First Income Report – 60,000 Rupees in September

As promised in my previous post, I am sharing the results of my experiments with monetization of Cash Overflow.

When I put my resignation two months back, I had no idea of what I will do with my life. I spent some time with farmers to learn the organic farming, I even started conversations about leasing some land to grow vegetables. I got involved in organic food management with some passionate people in our local area.

But, things changed dramatically in September.

Avinash decided to move to Chandigarh. He is the guy who was taking care of CashOverflow when I joined a startup as content marketing head in January. One of my friends, Raghav also joined me last month to help me (not sure in which area). My life partner Neha, offered her help in the designing work.

It was looking like a complete team but we really did not know what to do. We invested our savings to keep things rolling for next few months. Our focus was to start making some income from our business.

I started some experiments with monetization using two ways

1. Display Ads
2. Affiliate Marketing

We put first affiliated link on 22nd July, and generated about 2,800 rupees of income by month end. We added more affiliate links and display Ads in August month. I was serving my notice period at that time so could not get much time on optimizing the landing pages for conversion. However, I got sufficient time to learn about affiliate marketing and display ads.

We made 16,000 rupees in August by using affiliates of Amazon, Banking Products, Tech Products and Adsense.

I invested myself 100% into my business in September along with my team members.

Here is our traffic from June to September.

The combined traffic of June+July+August was 65,000

I follow my three-step formula of bring traction to my website.

1. Content Creation
2. Content Distribution
3. Measure and Optimize

We measured our traffic consistently and improved our content strategy. Short term strategy is writing articles that people love to share and long term strategy is bringing a lots of traffic from google search.

For building the base for long term benefits, we reached out to hundreds of people in our industry.

We were able to publish 17 articles on different medias and niche websites. Some of the big names are…

• Entrepreneur.com
• LifeHacker
• Huffington Post
• Your Story
• Inc42

And we closed September month with ~40,000 traffic.

Income

We optimized pages where we use affiliate marketing to increase our income. When we calculated, our income was 60,000 rupees in the month of September. It was not less than a surprise as we were expecting a lot less. We put some Ads on the header & sidebar but I am not very happy with it. It spoils the experience of our readers.

Update 1st Nov: Some of our affiliate leads has been declined by clients. It happens when leads return the product or do not qualify the profile criteria as desired by client.

Earning from each category

• Affiliate Marketing (Tech, Banking, Marketing) – confirmed 43,260
• Display Ads – 520
• E-com Shopping Affiliate – 452

Total – 44,232 confirmed. (more than 15,000 has been declined by clients because of non-qualified leads)

(Quick Plug: Want to save tax? Here are my 27+ tips on how to save income tax in India)

Expenses

We invested money into some tools and hosting apart from regular travel expenses. Out of four team members, we are paying salary only to Avinash. We are using one of our room as office and putting partial home rent as office rent.

I will share more detailed report on Income & Expenses in coming months to help fellow entrepreneurs to manage finances & their business.

Today, I can tell you that our business is becoming self sustaining and we may never need external funding.

Let me know in the comments, what you want me to include in my next income report.