Dealing with picking a market, defining your offer, and self-doubt are just a few of the issues that can weigh you down.

In this episode, Joe and I wanted to break down some of the counter-intuitive realities we’ve faced in our business and share with you some of the tactics and strategies you can use to hit the ground running with your business. While this episode is for those of you getting started on your journey, some of you old-time entrepreneurs will find yourselves nodding your heads and smiling as we lay out some of our own personal challenges in building our empire.

Go on…have a listen!

Check Out This Week’s Episode Here:

Direct Download – Right Click, Save As

Quotables:

“In the online space, your market is the WORLD!” – Joe – Click To Tweet!

“You probably aren’t going to build the next spaceship…” – Justin – Click To Tweet!

“If they don’t understand what you do, they won’t share you with anyone they know.” – Justin – Click To Tweet!

Topics Discussed This Week Include:

• Narrowing Your Scope (FTW)
• Singles & Doubles Are Fine
• Clear Up Your Value Proposition
• Taking Your Offer UpTown
• Stop Hiding Behind The Math
• Branched Profit Streams > New Profit Streams

Mentions:

• iTunes Reviews – Congratulations to our niche site winner, Mark Burgess from the UK!
• NSA story on Wired.com
• DropDeadCopy.com – A strong example of someone who knows EXACTLY what their value proposition is.
• Niche Pursuits – Sites are cool, Spencer, but no auction wars, eh? :-)
• TheAwesomePodcast.com – He puts on a kickass show…made it to the podcast rotation!
• JJAnalytics.com – Need help with Google Analytics? Julian’s gotcha covered! (I’ll take my commission in beers, man)

Are you starting off on your entrepreneurial journey or do you have a new business you’re working on? Give us a shout on Twitter or let us know how you’re doing in the comments below!

We’re following up on our April income report with what is (to date) our highest-grossing report ever! There are a several reasons for this which we’ll share in detail below.

We love hearing about how much these reports inspire and encourage you to continue to build and grow your own online empire. That’s part of the reason we openly share this information with you, but there’s also value for us brought about with the introspection that comes with writing these reports.

Having to take an open and honest look at our strengths, weaknesses, and growth opportunities (along with the feedback you deliver) provides us insights into our business we wouldn’t have otherwise. It gives us an opportunity to look at our business from the outside in, and (I hope) leads us to make better-informed decisions about the direction our company should take

Most of this revenue comes from you.

Whether you’re a long-standing outsourcing client of ours or you happened to use one of our affiliate links to buy a piece of software, we wanted to thank you for your continued support as we continue to expand our online empire.

Edit: Please keep in mind this is top-line revenue for our company and, while we’ve shared our average monthly expenses for niche site creation and have broken down our IntelliTheme revenue and expenses in a case study, sharing the breakdown for our outsourcing clients along with their expenses is something we’re not willing to do at this point.

Alright…let’s dig into the details!

What We’re Working On

After an awfully busy April, we ended up letting off the gas in May in terms of longer-term projects. We published a few podcasts and wrote a couple of blog posts, etc…but most of our time was spent on maintenance issues and just working less than we have in recent months. This wasn’t a conscious decision Joe and I made, but we’ve been in business together long enough to recognize our swings and this was definitely a low-key month for us in terms of output.

We held a strategy session on June 6th to kick ourselves back into gear and dig into some of the things we’re looking to accomplish through 2013 and beyond. We haven’t fleshed it all out, but we do have a few project ideas that we’d really like to get up and running and (hopefully) have live by the end of the year. We’d like to massively expand our business in 2014 and much of what we work on this year will be in preparation for that expansion. :-) I don’t mean to be coy, but some of these plans are so new they’re not really worth sharing at this point.

In the month of May we held a contest on our podcast to win a FREE niche site from us and…we have a winner! We’re happy to announce that Mark Burgess from the UK has won a free niche site (valued at $150 – $200 USD) for his submission. Here’s what he had to say:

5-stars – A must listen for business – Brilliant show makes me laugh and has loads of online business advice – it’s like listening to two of your best mates. :-)

Thanks, Mark! Please get in contact with us and we’ll be happy to get you sorted.

One more thing – we’ve been accepting more podcast interviews in recent weeks and we’re having a blast. If you’re new around here and dig podcasts, check out our interview with Tim @ TheAwesomePodcast.com. We get into a bit of our backstory and run through the basics on creating niche sites. (And compare/contrast our approach with that of Pat Flynn and Spencer Haws) He runs a high-energy show and the episodes are well put together…I’ve added him to my podcast rotation and am going through back episodes now.

If you’d like to hear us on your favorite podcast or to hear us interview someone in particular on ours, please Contact Us or let us know in the comments. (Better yet…have them get in touch with us to set something up!)

