​January is always a slow month. People go crazy in December and do all of their shopping then they usually stop in January and even return stuff.

If someone buys something and I get a commission, Amazon takes that money back if the item gets returned.

​So here are the numbers for January:

• Amazon Affiliate Income - $739
  
• Merch by Amazon - $488
  
• ​Ezoic (ads) - $463
  
• Adsense - $3 (this is how it should work. Ezoic should be showing all the income and Adsense should be near 0).
  
• Total Revenue - $1,693

January Expenses:

• Ahrefs - $99
  
• Ezoic Premium - $110
  
• Thrive Themes - $25
  
• Link Building - $370
  
• PeoplePerHour - $220
  
• Website Acquisition - $2,500
  
• Total Expenses (excl. one time costs) - $725
  
• Total Expenses w/ Website Purchase - $3,225
  

So if I hadn't bought a new website, my net profit would have been a little under $1,000 last month which isn't too bad.

The new site I acquired is making about $100 per month and I'm adding more content so it should start to grow and pay off.

The PeoplePerHour payment is for some content I'm having created for one of my websites. There's a keyword with HUGE search volume for coloring pages in my niche and the existing websites suck. I hired someone to create 25 hand drawn coloring pages for me and they're unbelievably awesome. Also paying less than $10 per drawing is great and hopefully once I start ranking I'll be getting some good traffic and make that money back with ads.

The other thing I noticed is that I'm spending a lot on link building. Most of that money ($320 of it) is going towards links for my outdoor and gaming sites. The company I use for link building just raised their prices (basically doubled them), so I probably won't be changing those plans any time soon.

My plan for February is going to be finding links from high authority sites. This will be manual outreach I'll be doing and hopefully getting some strong links.

My outdoor site is really seasonal so summer is HUGE and I need to get the links built now for them to kick in by June. This site is getting about 12k views per month and I don't think it's a stretch to see 2x-4x the traffic in summer.

​I've got a post I'm going to publish in the next few days about my new habits and routines I've created to ramp up my content creation. This has been a HUGE change for me and has jumpstarted my productivity.  I'll send out an email when that post is live so subscribe at the end of this post if you want to check it out.

Right now the best bang for my buck is to write more articles for my outdoor site. This site (AcceleratedFI) makes $0 per month and the outdoor site is making over $200 per month and ​growing quickly.

I'm averaging 15,000 words per month on my outdoor site and basically 0 here so hopefully in another few months I'll be able to switch back to focusing on this site more.

Here's some pretty graphs to leave you with before I switch back to writing on my affiliate sites 🙂