May 2016 Passive Income Report: Most Profitable Month Yet!

I'm super excited to share this month's passive income report with you as it'll blow you away how much money I made and how I did it. I used to dream about being able to make $600 a month so I could live the "good life on the cheap" here in Thailand. Now that I'm making more than that per day it's crazy to think about what's next and what is possible.

The reason why I continue to share these monthly income reports is because I want you to follow what is actually working and see that hard work really pays off when you follow the right methods. There have been good months as well as bad months but as long as we continue to push through, we get massive months like this. I can't wait to see for myself as well as share it with you, so let's get started with this month's passive income report! 

P.S. If you would rather watch the video follow along here is me explaining this month's income report on youtube.

Passive Income: Books

Nothing much to report here as both 12 Weeks in Thailand and Life Changes Quick were written over 2 years ago and are completely passive income now. 

Paperbacks: $14

PDF Sales: $77.91

Amazon: $165 +/-

-Hosting: $5

Total Profit from Book Sales: $251.91

*Increase from $197.85 last month 

New reviews of 12 Weeks in Thailand

New reviews of Life Changes Quick

Passive Income: Udemy

I'm super excited about my Udemy income this month as the secret project I've been working on for this past month was creating a new course!

You might wonder, why the heck I would invest my time and energy creating another Udemy course when sales on the platform have become so slow recently, especially after the updates where you can now only charge $50 maximum for courses. Well, even with that, Udemy is still the easiest place to launch a new course as their step by step creation process is super easy to follow and since you still own your course, you're not committed to them and are allowed to sell it on other platforms.

As an example, I sold rights to both Small Talk Networking and Relationship Ready to a new platform that focuses less on business courses and wants to offer more lifestyle type courses. It was an easy way to make an extra $1,400 up front for work that Larissa and I did over a year ago. I wrote about the sales process in this cash for courses post here.

My New Udemy Course

I wasn't going to mention it here in this income report yet but I accidently launched it and started making sales since it's still technically 9:30pm in California the night and Udemy is still adding sames of my new course to my May earnings. 

I'll write a bit announcement on what my new course actually is and who it's for, but if you're super curious you can check out the site at Dropship Lab: Six Figure Formulas to see for yourself. I've been putting off making this course as I don't to compete with Anton's dropshipping course, but realized that there is a big market of people who are already making $1,000+ a month from dropshipping and want to learn how to scale that to Six Figures ($100,000) which is something he doesn't get into. 

Good news is it's only been a few hours and even before I mentioned the course to a single person someone organically found it and purchased it which shows the power of Udemy. 

My plan is to drive all of the new sales through Udemy and hope that they see it being a popular course and matching it with organic sales and advertising. This allows me to sell the course at $50 and still be profitable as by doing it this way I'm essentially getting double the amount of new students as I would on my own as they do a great job of promoting on their instructors behalf and generally match your own efforts. 

More on this in a blog post later this month as there's a lot to talk about and it's exciting! 

Total Profit from Udemy Courses: $437.65

*Increase from $184.58 last month

Passive Income: Dropshipping

This is going to be insane as even without logging into my dashboards or profit and loss sheets I already know that I made at least $57,635 from my dropshipping stores this month as I sold one for close to $60,000 on top of the sales I've still been making from my other store.

I don't have exact numbers since I no longer have access to the store by since we didn't officially change hands until May 7th, I still made a few sales with Store #1 this month. Either way, being a part of Anton's Dropshipping Course has really changed my life as just a few years ago I was pretty much broke and this month alone I made more than most people do in an entire year working their 9-5 office jobs.

Dropshipping Store #1 

Gross Sales: $8,320.15 
Expenses: +/- ?

Profit from Store1: $900 +/-
Net Profit from Sale: $57,635

(see how I sold this store for almost $60k here)

Total Profit from Store1: $58,535.00

Use the links in my Discounts PDF to get started!

Dropshipping Store #2

For Store #2 sales this month were okay but went down a bit mainly due to having some technical problems with coupon codes not updating correctly and also from over spending on advertising. I normally just group all of our expenses into one but I figured it would be super helpful to people running their own dropshipping stores to see exactly where we are spending our money.

I broke down our exact expenses down to the penny for you this month so I hope this helps! The goal for next month is to spend a bit less on ads and increase our conversion rates. The total profit would have been $872.33 higher this month but we had a large order cancel on us which sucks. 

Gross Sales: $12,344.00

- Expenses:

Dealer Cost: $7,542.00
Shipping Costs: $1,183.00
Credit Card Fees: $357.98
Advertising Costs: $1,325.08
Retargeting Ad Costs: $68.73
Shopify Cost: $59.25
Phone Support: $150.00
Spiffs Paid to VA: $141.00

Net Profit for Store2: $1,516.96

*Decrease from $2,591.29 last month

50/50 Split with Larissa: $758.48

+ 2.05% Travel Rewards: $214.25

My profit $972.73

Want to learn how to start your own dropshipping store?  

Follow the same course that I took when I started, sign up for Anton's Course and get my Jump Start Success course for free when signing up using my affiliate link and giving me credit for referring you!

Total Profit from Dropshipping:  $59,507.73

Passive Income: Youtube

Really exciting news is that my channel has surpassed a million views! Woohoo! It's been something that I've been keeping an eye on and meant to celebrate once I hit the magic number. The other magic number is having over 4,500 subscribers on Youtube which gives me access to places like the Youtube recording studios in Berlin which I plan on visiting this summer.

If you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, you can check it out here. 