Site Traffic

We had a total of 21,549 visits in May:

That’s an improvement over last month by around 1.5K visits. Here’s a look at our most visited content in May:

It’s definitely our newer content that has attracted the most visits. I’m still waiting to see some of our older posts get that longtail search traffic we were getting when we were on AdSenseFlippers.

Here’s a look at our top referrals for May:

Again, we see that Facebook has been a better referral source for us than Twitter, even though I’ve spent more time overall on the latter.  This probably has to do with the stickability of Facebook as opposed to Twitter. (Especially considering the fact that I’m sleeping when our US audience is the most active, and I don’t use delayed or pre-messaged tweets.)

Podcast & Email Audience

We had another excellent month in May for podcast downloads, nearly breaking the 20K barrier:

We had a couple excellent guests on the show including Cody McKibben and James Schramko.  We have more show ideas lined up for June/July that should be fun, entertaining, and useful for both us and the listeners.

We’ve noticed our downloads are WAY down in June, though.  Now that we’re 33% of the way through the month, we’ve noticed that we’ve only received around 10% of the downloads on the older episodes that we received in April.  We’ve spoken to two other podcasters that are using LibSyn and they’re reporting similar numbers. (I contacted support and they’re saying nothing unusual on their end.) It could just be that Summer is here and less people are listening to podcasts and are out enjoying the nice weather. :-)

Here’s a look at our email subscribers:

We’re gone up by nearly 300 new emails since last month. (Not counting the 40 or so that have been added to Office Autopilot)  We should be fully transitioned to OAP by the next report – it will be interesting to see how many of those emails are duplicates across our different lists. I’m expecting this to go down next month as we de-dupe and clean this up a bit.

Monetized Sites

Here’s a look at our AdSense earnings in May:

The AdSense earnings for May are just about the same as they were in April. Our best day was May 9th at $87.51 and our worst day was May 28th at $35.96. Any new sites we’ve created a few months ago that are popping up the chart in earnings are just replacing the sites we’ve sold on the Marketplace and the smaller niche sites in our Empire Starter Packages.

I’d like to see us adding other monetization methods to this section, but I don’t think we’ll see much change here until the end of the year.  We’ll be laying some groundwork in Q4, though, that should definitely change this section up a bit with more blended earnings from multiple sources.

Selling Our Sites

We bounced back a bit with selling our own sites in May with just over $8K in sales. (Compared to $3K in April) We should be able to continue to sell through June as the sites become available, although I’m expecting the earnings to drop a bit here in June.  We have sites for sale right now and should be adding a few more by the end of the week.

We’re definitely planning to run another Flippa auction in the coming weeks – more information on that when the auction is live!

Products & Services

Our income from sold products nearly doubled in May, bringing in $8,576 for the month.  Most of the products sold included starter packs, content packages, and people selling their sites with us.

I didn’t get a chance to add the new products in May, but should be adding both a “ZenDesk ticket support product” and an “App wireframe development product” in the next couple of weeks.

Brokered Sites

We added several new sites for sale towards the end of May, (several which are available now) but didn’t sell them all right away, bringing in a total of $5,766.40 in revenue for the month. ($864.96 of which I’m counting for our income)  We did cut a deal for the premium dropship site and received the deposit, but since the deal wasn’t completed until June, I won’t be counting that this month.

The sale of the premium site (and any of the sites we have for sale right now) should add quite a bit of revenue for us in June.

IntelliTheme

After our breakout month in May with the product launch, we’re back down to more reasonable numbers, bringing in $706.88 for the month.  I see the sales for IntelliTheme steadying out over the next few months.

We’ve had some problems with development and pushing out Version 2.0 of the product.  The changes include having the theme automatically login to your AdSense account to create ad units, pulling down more data from AdSense and reporting into the theme directly, etc.  The problem is we can’t get these features to work all of the time in our own account. (Although it does seem to work in “most” of the personal accounts we’ve tested)  Since we’re unsure as to the problem, this might be an issue with us when it comes to supporting the product and we’ve held off on pushing out the V. 2.0 update until we can get these issues resolved.

You probably saw our product launch case study on IntelliTheme, but I wanted to share with you another interesting case study from Glen at Viperchill.com. It’s extremely long/detailed, but I LOVE reading this kind of content and it’s definitely worth checking out! (He had some serious issues on the launch…ugh…feeling his pain, heh)

Affiliate Income

Our affiliate earnings haven’t changed much this month, bringing in a total of $1,034.97 in May.  We don’t have much planned here in the near future, although I would like to revamp and update our Tools & Resources Page.

Outsourcing Clients

This was our biggest revenue stream by far for May, bringing in a total of $57,756.14 for the month.  We had two customers that had fallen behind on invoices that got caught up in May, giving us quite an injection of cash.

We’ve added two new (smaller) clients in the last six weeks or so and lost one as well.  Our new Hiring Manager is getting up to speed, finally…and while we were looking for new agents for our own business, the needs of the new clients are more pressing and we’ve pushed these hires back a bit until we can get the new clients staffed.

