Blogging life and Income report – July 2015

Hello guys and welcome to our first income report from Jaco beach Costa Rica! We moved to this beautiful place a few days ago and we are very happy with our new apartment and all the activities we can do here that we couldn’t do in Playas del Coco.

Weather wise it is a bit cooler in temperature since it rains more here but it is more humid. The amount of tourists is way more since Jaco is a surfing town close to the capital so you can see a combination between locals with foreigners.

Our plan is to be here for 6 months and get a lot of work done to get ready for our next long trip. In February we are thinking about going to Europe and back to some other countries in Asia that we couldn’t go last year.

If you are around Costa Rica and want to to stay with us in Jaco, we have one private room on Airbnb for rent. We’d love to have you stay with us!

What we have done in July

Samantha’s parents visited us for 10 days and we had the opportunity to show them around Playas del Coco and La Fortuna de San Carlos where Arenal volcano is. We also did some beach hopping, horseback riding, hiking, ziplining and enjoyed a day at the hot springs.

During their visit we ate lots of good food and we found the best empanadas in the world (Empanada is a Costa Rica pastry with meat and cabbage) in La Fortuna. If you are in La Fortuna, go to a restaurant called the Rainforest cafe, we had them for 2 days in a row and we are planning to come back. We had an awesome time with the family and the trip was really fun.

Work wise we did what we always do. Work hard and have fun while we do it. We wrote 10 articles for Mytanfeet and we are always optimizing our previous articles and performance of our blog.

I got my new DJI Phantom 3 Professional drone

Two months ago I sold my old DJI drone It was not easy for me because I love my toys … excuse me my work tools. At the beginning I was looking to buy a DJI Inspire 1 but after seeing one in person the size became a factor. If I was having some trouble with the DJI 1, then that one would have been almost impossible to travel with.

Then one day I saw the DJI Phantom 3 professional on Youtube and after researching for a little bit ,I realized that some of the features I liked about the Inspire were in this guy. The best part is that the drone still compact since it’s almost the same size as the DJI one but with a built in FPV and a 4k camera. I am very happy with the drone, after a few more flights I am planning to make a detail review of it.

Christmas came early this year

I have to say that the quality of that little camera is stunning, I have never seen such of a quality image coming out of such of a small device. Here is the first video I took with the DJI Phantom 3 Pro, editing was minimal, it was pretty much just cut and render.

Sneak preview of our Costa Rica affiliate platform

One of the reasons why I love the internet is because you can automate processes and you don’t need to spend money on renting an office or hiring staff to sell products. The opportunity to make a sale is available 24 hours a day.

If you have followed our income reports you will know that our most successful program is the one we created ourselves, our Costa Rica affiliate network. Now we are working on the next step which is launching a dedicated website focusing on making sales.

Here is a screen shots of one of the headers we are going to use, we are putting lots of hours into this project but we want it to be perfect and have at least 30+ options for our readers.

I am very picky when it comes to promoting a product or an offer to our readers. If one of our current partners is reading this, he knows how important it is for us to provide the best service, experience and value to our readers. They get a little bit tired of me always making sure they are on top of things but when they see that we sold $5000 a month on a $50+ dollars a day product or we bring them big groups, they start assigning some of their best representatives to handle Mytanfeet clients.

One of our goals is to have a semi automatic booking site with the best prices and services, our long term goal is to have the biggest Costa Rica booking website. So if you are in Costa Rica and want to work together to promote your business, please contact us.

Side Projects

Mytanfeet will always be our main project but since I published our last income report on yeisonkim.com, I have been contacted by a couple of companies that want me to help them with their marketing and sales strategies. I am working with one already so for the next income report I will start adding a section for yeisonkim.com for this.

I have said many times that I want to write more on this blog but honestly I haven’t done it, I apologize for that. Every time I want to write an article I get a phone call from a friend inviting me to a BBQ, boat ride, snorkeling but I need to get focused in yeisonkim.com. Samantha tells me that every day and most of the times she is right.

