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Income Report: April 2015 Location: Taiwan and Chiang Mai

This month I spent more time working out of Starbucks in Taiwan and airports than any other place, thank goodness for my Roost laptop stand and my Apple wireless keyboard and trackpad.  Larissa is in South Africa for a month visiting her friends and family and I had the rest of the month to myself in Chiang Mai to catch up on work, well until my cousin showed up from Los Angeles that is.

A week of showing him around Chiang Mai, and a few days of hiking in the northern mountains later, I'm now sitting in my hotel lobby here in Phuket trying to make sense of what happened last month. Your guess will be as good as mine as I haven't had the least bit of time to look at how my businesses went last month.  So here it goes!


Book Sales:

Last month I decided to experiment with lowering the price of Life Changes Quick from $7.99 to $4.99 to see if the lower price point would make more sales and it did. Total profit went up and I got the book to more readers, so I'm keeping the price at $4.99 at least for another month to see how it trends.  




Big thanks to Angelo, Tryton, TK and Laura for taking the time to leave a review on Amazon for LCQ!  It means a ton knowing that people are enjoying the book, and also the reviews help boost the book in ranking so more people can find it.

Total Profit from Life Changes Quick and 12 Weeks in Thailand: $290US (+/-)


Udemy Courses:

I don't know if I ever really mentioned it anywhere, but when Larissa and I first started creating courses on Udemy, I knew exactly 0 people who have been successful with it and it was a huge gamble for our time and energy.  This is a big reason why I share these monthly income reports so that you guys can see what is realistic for each business model as an example.

This month I launched a new course on Udemy called Jumpstart Success which was actually intended as only a bonus give away to people who have used my link and given me credit when signing up for Anton's dropshipping course. I didn't ever expect to sell it but a few people in the course who didn't sign up through me wanted access so I created discount for them in the member forums.


Total Profit from all three courses: $530.49


Phone Coaching:

This month I took on a guy named Cliff for a 4x package of phone + email coaching for his dropshipping store.  It was a bit of a tough niche to crack but now he's in with 3 suppliers and it was well worth the phone time and work he put in.

Total profit from Phone Coaching: $262.50 with 1 session outstanding.

Other Income:

I also make money from advertising/affiliate comission for those who are niche enough to use my links in my recommended resources page on my podcast and blog but haven't had time to calculate it yet as it's spread out from about 20 different sources.  I'll do a full write up about it in the upcoming month so keep an eye out!


Dropshipping Stores:


Store #3 Update:

Mainly because I've been working on the new membership course that should hopefully be done and announced next month, I haven't had time to even look at store #3 for months now. So even though it has been profitable, I just don't have time for it, which is why I've decided to pass it down to my buddy Adam, the guy from episode #1 of the Travel Like a Boss Podcast

Our deal is, he is now 100% in charge of this store and is going to give me 50% of the profits from it for 1 year. After that he can keep it for himself, or sell it and keep 75% to himself for the hassle of growing it and listing it for sale.

Hopefully now that he is running the store he can give it the attention it needs to grow it.  This month's total sales was $4,400. 

Store #3: April 1st - 31st

Total Profit from Store #3: $312.32
My 50/50 split $156.16 (100% passive)


Store #1 Update: 

I somehow reached a milestone of hitting my 1,000th order for my main store this month! Woohoo! That being said, I've still been neglecting my stores and just letting them coast these past few months. They are a great source of semi-passive income, but there are definitely things I could do to scale them up.

For my main store I made $22,500 in sales this month and my ad spend was only $388.49 which is significantly lower than it can be. I've just increased my bids for items that were profitable but not very competitive by 10 cents to see if that results in more sales for this month.

Total Profit from store #1: $3,375 (+/-)

Main Store April 1st - 31st

For store #2, the one that I run with Larissa we had a great month in sales at $20,200 but with twice as many visitors so I'm still playing around with things to try to increase our conversion rate.

Since this store is still new, it's still a bit of a learning curve, and we finally got hit with our first return. Unfortunately, it was kind of our fault as our phone support guy didn't have proper training for the products at that point and might have disappointed the customer with his product recommendation. Since it wasn't anyone's fault, just bad timing, we decided to pay for the shipping out of our own pocket. That combined with subtracting that order from this month's profit split as we were paid for it back in January was a huge hit on our profitability for this month.