Joe would really like to grow this side of our business over the next 12-18 months which is great, but I don’t think we have a very clearly-defined value proposition for this side of the business.  We’ve made it work with our “Americans on the ground” Unique Selling Proposition (USP), but I think a much more targeted (niched down) approach is really what we need to scale this properly.  I think the best way to accomplish this is through targeted products rather than rented agents, but we’re likely to continue to test through both.

Consulting

No consulting revenue for us in May.

It’s been interesting going through the niche site process with our client from April…it forced both Joe and I to revisit sections of our business we haven’t been closely involved in for quite some time. To be frank, I’m not sure the value of one-on-one coaching (regarding niche sites) is so much more so than it would be in a smallish group of 4-5 people…I’ve been wondering whether small group training might be a better way to go. I’ll be sure to ask her the next time we chat to see if she feels the same way. :-)

Summary

Overall, we’re very happy with how May turned out and catching up on invoices definitely helped our cashflow for the month.

Here’s a snapshot at the numbers…

Business Data:

• Employees: 36 (+3 from last month)
• Interns: 1 (Erik)
• Contractors: 3
• Site Visits: 21,549 (+1,496 from last month)
• Emails / Contact Records: 10,357 (+279 from last month)

Earnings:

• AdSense: $1,729.50 (-$26.69 from last month)
• Site Sales: $8,036.20 (+$5,045.00 from last month)
• Products/Services: $8,576.00 (+$4,022.00 from last month)
• Brokered Sites: $864.96 (-$1,610.88 from last month)
• IntelliTheme: $706.88 (-$16,384.44 from last month)
• Affiliate: $1,034.97 (+$53.48 from last month)
• Outsourcing: $57,756.14 (+$32,396.14 from last month)
• Consulting: $0.00 (-$1,260.00 from last month)

Total For April: $78,704.65 (+$22,234.61 from last month)

“Reviewing the detailed monthly income report over at @empireflippers – Check it out!” - Click To Tweet

Alright, over to you! What are YOU working on in June to help you grow your business. How can we help you? Give us a shout on Twitter or feel free to leave a comment below…we’d love to hear from you!

Joe and I wanted to sit down and get a bit more personal in this episode, discussing some of the differences we have when it comes to our business philosophy relating to risk, strengths/weaknesses, and work/life balance.

Each one of the points we address in this show have (at one time or another) been responsible for some serious strife or disagreements between the two of us. Listening back to the show, though, I think they also highlight some of the benefits of having a business partner to keep you on your toes.

Check Out This Week’s Episode Here:

Direct Download – Right Click, Save As

Quotables:

“There is SOME point where you have to pull out the nuclear codes!” – Justin – Click To Tweet!

“Unless you can turn it into something that’s a working prototype, it doesn’t matter what your ideas are.” – Justin – Click To Tweet!

“It’s so much more truthful when you tell me about your failures AND your successes” – Joe – Click To Tweet!

“If you have something that’s working, just make money and shut your mouth. Yeah, screw that.” – Justin – Click To Tweet!

Topics Discussed This Week Include:

• Superman / Kryptonite – How we view our personal strengths and weaknesses
• Thorns in our entrepreneurial sides
• Knowing when to hold ‘em / fold ‘em
• Scotch And Spreadsheets – Maintaining a work/life balance
• School of hard knocks and some lessons learned
• Our business is growing up? What do we want to be…

Mentions:

• iTunes Reviews – A bunch of new 5-star reviews…thank you so much!
• Spencer’s Copied Site – An interesting post on Niche Pursuits regarding someone copying his public niche site (and what he’s doing about it)
• Moz.com – SEOMoz changes their name, cleans up their UI, and gets into the Content Marketing Analytics game!

Which business philosophies of ours do you share? What traits do you think are complimentary/helpful for business partners? Let us know on Twitter or feel free to speak your mind in the comments below!

In episode 49, Joe and I sit down with Cody McKibben from ThrillingHeroics.com to get down and dirty behind the scenes with lifestyle businesses. We dig into some of the pros and cons when it comes to setting up a home base, slow travel, and the living the tech nomad lifestyle.

Cody’s been doing this longer than we have, so we thought it might be interesting to hear his insights on whether travel has helped or hurt his business.

Check Out This Week’s Episode Here:

Direct Download – Right Click, Save As

Quotables:

“There are some real benefits to planting your roots in SEAsia” – Joe – Click To Tweet!

“You don’t want to miss out on the ‘lifestyle’ with your lifestyle business” – Justin – Click To Tweet!

“Slow travel expands your adaptability and makes you more resourceful” – Cody – Click To Tweet!

