September Update
Nothing major to report. In fact nothing interesting at all.
I came in under target, at just over $3000 for the month across all my Income Streams combined. I'm a bit disappointed by it, but considering I spent hardly any time actually promoting my services it's to be expected.
- Adsense was down by about 20%, this is because of two factors;
- Smart Pricing (this has affected many adsense publishers)
- I let a few .info domains drop, some accidentally (I didn't receive any renewal notices! and some on purpose as I had no use for them). A few had adsense sites..meaning that they have now stopped producing income.
- eBook income was up substantially - due in no small part to me buying resell rights to a very popular eBook and then undercutting the author by $80 !
- Website Templates, again pretty much rock-steady. Nothing to report.
- Scripts & Software Sales was up slightly, due to my releasing a new Tool called `Social Smart Submit` as well as ongoing sales of SmArticle (though the SmArticle sales were very disappointing).
- Affiliate income stayed rock steady. Although I did lose some monthly recurring fees, this was made up by sales of other affiliated products.
- Other income is up slightly as I made a few license sales…
Summary
All in all, an OK month. Could have been better, had I worked more 
Next up, is to concentrate on getting a bunch more affiliate sites up using the Joe Bucks system - along with a number of satellite sites (article based white hat) which will act as feeders to the affiliate sales site(s).
Comment by Chance — October 2, 2006 @ 4:47 pm
Burt do you have plans to share how the whole JV thing went with SmArticle in an overview or case study type post?
I've gathered from a few of your posts and comments that you are not completely happy with it. It would be nice to hear your thoughts on what could have been better, done differently, etc.
Comment by One Dollar A Day — October 2, 2006 @ 7:32 pm
burt, I think your JV partners have over-priced smArticle Composer in order to offer affiliates a big slice of each sale…would you agree? Or can you not say?!
Comment by burt — October 2, 2006 @ 7:58 pm
I had about 10 buyers lined up at $1k each for the technology. This would have benefitted me as I would not have had to provide support to as many people…
Or.
I thought about giving the technology away for free, then raking in the back-end (template sales and such).
The actual selling price is $127, which is cheap, too cheap in my opinion. If I had been running this myself, I would have probably gone with the free route and then made lots of backend sales, tying customers into my offerings only (or, in other words, the system would be closed to other developers)…I'll make a new post on it sometime in the near future.
I'll also do a JV post, in the near future.
Comment by The Gent — October 3, 2006 @ 12:45 am
I spoke with Joe Bucks people last week and am in two minds whether to follow up on this. I didn't appreciate the care-less attitude I encountered and considering it's supposed to be a health product that amazed me.
I would advise anybody getting involved to take an in-depth look at their products for themselves, certainly the person I spoke with was not all that bothered or seemed to be clued up on their ingredients!
Having said that I have gone full ahead on all of them
(only joking - I am studying the ingredients)
Regarding the comment about undercutting the author of an e~Book by $80 (and I appreciate that it's your right) but do you think that's good business? What if the boot was on the other foot?
Comment by burt — October 3, 2006 @ 8:26 am
Gent; probably people who earn $5 an hour to answer emails/calls are not that enthused about their job, would you say?
If I sold unrestricted selling rights to a product of mine, it would not bother me to see people selling cheaply…