Blogging life and Income report – September 2015

Another month is over and here we are, ready to share what we have done in September.

We came back from Seattle on September 1st and the day after we had some friends staying over for 10 days, Samantha spent most of the time with them and took them around because I was busy finishing some extra projects and dealing with some responsibilities that required my presence at a certain location.

For the last few months I have been investing a lot of time on side projects and I realized that I don’t want to keep spending 75% or more of my time on other things that are not related with our main projects. So within the next weeks I will be making changes to my work schedule and try to get all my attention to this blog and of course Mytanfeet.

September was an interesting month and one of the hardest in 2015 so far. Let’s find out why.

What we have done in September

The first 10 days of the month Samantha spent most her time with her friends, but due to the fact that our job is to have fun and visit places, I can say that Samantha worked super hard. She took her friends to Manuel Antonio National Park, Guanacaste and around Jaco.

They had the chance to experience two attractions that neither of us had done before. The “Jose’e crocodile tour in Jaco” and “Ocean ranch park” also in Jaco. I couldn’t go but after seeing the pictures and the videos they took I want to go and do it.

After our friends left we went back to our normal routines. We have also been exploring some of the 4×4 roads on the hills of Jaco and having lots of fun exploring. The other day we took “Turbo” to the top of one hill and the one of the holes we had to go through were so big that Samantha had to step out of the car and tell me where exactly to go in order not to fall!

I also bought a long board and I have been practicing my surfing skills, I love sports and now that we live in a surf town I have to do more surfing.

Becoming an official business

We are very excited to announce that Mytanfeet will become an official business in Costa Rica within the next two weeks! Our lawyer friend already presented all the paper work and we are about to become an independent business.

One of the reasons why we haven’t launched our Costa Rica booking site is because we want to operate according to the Costa Rica law. The process has been slow but this is a huge step for our ultimate goal which is to become the #1 source of information and booking services in Costa Rica.

We also started the process to trade mark our logo and name, it will take approximately 3 months but it will be a TM world wide and then we will start thinking about taking our brand to the next level. But for now we will focus on the booking site first.

TBEX Asia Thailand 2015

We just got our airline tickets this morning and now we feel more excited for this event. Our session will be on Saturday October 17th at 10:35am and our topic is “How to Create an Affiliate System in Your Travel Niche.”

For the last months our biggest blogging success besides traveling and having the best times of our lives has been the affiliate Costa Rica program. We have been increasing our commissions drastically since we started to do it. Now we can make a $300 commission in just one sale and provide a better price and service to our reader.

If you have a travel niche already established and what to hear what our talk, join us in Bangkok, you can register and get a 20% discount by using this code “Yeison20″.

We leave next Saturday and it will take us over 40 hours to get to Thailand so beer must be cold once I get there :). We are also going on a FAM trip to Krabi and are very excited for it. Thailand, here we come.

Less tourists equal less commission?

In our last month’s report I talked about how the low season was affecting our sales and that we were predicting a bigger drop this month. Well it really happened.

We saw more than a 50% drop on commissions for the month of September on some of our popular products, and sadly our commissions for October doesn’t look that good either.

But no everything is bad, we are seeing many bookings already coming in for December and January so that is good news. For example if were doing 10 sales a month for “x” product last high season, this high season we already have 15 sales. So even though we got less bookings for low season months of August, September and October but but we are getting way more bookings than last year’s at this same time for the next coming high season.

Does that means that we will do better next high season? Humm maybe yes maybe not, I made a mistake last year and it was not to continually engaging all the people that bought something through our blog, but this year it will not happen again. We have a couple plans for that.

Malware problem again!

There is nothing more frustrating than seeing your blog down due to some malware injection and spam. This is the second time it happened to us. The first time we were in Malaysia and the second time was just a few days ago.

The hosting company I use is Traffic Planet Hosting and it is run by Terry Kyle (if you know about SEO for sure you know this guy). Anyways I got an email from their security department telling me that I had some malware injected on the blog and that they will take the site offline in order for me to fix it and avoid bigger problems.

To make the story short, it seems that one of our computers got some kind of malware and that passed onto our blog.

Even though I love to resolve problems, when it comes to malware and infections it’s better to pass it to specialized people. The quickest and best solution was to open an account with Securi. I have to pay $18 a month, but in less than 12 hours everything was clean and shiny. I saw the final report and the problem was not that bad at all and it didn’t affect other files but I would have taken me at months to learn and find the problem.

I had a good experience with their service and I would recommend Securi if you have the problems we had. We lost a whole day of traffic but at least our blog is like brand new and completely spam and malware free.

September 2015 Stats & Income Report

Traffic

Visits: 61 093 (-6057)

Unique Visitors: 51 339 (-4811)

Page views: 88 954 (-9672)

YouTube channel stats:

Views: 13 693 (-276)

Minutes watched: 33 745 (-449)

Subscribers: 329 (+12)

Income Report

Affiliate links:

Amazon: $87.75

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: $4154.65

Mytanfeet International Affiliate Network: $1151.27 (Combination of affiliate programs such as Hotels combined, Agoda, CJ, etc)

Total affiliate income: $ 5410.9

Advertisement:

Google Adsense: $265

Youtube:$23.19

Total Advertisement: $288.19

Coffess, Pizzas and Beers from Readers: $30

Total Affiliate commissions and advertisement: $5728.09

Expenses August 2015:

Traffic Hosting Planet: $24.99

MaxCDN: $14.99

Lead Pages: $40

Aweber: $30

Securi: $18

Total Expenses: 127.98

Total Income for September 2015 : $5,600.11 (-414.91)

Social Media and email subscribers

Twitter followers: 17 754  (+534)

Facebook likes: 2169  (+56)

Instagram: 5412 (+248)

Emails subscribers: 2831 (+116) Learn how I used Lead pages and Aweber to gain subscribers and automate income

Celebrity Status

Google Page Rank: 3

Alexa Rank: 221 205 (+25303)

Domain Authority: 40 (+4)

Thoughts and Plans

Our Amazon income took a huge hit this month. We hadn’t been this low in a while but we expected this to happen. We’re going to start promoting our main Amazon posts more to see if it makes a difference. Not exactly sure on a plan, but probably experimenting with boosting posts in Facebook and re-writing our email sequence to see if that makes a difference.

Samantha started writing her e-book and signed onto another project which we hope in the future will help bring in another side income, especially the e-book. The plan was to get the book finished by December for high season so we’re working hard to make that happen.

We’re very excited for Thailand, we think this will be a great opportunity to expand our blogging knowledge and circle. We can finally meet some of our blogger friends in person and share our knowledge with others. TBEX records the speeches so we will post the link in the next income report in case you are interested to see us in action.

One of our problems we noticed is that we start five things at once and have trouble finishing things. We really need to re-do our automated email sequence since we have so many new posts and so much information. This will be priority number 1 as soon as we get back from Thailand.

We’re also brainstorming of ideas for a new web design, we’ve had this one for a year and it’s time to change it especially since now we will be launching our sales website soon and becoming an official corporation.

The main goal right now is to give a great speech at Thailand, have a blast and learn a lot. As always, we want to thank you for reading because without you, we wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t be going to Thailand.

September was a hard month but that happens in business and in blogging. The key is not to let it get you down and keep working hard and thinking of new ideas.