Topics Discussed This Week Include:

• Our privacy policy, Niche Site Gold, and a customer service mistake we made
• Laying down roots and setting up a home base outside your comfort zone
• The “slow travel” approach
• Nomadic travel as an entrepreneur
• Expanding your circle and making connections

Mentions:

• iTunes Reviews – Our niche site giveaway ends this month!
• Privacy Policy – A copy of the privacy policy we use on niche sites.
• Empire Keyword Research – The same domains and keyword research we’ve used for Niche Site Gold.
• Cody McKibben @ ThrillingHeroics.com – Our guest and well-known travelling entrepreneur.
• Digital Nomad Academy – Cody’s membership group for aspiring digital nomads.
• ChrisDucker.com – Justin’s interview with Chris on the New Business Podcast regarding masterminds.
• Rajesh Setty – The mentor Cody mentioned on the episode.
• CommentCast – The easy way to review international iTunes reviews (Mac only)

Which method of travel/work do you prefer? Do you like to dig in roots or do you never seem to settle down? Let us know on Twitter or in the comments below!

When talking to business owners about outsourcing, we’ll inevitably hear a story describing one (or both) of those scenarios. Why are the experiences had so vastly different?

Joe and I have been on both sides of the fence, both as an outsourcing provider and a customer. We wanted to sit down and go over some of the characteristics seen in successful outsourcing relationships. Much like businesses, some just seem to be more “lucky” than others when it comes to success. In this episode, Joe and I break down those factors that determine luck and share the real deal when building teams of outsourced workers.

While we talk about this episode through the lens of offshore outsourcing, many of the strategies mentioned work with onshore teams and employees as well.

Check Out This Week’s Episode Here:

Direct Download – Right Click, Save As

Quotables:

“Can you make me a worthwhile SEO company. You know, just pull it out of your ass?” – Justin – Click To Tweet!

“You’re going to pay either way…you might as well get the most out of the process.” – Justin – Click To Tweet!

“If you want to get through the outsourcing dip faster, you’d better have the training materials ready.” – Joe – Click To Tweet!

Topics Discussed This Week Include:

• Outsourcing Support – What tasks do YOU wish we could take over that would help your business?
• Know Thy Process (And document the hell out of it)
• “It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better”
• Skill transfer and measuring ROI with outsourcing companies
• Redundancy and the “Hit By A Jeepney” Policy

Mentions:

• iTunes Reviews – Wrapping up our niche site giveaway (bribe) this month!
• Sites For Sale – We have 4 sites for sale right now, ranging from $141 – $348 per month.
• Niche Site Duel 2.0 – Pat Flynn has launched Version 2.0 of the Niche Site Duel – should be interesting!
• Episode 17: Skill Transfer Mastery – The BEST way to transfer skills from one team member to another without losing the plot.
• Yesware.com – Part contact management, part todo list – great for tracking prospects.

Have you had success with outsourcing or do you have a horror story you can share? We’d love to hear them! Leave a comment below or feel free to reach out on Twitter!

• Searching For Sugar Man
• The Imposter
• The Fog Of War
• Louis Theroux documentaries (I’ve seen almost everything this guy’s put out…great stuff!)

One of the things I find fascinating about documentaries is that they’re (usually) limited to the constraints of what’s actually said or done. They have to take those jagged, unfinished pieces and put them together to tell a story that makes sense and inspires, enrages, encourages action, etc.

Love The One You’re With

Have you ever watched a blockbuster movie and thought to yourself, “Why isn’t MY life that exciting?” Beautiful people, extraordinary circumstances, heroes and villains – it all seems so dramatic and integral to the story. It probably wouldn’t be nearly as interesting watching our hero lazing around the house reading a book for a couple of hours, sitting in a coffee shop sipping a latte, etc. Just as it wouldn’t make sense to have a horribly sad ending in a feel-good story.

Still, these things are what happens in “real life.” Most of us are semi-flawed characters and large chunks of our lives are kinda boring. (No matter what you see in your friend’s facebook photo albums) A blockbuster film can take whatever artistic liberties they like to make you seem more heroic, more fierce…but documentaries are much more limited. Sure, they can paint (sometimes amazing) pictures…but they’re forced to use snippets from the real world and real life.

Business are like that too.

Being able to hand-pick the best programmers or designers, the best finance guys/gals, etc – it’s a luxury only the largest businesses and startups can afford. For the rest of us, well…we have to roll with what we have available. It’s not just employees that can come up lacking. As the entrepreneur, YOU may not be the best choice for running your business.

There are thousands (maybe tens or hundreds of thousands) of people out there that might do a better job in building your company than you. Does that mean you shouldn’t even bother?

Hell no!

Sure, it might be nice if you had better employees, leadership qualities, or skills that you don’t have today…but those aren’t requirements for getting started. The uniqueness of your business and your company culture will come directly from you and your team. For most of us, this will require that we use our connections and build a team or business the best we can with the tools, resources, and people available.