We spend a total of $545.32 in ads this month, with $162 of it being completely wasted on a high priced product that doesn't seem like anyone wants to buy.  Lesson learned, I've lowered the bids for that range of products down to 1 cent so it doesn't happen again.

Total Profit from Store #2: $3,173.00
After splitting it with Larissa 50/50 and deducting the refund: $1,091.92 (updated)

Store #2: April 1st - 31st

My Total Take Home Profit from my dropshipping stores: $4,530.14 which I'm quite happy with as my total expenses for this month including rent, food and my coworking space membership was only 1/4 of that.

It's been two years since I replaced my normal 9-5 income with my dropshipping stores and I really have Anton to thank for that so if you want to take the same dropshipping course I took when I got started I would highly recommend AntonMethod.com


Next Month:

My cousin Jacob is in town visiting from Los Angeles still and we'll be headed down to Koh Phi Phi for a week to do some scuba diving. I don't know how much work I'll be able to get done while down there but as soon as I get back to Chiang Mai on May 7th my plan is to put my head down and finally finish the membership course I've been working on.

I haven't been this excited about anything in a long time and I know everyone who joins it will have their minds blown by even just the content I've recorded so far and it's just the start of it!  So keep an eye out on that and best of luck with your own progress in May!

April 2015: Taiwan -> Chiang Mai -> Phuket

Warm Regards,

Johnny

Tweet: Check out @JohnnyFDK http://ctt.ec/xX919+ #incomereport - How much did you make?

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Post a Comment

  1. Hey Johnny,

    Long-time reader. I started my dropship store at about the same time you did -- best decision I ever made. I'm curious which areas of your store would you improve if you weren't working on the membership site. Add suppliers, PPC, social media? My site is only making $800/mo (hey, that's rent!) but I'd love to make some tweaks to take it to the next level and quit the 9-5.

    Thanks
    Marcus

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey what's up Marcus, really glad to hear you have a profitable store. $800 a month is a great place to scale up! The ways to grow sales would be:

      1. Add more suppliers/products
      2. Get more traffic
      3. Increase conversion rates

      If you are getting less than 2% conversion to sales I would sign up for www.OptimizeLikeaBoss.com and do everything I show you in there, as it's an easy way to get more sales and profit out of your existing traffic.

      If you already have better than 2% conversion then you need more suppliers and traffic, which is what I would focus on if I had more time.

      Delete
  2. Great post Johnny. They always mean a lot to me and I love learning from you. Can you explain more about the return that happened on store 2?

    You said, "Total Profit from Store #2: $3,173.00 After splitting it with Larissa 50/50 and deducting the refund: $998.98." So does that mean that you paid almost $600 in shipping and got store credit with your supplier? Thanks

    Preston

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Preston, I'm really glad my posts are helping out!

    The return basically hit us two fold:

    1. We ate the shipping costs which was around $200
    2. We had to deduct the profit we had already paid ourselves two months ago.

    So in reality we really only lost $100 each so it wasn't that bad, but since we had already taken profit out and paid ourselves, we had to give that back this month.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I remember I tried to start with dropshipping after reading about it in the 4HWW about 5 years ago but lost focus after some setbacks. I'm now making about $400 a month from Amazon affiliates program and published my first income report. I aim to 10X that shortly :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey Bodhi really glad you are building your passive income streams and now making $400 a month! Great job, I'll keep an eye on your progress. I'm sure you'll 10X it this year!

      Delete
  5. Hey Johnny,

    What would you say your total living expenses are on average per month?

    In other words, how much are you able to save up per month and how much do you spend?

    Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey Laddy, instead of living paycheck to paycheck back in the U.S. trying to save $200 - $300 a month if i'm lucky, out here I'm putting 70-80% into the bank.

      My monthly expenses is almost always less than $1,500 and sometimes less than $1k. Here's a breakdown: http://www.johnnyfd.com/2014/04/cost-of-living-my-monthly-budget.html

      Delete

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