the site.
So as of August, we hired a freelance writer (Freelancer.com) on a permanent basis to write 5 articles a month for $80. Included in this price we have asked for some promotion on Pinterest and Facebook as well as use of SEO (search engine optimisation). We will be giving her access to our statistics so she can see what posts are working better than others and have agreed that if she can help to grow the site, we will increase her monthly income.
Again, this is only new so after a few months of content and good promotion we should see an increase in the earnings coming from Adsense. Femininex is also affiliated with Amazon, however we haven’t created a lot of content with affiliate links to make commissions yet. This is also something we will be teaching our freelance writer.
wordpresstemplateshospedagem.com, www.nomadan.org, www.moneis.com and www.galeriadeblogs.com
Dan created all three of these websites some time before starting up the new company, however they have now been transferred over to Adireto Ltd under their own terms (for instance, nomadan.org is Copyleft and moneis.com is Creative Commons – Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0). They have all been making small amounts of income through either affiliate commissions or advertising.
WordPress Templates Hospedagem is a site affiliated with ThemeForest, a place where you can buy and sell website themes. On WordPress Templates Hospedagem, the theme descriptions have been translated from English to Portuguese and then sold to a Portuguese/Brazilian audience. If a customer purchases through this site, Adireto Ltd gets a commission from ThemeForest. Also, the website is affiliated with some hosting companies where a few commissions have been made and are accumulating for the next report.
Nomadan is Dans personal blog in Portuguese. On this site he has recently started giving away a lot of valuable information along with tips and strategies to help others who are trying to make money in movement and be able to travel more. He teaches how to use simple tools such WordPress, Active Campaign (aff), and OptimizePress, among others to help build an online business and have the freedom to travel more – check the Youtube channel if you like to learn some Portuguese as well.
We don’t advertise on this site, however we occasionally promote some affiliate links. Dan has also created one digital product exclusive for subscribers to pay however much they think it’s worth. This is a large spreadsheet of Freelancers, designed to help with outsourcing writing. This is not openly available to the public yet. Much like StoryV, this blog will be used to attract other income streams from selling services such as consulting and teaching as well as products such as memberships to private groups and more digital information.
Moneis is a platform where other professional bloggers can run their site under a sub-domain. The idea of this is to connect bloggers as well as help each other earn from it. Basically, Moneis is a content management system that looks after the difficult, confusing side of things such as hosting, themes, subscriptions, email marketing and optimisation and helps you to focus on the most important thing – creating the content.
Source
At the moment we have a couple of smaller sites running under Moneis which make some small earnings from advertising. As we’ve been busy trying to build our other sites, Moneis hasn’t had much love, however Dan is now working at it and eventually we plan to open it up to others.
Galeria de Blogs was bought from a famous Portuguese problogger and entrepreneur Paulo Faustino. The monetary value paid was EUR1,000. This website is generating almost zero income directly with Adsense but is linking to wordpresstemplateshospedagem.com which sells WordPress themes as an affiliate and most of the visitors come from Google Search Engine (we believe the linking strategy is helping).
But wait! There’s more…
Direct Advertisement
As I briefly mentioned earlier, there is also a Brazil based company in which other web properties run under. Any direct advertising in which Dan specifically deals with for other international markets goes into Adireto Ltd. At the moment there is one major client in Italy.
Now let’s get onto numbers – remember, by no means are we able to live off this amount of income. This case study is to show you how we aim to grow these numbers in the coming months and help you to understand how you can apply the same strategies in order to make money in movement. Your feedback is sincerely welcomed!
Please note: These reports show only the exact figures in the account after fees are taken out. Sometimes the reports might show nothing for a few months and then, bingo, an accumulated amount will show up. This could be a result of exchanging time for value before doing a launch or earnings sitting in lingo and not being deposited into an account.
As all of our Adsense earnings from Femininex and Moneis as well as affiliate commissions from other sources are doing just that at the moment, waiting to be deposited in Hong Kong, this report will show $0 until the money physically shows up in the account.
What an exciting report this one turned out to look – jokes. But hey, the next one should look a lot better on paper!
Income Report May – Sept 2014
Websites
Storyv.com:
HK$0
USD $0
Femininex.com:
HK$0
USD$0
WordPresstemplateshospedagem.com:
Affiliate commissions: USD$251.50
Nomadan.org:
Product sales: USD$28.38
Moneis.com:
HK$0
USD$0
To be revealed website:
Direct Advertisement: USD$1136.25 (accumulated over many previous months)
Other Affiliate Commissions:
HK$0
USD$0
Other Direct Advertisement
EU€1299.46
Totals:
HK: $0
USD: $1416.13
EURO: €1299.46
Reflection and goals for the next report
As you can see, the business is in its early stages. We could have done more to grow the earnings for this report, however due to the lack of stability/a proper home over these months, we weren’t able to be as productive as we would have liked. Although saying this, we did manage to publish a free eBook about ways to travel more and this has helped to build our readership on StoryV.
The negative pattern we are noticing due to our eBook being free though, is that our readers are subscribing to receive it but then not reading. Why? Because it’s difficult to see initial value in something that’s free. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way human psychology works. So with this in mind, we are looking at putting a small price on it soon because it’s there to be read!
Hiring a freelance writer to help look after Femininex was a move we had to make in order to grow. There weren’t enough hours in a day for us to focus on everything and Femininex was suffering. By outsourcing tasks such as content creation and promotion we have now created more time to focus on various ventures. This project is only new, however we hope that within the next two months the earnings will be back up to where they were when we bought the site.
From now until next time we will be focusing all of our energy on growing our readership and building a list for StoryV. We’ll be reaching out and networking with others a lot more to bring our readers more unique perspectives and less me, me, me. We have thrown some ideas around for a consulting service we can offer to aspiring digital nomads to help with the more technical side of things and we aim to open this up to only a handful of clients to keep it personal and ultra valuable.
Nomadan is actively helping to build a Portuguese readership for StoryV, meaning the sites are working together hand in hand. Dan is currently working on a video series about using OptimizePress to help grow an online audience and will be offering this for free on Youtube. Today we also release the list of Freelancers to Nomadan subscribers to help speed up the process of outsourcing tasks.
We are also thinking about hiring another freelancer to add content to some other sites, including our newest venture, soon to be released! If you want to be the first to know about it, don’t forget to subscribe – You’ll get the eBook, Travel More for free as a bonus for being so awesome!
We are looking forward to the next two months as we have some cool ideas in which we finally have the space and time to put into action. Fingers crossed we can get some new and exciting things happening by the next report!
This was a long one as we had a lot to get you up to date on, however we hope this first report has given you some more insight into some of the ways you can begin making money in movement. If you’re interested in finding out more, please don’t hesitate to ask away in the comments section below! And as always, all new ideas and feedback are positively welcomed.
Stay tuned for the next Money in Movement Income Report coming in November. Until next time, thank you for stopping by!
The post Money In Movement: Travel Income Report May – September 2014 appeared first on StoryV.