Fake It ‘Till You Make It

The unspoken mantra of the Make-Monies-Online (MMO) community. The idea is to parrot the advice of others that are doing well (or at least faking it better than you) to those who don’t know better so that you too can rise through the ranks and (someday, maybe) ACTUALLY make it. Here are just a couple of examples I happen to know about:

1. Sean King from CopySean.com – Gained a bit of attention by tricking some friends of ours online. Unfortunately, his story didn’t add up and he decided to “retire” from blogging.
2. Tyrone Shum from TyroneShum.com – Fakes income reports and then owns up to it in a video. Puts plenty of (legitimate) online business guys/gals in the community in an awkward position.

Documentaries have this problem too. Aside from the obviously fake mockumentaries like Spinal Tap or A Mighty Wind, there was quite a stir regarding the movie Catfish. While the documentary is worth watching and does make some interesting points, the creators have taken a ton of flack for what seemed like contrived moments and a too-good-to-be-true storyline. They’re accused of faking it by critics and their peers.

So…is it worth it? Is it worth faking it to boost your credibility? I don’t think so.

Those who will go through all the hassle and have the ability to fake it and get away with it likely have the chops to make it happen without the bullshit. For the rest, the truth will likely come out so any gains are short-lived.

Both bootstrapped entrepreneurs and documentary filmmakers share some difficulties regarding having to use the pieces of the puzzle they have available. The trick is making it work without resorting to faking it.

The allure of quick or semi-guaranteed success is what drives both documentary filmmakers and entrepreneurs to faking it, many of whom are justifying it to themselves with the “ends justify the means” fallacy. After all, if their intentions are to show or share a truth, even if that means lying to get there…doesn’t that add value to the greater good?

The problem is their short-sighted (and often short-lived) strategy will inevitably end up blowing up in their faces. The end goal or truth they were looking to share becomes overshadowed by their deception. (And often hurts the cause, goal, or truth they were looking to highlight in the first place)

I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on this one regarding the “fake it ‘till you make it” strategy. Do the ends justify the means? Have you considered this approach?

Is “fake it ’till you make it” worth it? Do the ends justify the means in business? – Click To Tweet!

Also, I’m always looking for great documentaries to watch…let me know your picks on Twitter or in the comments below!

The “build it and the will come” approach doesn’t always cut it. Why do some brands seem to take off and others sputter or fail to get started at all? There are no formulas or blueprints for success that will guarantee success here, but you can look at some of the strategies others have used effectively and find ways to bake them into your business where appropriate.

Check Out This Week’s Episode Here:

Direct Download – Right Click, Save As

Quotables:

“If you’ve got business chops, you can make it work (anywhere)” – Justin – Click To Tweet!

“If you have a content schedule…stick to it!” – Joe – Click To Tweet!

Topics Discussed This Week Include:

• Business Chops make even off-the-wall businesses easier
• Being controversial and taking a stand
• Headlines – Fair marketing strategy to get better open rates or just an irritating tactic?
• Skipping the n00bs and writing for your peers
• Overdeliving for your clients (Don’t cop out…it’s tough for everyone)
• Passing the stage test

Mentions:

• iTunes Reviews – Leave a review to be entered into the drawing!
• Our Case For The Philippines – Our best arguments for packing your bags and getting your business up and running right here in the Philippines!
• Pat Flynn on Mixergy – Andrew gives Pat a bit of a beating on this episode (and they BOTH come out better for it)
• “I Want Your Monies” – Our blog post on reaching out to people the “right” way.
• Inform.ly – Yeah, we keep mentioning Dan Norris. That’s because he’s KILLING it at producing excellent content for his peers.
• Tropical Talk Radio – The Stage Test – Great point we dug into in this podcast.

Have some tips on engagement you’d like to share? We’d love for you to hear your thoughts below or on Twitter! We’d particularly like to hear what you think about whether metrics are ALWAYS the best way to track success.

While our last report was a quarterly report (focusing on Jan – Mar details) your overwhelming requests to go back to a monthly schedule have us back to reporting monthly status updates. :-)

We love hearing about how much these reports inspire and encourage you to continue to build and grow your own online empire.  That’s part of the reason we openly share this information with you, but there’s also value for us brought about with the introspection that comes with writing these reports.

Having to take an open and honest look at our strengths, weaknesses, and growth opportunities (along with the feedback you deliver) provides us insights into our business we wouldn’t have otherwise.  It gives us an opportunity to look at our business from the outside in, and (I hope) leads us to make better-informed decisions about the direction our company should take

Most of this revenue comes from you.

Whether you’re a long-standing outsourcing client of ours or you happened to use one of our affiliate links to buy a piece of software, we wanted to thank you for your continued support as we continue to expand our online empire.

Alright…let’s dig into the details!

