August 2017 Unconventional Income Report

Soooo after a kick-ass July, my income dropped a bit in August.

This is mostly because I worked my BUTT off in July to launch The Functional Nutrition Library, and I really freaking needed a break.

So, I took it pretty easy in August, and that was definitely reflected in my income. But I don’t regret taking some time for myself one bit!

Disclosure: Please note that this post contains affiliate links. This means that I will earn a percentage of any sales made through those links, at no extra cost to you.

Let’s review my income sources for August:

August 2017 Total: $1,433.26

1. Virtual Services ($1,005.26)

• Virtual Private Practice ($1,005.26)

2. Recurring Revenue ($321.93)

• Functional Nutrition Library ($321.93)

3. Products ($75.13)

• Fullscript ($75.13)

4. Advertising ($29.18)

• Gourmet Ads ($18.92)
• Google Adsense ($10.26)

5. Affiliate Income ($1.76)

• Amazon Associates ($1.76)

So after making the majority of my money from “passive income” in July, I was back to relying on 1:1 work in August. 

Sigh.

But if nothing else, launching a passive income product has taught me the importance of both patience AND persistence.

It’s highly unlikely that your first passive income product will instantly catapult you to success.

Typically, it takes months or even years to hone your product and sales funnels to the point where they can support you full time.

So all in all, I was thrilled with the $2k pre-sale of the library, and knew that with time and effort it would eventually grow into something big.

(If you missed my income report that discussed the launch of my passive income product, check it out here.)

Let’s dig into my August 2017 income a little bit more, so you can see exactly where the money came from.

Virtual Services

1. Virtual Private Practice: $1,005.26

This month I was only working with 4 people in my private practice. This is mostly because I was SO focused on creating The Functional Nutrition Library in July, that I put zero effort into getting new clients.

But hey, an additional $1k in revenue for meeting with people a couple times a week is a-okay with me 🙂 .

My ULTIMATE goal has always been to build an online business, so my private practice is more of my “side hustle” for the time being.

If you want to learn more about how I ran my virtual private practice, check out my e-course on the topic!

Recurring Revenue

1. The Functional Nutrition Library: $321.93

Woohoo! The FNL was my 2nd highest income source for the month. Not bad, not bad.

That’s $300 extra that my boyfriend and I could put towards the $25,000 of credit card debt we racked up while trying to start two businesses at the same time (he is a realtor).

Or, money I could save for taxes so I can actually pay them on time instead of needing a payment plan.

Or, money to actually move out of our apartment that is incredibly noisy and right next to the busy I-10 freeway!

You get the idea…

Entrepreneurship has definitely NOT been an easy ride, especially the 1st few years where I was the primary breadwinner and couldn’t afford to quit any of my side gigs. I was basically working 24/7 to support our life on the Westside of Los Angeles.

Butttt I kept going, trying things, and pivoting as needed until I found my niche and the type of work that really spoke to me.

I had a really good feeling about launching the FNL, and it was the FIRST product I created that actually took off. (Check out this post to learn about my previous passive income flops).

I know it’s not earning me very much on a month-to-month basis right now, but my long-term goal is to have the library run in the background as an additional income stream until it finally reaches critical mass & I can quit all my other projects and work on it full time!

Clearly $300 is not enough to quit my private practice over, but hey, it’s a start! One that I’m MORE than happy with in the product’s second month of existence.

Here are some more details on my sales for the month:

This is a screen shot of my sales, taken directly from the WordPress plugin I use to manage my membership site, called Memberpress (affiliate link).

Those little bumps represent recurring monthly payments of $11.99 from my monthly members, and the BIG spikes in the graph represent annual membership purchases ($119).

Here’s the breakdown of how my 1st two months of business went:

• During the 1 month pre-sale:
  • I sold 19 annual memberships and made $1,777

• After the site went live on July 25th:
  • I sold 2 more annual memberships at $119/year
  • + 1 monthly membership at $11.99/mo
  • = ~$250 additional dollars

• In August:
  • 7 more monthly members joined, for a total of $83.93
  • On the last two days of August, I got 2 more annual members, for $238 more dollars
  • = $322 for the month!

Now while you might be a little underwhelmed by the income I received from monthly members, remember, that is RECURRING revenue. 

That means if I provide enough value for people to remain members, I can count on earning that same $83.93 next month (plus more revenue for any more monthly members who join).