Total Passive Income from Youtube: $79.84 +/- 

*Increase from $67.78 last month 

Passive Income: Affiliate 

This was a huge month for affiliate commissions. What's insane is the fact that my affiliate commissions have grown steadily by around 10% per month since I started focusing on using myself as a test dummy and case study inside of my affiliate training course.

What's crazy is the fact that what I teach inside the course isn't even that mind blowing, it's just recommendations products that genuinely work and slowly building more and more trust and a bigger and bigger audience over time. The fact that I've earned this ridiculous amount from doing what I love doing still boggles my mind. And the fact that the cost of my training course Earnest Affiliate is still only $197 makes me realize that even if no one ever signs up for my course just the fact that creating it has forced me to step up my own affiliate skills has paid itself back 10x.

Total Profit from Affiliate Income: $19,146.86

*Increase from $11,483.68 last month

Examples of some of the affiliate products I promote

See all of the confidential case studies inside the course 

Passive Income: Courses

I've actually messed up and have completely forgotten that I still get paid whenever someone signs up for my ecommerce optimization course Optimize Like a Boss. I've been counting the revenue from that in my affiliate income as it gets tied into my clickbank account payment, but in reality it's course income and not affiliate income. Oops, it's never more than a few hundred bucks a month anyway so I won't go back and update it all but from now on it'll keep the income separate.

Profit from Optimize Like a Boss: $364.42

*Increase from $159.01


Total Sales for EA: $3,152.00

Sam Cart Fees: $66.00
Credit Cart Fees: $94.40

Profit from Earnest Affiliate: $2,991.60

New signups for my Earnest Affiliate Course 

Total Passive Income for May 2016

It still feels surreal that I could have earned more than my my of my parents combined made working 50 hours a week for an entire year in just one month. I know that the big windfall from selling my first dropshipping store is a one thing thing so next month not only will I not have the additional $57,635 in income as the store will no longer belong to me, but I'll also lose the $2,000 - $3,000 in profit it's been bringing in each and every month since starting it almost three years ago as well.

Either way, the best thing that's happening is that I now have the abundance mindset where I know hard work pays off and I'm no longer scared that i'll ever need to go back to a normal 9-5 job ever again. I can always build another dropshipping store now that I have the knowledge and experience of going full circle. In fact, my plan is to partner up up a bunch of fellow students of Anton's course after the dropshipping retreat later this year to come back to Chiang Mai and build between 5-10 partner stores with the intention to sell them like I did this one. Keep an eye out here on the blog for when I figure out the details, but it'll definitely only be open to those either in Anton's course or those who already have some type of successful dropshipping business as I won't have the time or patience to train complete beginners.

Best of luck to everyone with your journeys and your online businesses. It really does pay off, and pay big!

Expenses for May 2016

The good news is I spent most of the month in Chiang Mai so my living expenses were pretty low this month, which is good because I'm planning on spending the next three months in Europe where it's going to be a lot more expensive.

This month i'm going to breakdown my business expenses as well as personal as I realize there are a bunch of little things I've been forgetting to include like costs of email software, web hosting, etc. Plus this month not only am I paying for myself, but I've brought on my first full time intern, meet Anthony Rigo from New York, he's going to be my Lieutenant behind the scenes in the Travel Like a Boss Army and has been responsible for publishing all of the podcasts so far this month and has done a fantastic job.

Business Expenses: 

Anthony's Expenses: $600

Coworking for Anthony: $100

Coworking Membership for me: $100

Web hosting with SiteGround: $14.95

Email Marketing with Aweber: $50

Email Optins with OptinMonster: $16.59

Professional Photo Shoot: $50

Photo Editing with Fiverr: $16.50

Email Accounts with GoogleApps: $8


Total: $956.04

A video posted by Johnny FD (@johnnyfdk) on May 20, 2016 at 9:50pm PDT

Living Expenses: 

Rent in Chiang Mai: $342 a month

Utilities: $40 a month (increased from $15 because of heavy A/C usage)

House Cleaner: $30

Internet/Phone: $16.85 a month

Food: $500 +/-

Other/Misc: $270 +/-

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: $30


Total: $1,228.85

A photo posted by Johnny FD (@johnnyfdk) on May 21, 2016 at 6:33am PDT

Travel Expenses: 

Chiang Mai to Bangkok Return: $100
Hotel in Bangkok: $100

Total: $200

Other Expenses:

Donation of 83 Mosquito Nets ($250 to Project Malaria)

Donation to Muay Thai Isaan (monthly recurring for children)

Donation to Warm Heart Worldwide (monthly towards Biochar Project)

Monthly Check to Parents ($1,000)

Giving Blood to the Red Cross (Free! More info in the video!)


Grand Total Expenses: $3,684.89

Giving blood is like giving money that magically regenerates itself.

Giving blood in foreign countries helps stock rare blood types!

Total Bootstrapped into Savings: $79,095.12

It's still pretty crazy to think even with earning over $80k in a month, my expenses if you exclude giving my parents money or donating to causes I believe in end up being less than $2,000 which is what some people pay for rent back home.

Get the Full Story:

Final Thoughts:

The best thing about living the location independent lifestyle that we do is the fact that it coexists with the minimalist lifestyle as well which keeps us from blowing all of the money we earn. I'm a big fan of the lessons I've learned from reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad and will be using the majority of the money I earned this month into buying assets instead of liabilities. Keep an eye out for more detailed posts about investments as I'm getting super into that world along with being an entrepreneur.

Best of luck to you in your journey, if you've enjoyed this month's income report and have learned something from it, please share it with your friends! Talk to you soon.

Warm Regards,

Johnny 

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