Lessons Learned

I should start off this report with an admission – I’m significantly less confident with the numbers this month than I have been in the past.  Every month I’ve used a combination of digging through emails, logging into affiliate platforms and accounts, Quickbooks, etc. and I’ve verified those numbers by checking our bank accounts and Paypal.  Some changes to our classifications and a bazillion micro-payments in our Paypal account this month have made some of that verification virtually impossible.  All of the income streams have been verified and, if anything, are under-reported. (Except for IntelliTheme…I think we’ve had $1K-ish in refunds that I’ve not accounted for)

The lesson learned here is that, as our business continues to mature and we add additional revenue streams, tracking these numbers as I’ve done previously is unsustainable.  I’m working with our bookkeeper that will take the reporting aspect involved here off my plate and give me a nice, easy-to-digest report each month from which I can run the numbers.  We get reports now, but they’re not how I need them and typically 1.5 – 2 months behind.

One last thing regarding numbers – we’re getting to the point where having a better understanding of detailed business analytics could have a real impact on our bottom line.  Most of our internal data right now revolves around overall cash-flow and project-based ROI numbers.  That’s actually preferable in the early stages of a company, I think. (Spending too much time/effort/energy on tracking can HURT growth efforts)  If we intend to grow at this point, though, we need to have a better grasp on the Lifetime Value (LTV) of our customers and need to understand the entry points for customers so that we can better focus our marketing efforts, etc.  My guess is that we’d get more out of customer development than new customer outreach, but it’s going to take some testing to validate that assumption.

What We’re Working On

April was a pretty big month for us in terms of getting some new projects shipped.  With the re-launch of IntelliTheme, our guest posts on Flippa, and pushing out a weekly podcast, we’ve been pretty busy!  While we’ve got some great content coming out through the blog and the podcast in coming weeks, much of our efforts in May/June will be internal.  We’re carrying over a few of the projects mentioned in the last income report, but we’re also working on:

• Data And Systems Migration:  Moving all of our data and customer records from disparate systems like email, AWeber and our vTiger CRM into Office Autopilot is going to be quite the job and a bit complicated.  In addition to migrating the data, we’re also looking to clean up our records by deleting duplicates, adding appropriate tags, automating some of the emails and tasks, etc.  After setting it up and migrating the data, it’s also critical that we have a smooth adoption process with our team.  We’ll have to train our agents on the new process with the new system and ensure it’s all running smoothly.
• New Products:  I had a chat with our Intern (Erik) the other day regarding Customer Support staff.  Most of our support packages are $3K+ per month which puts us out of the price range for many eCommerce shops, early-stage entrepreneurs, etc.  We have our own internal support team right now that are working out extremely well with Zendesk and they have some extra hours available.  The plan is to offer Zendesk support on a per-ticket basis…allowing entrepreneurs to use up their pre-purchases support tickets as they come in.  This will allow us to offer support to a much broader audience – We should have this out by the end of May.  We’re also looking at a content editing/syndication service, but we’re still working out the details. :-)
• Adding Staff:  There have been a few speedbumps with us bringing on a new Hiring Manager, but we’re looking to have most of those sorted by the end of the month.  Some of our teams are at capacity and with new projects, products, and potential outsourcing clients coming up we really need additional team members in the coming weeks/months.  We’re looking to bring on additional support, content, and technical staff to cover our expected growth.  We probably won’t fully utilize the additional staff for a couple of months, but if we don’t get them onboard and ready to go today we won’t be where we need to be in Q3/Q4 of this year.

These are definitely a few of the less exciting aspects of our business, but critical to our continued development and our longer-term goals.

Site Traffic

We had a total of 20,053 visits to EmpireFlippers.com in April:

That’s an improvement from our 51.5K visits in the first quarter.  Here’s a look at our most popular content in April:

It’s helpful to see that our most popular content on the site includes our “paid” pages like the marketplace, products and services, etc…but I worry this highlights a bigger problem – it’s not very easy to find some of our best content.  I think having our Get Started page is helpful for those new to the brand, but I’d like to make it a bit easier for people to quickly/easily find some of our older content for reference.

Here’s a look at our top referral sources for the month:

It’s pretty surprising to see Facebook at the top of the list, considering we don’t actually do much promotion there.  There are less “new” visitors finding us through Facebook, so it’s mostly people familiar with our brand that are likely seeing and sharing our posts.  It’s funny…I probably spend 3x more effort on Twitter, but it’s only produced about 60% of the traffic we received from Facebook.  Interesting…

I’ve been doing regular guests post at Flippa which has been great for outreach and exposure for us.  One of the posts about life as an expat entrepreneur was extremely popular and several people I’ve spoken with recently told me that was the post that introduced them to Empire Flippers. (Sweet!) You can check out all of the guests posts here.

Podcast & Email Audience

We saw another increase in podcast downloads in April and we finally crossed the 200K downloads mark!