As you can see… as the number of monthly members grows, your income can increase almost limitlessley.

And even better, you can have at least SOME idea of how much money your site will bring in every month, which helps a ton with trying to budget for new tools, hiring a VA, advertising, or whatever.

Running a membership site has been a business model I’ve really enjoyed!

Of course, not everyone will remain a member FOREVER, and that’s okay! We’ll talk more about that in future income reports 😉

Oh, you might also be wondering how I advertised during this month….

I really didn’t do much! I posted in The Unconventional RD Facebook Community about it (which at the time, had around 800 members) and sent an email to my email lists for ericajulson.com and the unconventionalrd.com, which together had only 822 subscribers.

I think I also posted about it in the LEAP Practitioners group, which had less than 1,000 members at the time as well.

So, I marketed to maybe 2,500 people tops (obviously not all the people in those groups & on my email list saw my posts) and had 30 people sign up.

That’s a 1.2% conversion rate, which is pretty much in line with industry standards of 1 to 3%. Success!!!

Physical Goods

1. Supplement Sales: $75.13

This month some of my clients ordered supplements (mostly probiotics or vitamin/mineral supplements) through Fullscript, my online dispensary.

I’ve talked about this extensively in past income reports, discussed it in “7 Passive Income Sources for Registered Dietitians“, and even have an e-course on the topic, so I won’t really go into more detail in this post!

Check out those links if you want to learn more about recommending and selling supplements online.

Advertising

1. Gourmet Ads: $18.92

Gourmet Ads earned me almost twice as much ad revenue this month compared to Google Adsense.

This makes sense though, since I have Gourmet Ads in the header of my website and also as a few in-text ads.

I know $19 isn’t really mind-blowing stuff, but hey, that’s lunch or breakfast out on the town! I’ll take it.

2. Google Adsense: $10.26

Andddd I made an additional ten bucks from Google Adsense, for a grand total of $29 this month!  I’m RICH! (lol)

It would probably help to give you some context on this income, so let’s look at my traffic for August 2017:

You can see I didn’t really have any crazy pops of traffic this month. On most days I hovered between 250 and 500 pageviews.

[A pageview is literally a view of one page on your site, so if 1 person visits 3 different posts, that counts as 3 pageviews.]

You can see that my post popular post was a recipe for Sauteed Power Greens and Mushrooms, which got some love from Yummly.

To date, that recipe has over 10,000 shares on Yummly and 19 reviews!

(PS if you have recipes on Yummly, it’s worth taking a look to see what people have to say on the platform! I get way more comments and feedback there than on my actual site).

You can also see exactly where that traffic came from:

My largest traffic source was “other” (which is actually Yummly, but shows up as other for some reason), followed by direct traffic (usually people who have bookmarked a page on your site or typed in the URL directly).

For social traffic, Pinterest was the winner, sending me 660 visitors in August, followed by Facebook with 371.

My #1 referral source was FoodGawker, which is sort of like a food-only version of Pinterest, where bloggers submit their own photos. It used to be a SUPER big traffic driver in the food blogging world back in like 2011, but has steadily declined as Pinterest has taken over.

Andddd bringing up the rear was organic search traffic with 627 visits. In retrospect, I can’t believe this wasn’t a HUGE sign that I should work on SEO…. but hey, sometimes you don’t know what you’re missing!

Affiliate Income

1. Amazon Associates: $1.76

This month, someone bought a dental guard and a book on entrepreneurship within 24 hours of clicking on one of my affiliate links.

Clearly I am doing something right in this world.

So that’s it for my August 2017 income, but I also did some other fun stuff this month, like:

• Visited with my mom and sister for a few days. (My sister lives in Switzerland and I only get to see her like once a year, so that was a big deal! She was visiting SoCal for a friend’s wedding and stayed with us. My mom also drove down from the bay area to join in the fun!).
• Went to an Alt-J concert at the Shrine Auditorium. Totally recommend seeing them live if you have the chance! The light show they put on is next-level.
• Started working on my first ever mini e-course that was set to come out in September 2017.
• Recorded my presentation for the Fall 2017 RD Entrepreneur Symposium!!

Stay tuned for updates on these exciting projects 😉

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PS – If you haven’t checked it out yet, I totally recommend joining The Unconventional RD Community on Facebook, listening to my podcast & connecting with me on social media! (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)

Best,
Erica