So if you want me to write about something in specific, please leave a comment at the end and I promise I will do my best 🙂

We passed the 2000 Facebook likes

It doesn’t seem like much compared to the other big travel bloggers but we’ve never spent any money on boosting posts or promoting our page. It’s not because we’re against it, it’s just we haven’t really sat down and spent time learning about it.

Even though we don’t focus a lot on Facebook marketing, it’s nice to say we’ve finally passed 2000 likes. Maybe now we will give in to Facebook’s game and start paying for ads or boosting posts. I can see it working well for a few of our posts.

Signed up for Buffer Awesome Plan

We had been using Hootsuite ever since we started but we recently stopped paying the premium plan. Samantha decided to sign up for the Awesome plan on Buffer so that she can schedule pins on Pinterest which is our main social media referrer. We still use Hootsuite to schedule tweets but use Buffer for scheduling tweets with pictures from our posts.

She’s only been using it for a week and we’ve already seen the results, we normally get an average of 300 visits a day from Pinterest, now the average is 400 ever since we signed up for Buffer.

July 2015 Stats & Income Report

Traffic

Visits: 65 167 (+4321)

Unique Visitors: 54 543  (+3853)

Page views: 95 118  (+4905)

YouTube channel stats:

Views: 11 797 (- 424)

Minutes watched: 29 823  (- 878)

Subscribers: 292

Income Report

Affiliate links:

Amazon: $308.01

Aweber: $5.70 (This service is a must have, read how we use it in this article)

Leadpages: $11.1 (Learn how we used LeadPages with this blog)

Mytanfeet Costa Rica Affiliate Network: $5819

Mytanfeet International Affiliate Network: $1399.71 (Combination of affiliate programs such as Hotels combined, Agoda, CJ, etc)

WPEngine: $50

Total affiliate income: $ 7323.52

Advertisement:

Google Adsense: $186.80

Youtube:$ 14.91

Total Advertisement: $201.71

Coffess, Pizzas and Beers from Readers: $0

Expenses July 2015:

Traffic Hosting Planet: $24.99

MaxCDN: $14.99

Lead Pages: $40

Aweber: $30

Total Expenses: 109.98

Total Income for July 2015 : $ 7,415.25 (+2,283.61)

Third month in a row that we set a new record! and we are just $2600 away from our 10k month record.

Social Media and email subscribers

Twitter followers: 16 500 (+511)

Facebook likes: 2040 (+74)

Instagram: 4564 (+394)

Emails subscribers: 2474 (+156) Learn how I used Lead pages and Aweber to gain subscribers and automate income

Celebrity Status

Google Page Rank: 3

Alexa Rank: 191 905 (+4287)

Domain Authority: 36

Thoughts and Plans

August will be a fun month for us. Samantha is going back to the US on the 8th to the east coast for a week and then I’ll join her in Washington in the middle of August. We have some really fun activities planned like camping at San Juan Island, Mount Rainier, Kalaloch, Olympic Peninsula and the best part is that none of them are sponsored. We won’t have to write about it though we probably still will but we are not obligated to.

We both come back the first of September and then Samantha has some friends coming. So it’s going to be a fun month but really busy since we will still need to keep up with blogging and our side projects that entire time. One thing to know about blogging is that it never stops. Even when you’re on “vacation,” the work keeps going and you can’t fully turn it off.

Samantha has began planning to write her first “real” e-book and hope to have it done by the end of the year. We write so many articles on Mytanfeet that we figured we could put all the posts together nicely into a book so that way, we have another product of our own to sell. We just need to buy a new zoom lens so she can get more wildlife shots. We are also thinking about buying the Canon 6D to take our photography and videography to the next level.

I mentioned earlier that we are renting out one of our rooms on Airbnb. Jaco was more expensive we thought when it comes to rent, and we have an extra bedroom we don’t use so we figured this would not only be a way to make some extra cash to help with rent, but a fun way to meet other travelers and even readers. So if you or someone you know is traveling to Jaco and want to stay with one of the most awesome and knowledgeable couples about Costa Rica, send them our link 😀 Also we have a $25 credit off if you sign up through this link here so you can save even more money!

Let’s hope that we can keep up our passive income, September and October are coming up which are the worst months in tourism in Costa Rica but we are hopeful.