The podcast audio quality has been better in recent weeks and we’ve had some positive feedback about the improvements.  We’re currently running an iTunes review bribe giveaway where we’ll randomly select an iTunes podcast review given in May and offer a free niche site to the winner!  (US, UK, and Australia only) Click here to add your own!

We’ve been doing more interviews on the show in recent weeks which is great for us – we get to ask questions of people we like/respect and get some insights into how they’re growing their empires.

I thought it might be interesting to share our email list or contacts here as well:

We have a total of 10,078 emails or contact records associated with our current business.  (Those I’ve blacked out are related to niche sites or unrelated projects)  The problem is that MANY of these emails are duplicates…people that have signed up to more than one list.  We’ll be importing all of these records to Office Autopilot in the near future where we can run dup-checks and generally clean up our lists a bit.

Monetized Sites

Here’s a snapshot of our AdSense earnings in April:

Our best day was April 17th at $76.31 and our worst day was April 11th at $40.69.  We’re starting to see some earnings from the sites created earlier this year pop-up and have sold a few through the Marketplace and through our Empire Starter Packs.  We lose a bit of revenue with sites that are “losers” and we don’t renew the domains, but they weren’t valuable enough to sell or for us to do anything with anyway.  I still question the fact that we’re losing/dumping the content from those sites.  Finding something else to do with that content would be nice, but not a priority at this point.

Selling Our Sites

We didn’t sell as many of our own sites as I’d thought in April, bringing in only $2,991.20. as compared to $12,622.00 the previous month. This was mainly due to still not having enough sites available and ready for sale yet.  We’re expecting this to pop up a bit in May and (hopefully) we’ll have many of the sites we created earlier this year available for sale in June.

Products & Services

We had another good month of products sold, representing $4,554 in total revenue.  It was great to see around half of those sales coming from repeat buyers that were (presumably) happy with their previous purchase.  We’d love to build and create products and services that provide recurring income and we’re on our way with some of our current offers.

We’ve noticed that with our top seller, Empire Starter Packs, many of the buyers already have a copy of Long Tail Pro, IntelliTheme, or their own hosting account.  They’re buying the package because of the niche sites that come with the Pro/Premium product.  Because of this, we’ve decided to offer the following:

• Own a copy of Long Tail Pro? – We’ll replace that with a $3-4/month niche site.
• Own a copy of IntelliTheme? – We’ll replace with a $3-$4/month niche site.
• Own a hosting account? – We’ll replace with a $3-$4/month niche site.

Just include a message on the order form after purchase and we’ll be happy to replace any/all of the above for you.

Brokered Sites

We sold a total of $16,505.60 worth of brokered sites, which comes out to $2,475.84 in revenue for us.  This is great news, but we’re still struggling to sell sites over the $10K mark.  I know that some ARE looking for sites in the $10K – $100K range as I’ve spoken to a few of them, but it seems that buyers at this level are fairly specific in terms of the monetization they’re looking for, the niches they’re looking to get into, etc.  I think it’s just going to take some persistence, time, and experience to break into this side of the market.

The feedback we’ve had from both the buyers and sellers has been quite positive, telling us we’re definitely heading in the right direction here and that we’re supporting the community.  It’s not as profitable as I’d like it to be for the amount of work we put in, but I still feel brokering sites is the right move and supports the goals of our clients and our business.

IntelliTheme

April was a breakout month for IntelliTheme.  As mentioned in our product launch case study, we were able to bring in nearly $50K in the week-long re-launch and finished out the month at a total of $52, 524.92 in total sales.  Still…less than half of that revenue actually went to us, so we’re putting our total for the month on IntelliTheme at $17,091.32.  It’s taking us a bit longer to wrap-up the testing for version 2.0, but we’re expecting to release the new features and functionality to everyone by the end of May.

Affiliate Income

We brought in a total of $981.49 through affiliate purchases, $190.37 of which came through Kindle purchases of our guide, Building A Niche Site Empire.  Most of the affiliate purchases were of Long Tail Pro or content orders through HireWriters.com.

Outsourcing Clients

The outsourcing side of our business generated $25,360.00 in April…a nice bounce back from the $11K in March.  We were able to collect on a couple of outstanding invoices and one of our clients paid twice this month.  Our Intern has taken on the role of pre-qualifying potential clients and will be taking on an Account Management role with any new deals brought in on this side of the house.

While these deals have much more long-term profit and potential for us, they’re also much harder to land.  We have some fairly specific roles we fill for customers and it has to be an awfully good fit for us to take on a new deal.  We’re hoping that taking a productized service approach will help us target a new market and bring more potential outsourcing deals through the door.  This is a growth area we do plan on expanding through 2013.

