Hey John here, if you haven’t noticed I have been completely out of the blogosphere for quite a while now (a few months), I’ll explain why in a bit. But for now a big welcome back to myself, sorry you have to deal with my writing style (or lack of) for this income report, a bit of a step down from the awesome job Matty has been doing. So strap yourself in and be prepared to be blown off your seat, with yet another self indulging, beating of my own drum income report, here we go …
Happenings For The Month …
So for the last few months their has not been a lot to say from my perspective … I have been busy working for someone in their Makati, Philippines based office, the client is based in Melbourne Australia and basically hired my services to help him out with his filipino staff. Well suffice it to say, after a few months I was going crazy as all those feelings of being stuck in a job came flooding back. I never expected it to last long, and I never expected I would overly enjoy it. The problem for me is I am a creative person … the job was basically testing software. There were aspects that were creative which I loved, but the main task was simply quality assurance oriented. For those that don’t know me, I struggle with consistency, I get bored easily and I cant stand any task that does not involve my creative juices. There are a few positives to this and many negatives. I do feel looking at the project now that Matt would have been a lot better at this. Thankfully me and Matt are completely different, which works well for us. Basically my point is, I dont make a very good employee, I realise that. So this month was the last month I worked for this client. I am very thankful for the few months I spent there as it helped financially and helped me learn a few valuable things. But I am very glad to say I am back baby! Cant wait to tell you wait I have been working on when I do the next income report.
The Report …
RemoteStaffRecruit.com
We spent quite some time marketing this month and ended up getting a few inquires none of which led to an actual sale which was disappointing. But the traffic is on the rise and we are starting to also see some organic traffic now which is promising. We tried out Facebook advertisements with some poor results….there is a huge bounce rate. Im guessing because our advertisements where going from Facebook to an outside site. Anyway we will need to look at this again some time this month to see if it is really worth it. We actually signed up for www.quickseoresults.com this month and it will be interesting to see the report they will be sending us soon.
You may be thinking why would you do that? why wouldnt you just outsource it? Well first off they offer a free month trial so there is nothing to loose. It is also fairly cheap at $370/month for 5 keywords so we would literally have to make 1 sale a month here from organic SEO to cover our expenses Another reason we would want to use them is they might actually get us results unlike an SEO VA. We have worked with SEO VA’s in the past and they can often be all talk. Quick results SEO also from what I have heard has some sort of blog network so a VA would not have access to this. As long as we see some sort of positive results we will most likely use this service for a month or 2.
We have been contacting a bunch of quality bloggers offering our services for free so that we can get some testimonials and put our service through some tests to improve and get feed back. So far we have placed 2 VA’s for free and are waiting for the feedback to come in. We also sent out an email to all our lists for our new affiliate offer and got 200+ sign ups which is cool. So far we have not seen to much traffic from it but maybe it will come in a month or 2. If you missed that email check out the offer here.
RemoteWorkmate.com
Not alot to update here, things are going pretty smooth at the moment and we had a small amount of growth. We are still trying to focus on managing our team a little better to get the most out of them. We have 5 guys on the team we need to really focus on and 2 in particular that help run and manage our business that we need to continue to work with. We had an inquiry for 10+ staff and it looked like we where going to get it at one stage but as with most of the larger projects we missed out. We need something way more professional to get these customers attention.
Perhaps a presentation and a real explanation of what/how we can actually help them would go a long way to help us secure such large clients. We are basically competing again much larger outsourcing companies for these projects and they would already have these things in place and even more than likely have a team in place to handle those type of inquiries. Maybe if we act like “50 year old boring as balls outsourcing gurus” then they would take more notice of us rather than “2 twenty something year old’s partying in The Philippines”.
RemoteStaffMonitor.com
Not a lot to update here. I am a little concerned that I have made the amateur mistake of trying to add too many features since it is taking a while to finish the development. If you are interested in testing the software soon, comment below.
RemoteJobs.ph (Formally known as virtualjobs.ph)
We made our first sale! $20 in my pocket! woohoo … we have not given this site any attention, but still gets a fair few sign ups every 
month. We flicked the switch this month and made it so employers need to pay to advertise as we have been seeing a few sign ups recently. The reason we still love the idea is because its so passive if we can get it to work! We literally need to do nothing, an employee signs up, posts a job a employee signs up boom millionaires hehe. The only problem is there is already well established players in the market and we do not really differentiate ourselves that much or have anything better to offer. There are already a few smaller players that as a guess would make next to nothing also. Unless we spend more time here I cannot see huge growth happening anytime soon but 20+ sign ups a month would be a good start as its recurring.
Niche Sites
First off let me start off by saying that we where not hit too hard by the EMD update Google just put out. Basically if you live under a rock and still dont know this update was aimed at hitting low quality sites that where trying to take advantage of having an exact match domain and went after that exact keyword hard. I for one am sick of these updates so lets all ditch Google and start using www.speedy-pete.com/ instead 
! Anyway I might put out a post on a few things we do which I think helped us avoid penalties of the new EMD update some time next week. Anyway we had another increase this month and it seems to be going at around $150-$200/month
A small sample of some of our niche site earnings
which is super lame, depressing and annoying But I know the cause of this and it just cannot be addressed. I could get this to $3,000/month in no time if I solely focused on this and invested more time and money but it may not be the best use of time/money right now especially with the EMD update.
We continued the same back linking strategy, content management, site theme, structure and everything… it is still 99% on auto pilot at the moment which is good because it makes S&%T all! We have just 2 staff on this at the moment and have invested around $8,000- (not bad…. if we stopped now we would have our cash back in around 6 months) I have no doubt if we threw $20,000 or more at this it would make $4,000-$5,000/month. That is a quality return on investment right! You would have your money back in in no time. 6 months or so to get your return on investment is super quick and I would consider this an investment not really a business.
People talk bad on niche sites but id take 4-5k/month on the side for doing absolutely nothing once its set up! This month I tried to set up Agoda affiliates (Thanks to Joe and John from Adsense Flippers while back in Davao this month) on some of the top sites. The reason I have not done this to date is its a bit of a pain in the ass! You need to add the site, get it approved, add the code, confirm its live and then make sure its actually working. I did this on 2 top earning sites as a test but the adverts never actually worked from what I could tell. I really want to test it as i’m 90% sure Agoda will pay way more if we put it on the top earning sites. The reason Hotels Combined is perfect for niche sites is you simply need to copy and past the same code for every single site. Or you set a custom code to track each site so its about as easy as Adsense. But I love the idea of getting sites earning using Hotels Combined and then switching to Agoda to cash in. Will just need to try again this month.
As you can see from the sample picture of earning on the left we have some fairly good sites that earn a fair bit a month that we might try to sell this month at some stage. We have 220+ sites now and id love to get that to 1000+ asap. I just need to get on flipper and sell some small sites perhaps buy a small site or 2 so I have some trust from the buyers on Flippa. Here is an approximate break down what we spent on niche sites just to show where we are at.-
- Staff (content writing, SEO, site creation) $700
- Hosting $40
- New Domains $250
- Content $200
- SEO software $100
The Numbers of our entire business
August income- $15,988.10
September income- $16,770.92
Difference- +$782.82
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