Consulting

We don’t do much to promote our consulting offers, but we we did get an email request and a 6-hour consulting gig paid this month (Our first 6-hour consulting package), bringing in a total of $1,260.00.  We had a kick-off call last week with the new client (Hi, Jennifer!) and we’ll start the training this week. (2 hours per week for 3 weeks)  The general idea is to walk her through the entire process of building niche sites, start to finish.  Both Joe and I will be on most of the calls and will be building sites right along with her.  The plan is to completely over-deliver and get her up and running…building profitable websites.

Summary

We’re pretty happy with how April turned out overall and we’re looking forward to another solid month in May.  Most of our “work” through May/June will be internal as we focus on migration, process overhauls, and personnel.  Here’s the detailed breakdown:

Business Data:

• Employees: 33
• Interns: 1 (Erik)
• Contractors: 3
• Site Visits: 20,053
• Emails / Contact Records: 10,078

Earnings:

• AdSense: $1,756.19
• Site Sales: $2,991.20
• Products/Services: $4,554.00
• Brokered Sites: $2,475.84
• IntelliTheme: $17,091.32
• Affiliate: $981.49
• Outsourcing: $25,360.00
• Consulting: $1,260.00

Total For April: $56,470.04

So…what do you think about our plan to focus on internal improvements over the next few months?  What would YOU focus on if you were in our shoes?  What did you learn here that you might be able to apply to your online empire?  Let us know in the comments…we’re looking forward to hearing from you!

There are a TON of key concepts and takeaways in this episode. I literally went back and listened through this episode again to pick up some tips or tricks I might have missed on the call. I encourage you to listen careful and see which business strategies you can extract and apply as you build your own online empire.

Check Out This Week’s Episode Here:

Direct Download – Right Click, Save As

Quotables:

“If I don’t use, it’s a loser. If I use it – I know my audience will be interested.” – James Schramko – Click To Tweet!

“(You don’t want your team) so concerned about putting rice on the table that they’re not loosening up and innovating.” – James Schramko – Click To Tweet!

“Up-market is key – The lower you are on the totem pole, the more people you’re competing with” – Justin Cooke – Click To Tweet!

Topics Discussed This Week Include:

• Rocking the boat and ruffled feathers when baking redundancy into your business
• Debt Collector – Car Salesman – Internet Marketing – How does that work?
• Taking your one-man-band to a full-on business
• Taking advantage of the maturing internet marketing industry
• Doubling your income in six weeks through reaching out to current customers
• Outshining the IM charlatans
• The Chocolate Wheel – Serving the right customer needs at the right time
• Be careful with affiliates and launches – This can turn into an “affiliate tax” where you’re paying over and over for your OWN customer
• Niche Business Ideas: Personalized Image database + Targeting verticals in your current business

Mentions:

• iTunes Reviews – Leave a review to be entered into the drawing!
• James @ SuperFastBusiness.com – He also runs the Freedom Ocean Podcast – definitely worth checking out!
• James Schramko’s backstory – It’s definitely worth having a listen to his interview on the Lifestyle Business Podcast and the Foolish Adventure Podcast as well.
• Own The Racecourse – Pick up a free copy of the course here.
• PowToon – Great software for creating your own intro video.

How are you building systems and process into your business? Did you learn something new in this episode? We’d love for you to share your thoughts below or on Twitter!

It’s been an amazing experience and now that it’s over, I’d like to share with you a behind-the-scenes look at exactly how it all went down.

True to form, we won’t be holding anything back. We’ll share our costs, revenue, and our experience. (the good and the bad) We’re pulling back the kimono and giving you a peek with the hope that this will provide you some tips you can use as you continue to grow your online business.

We’ll be putting all of our learning experiences here in a Product Launch Checklist we’ll be releasing soon. If you’d like a free copy, sign up with your email below! (Don’t worry…if you’re already on our email list you’ll get a copy too!)

Now…on to the details!

Investigating Our Options

Joe and I released IntelliTheme publicly back in November, 2012. We sent out an email to our list, put the blog post up, and sold some copies. We didn’t do much to massively promote the theme at that time. Our thought was that we’d make our money back on the theme internally and any additional sales would just be gravy for us.

We actually considered giving the theme away for free at one point, but this was an actual product that improved profits both for ourselves and the customers who used it. Plus, we’d spent quite a bit of time/energy on it!

We ended up selling around 98 copies via Clickbank and 35-40 copies directly via PayPal. We’d spent approximately $7,000 developing IntelliTheme and had earned around $6,000 from sales. We were still a bit underwater from a pure cost/profit standpoint.

Still, these sales were enough for us to prove the concept and the feedback we were getting from the buyers was incredibly helpful. The problem was that 140ish users for a product like this is fairly underwhelming…we needed a way to get this out to the public.

We knew that Spencer from NichePursuits.com had just recently been promoting the hell out of LongTailPro. Everywhere we looked we were seeing new reviews and videos promoting the product.

We reached out to him in January to find out a bit more and he enthusiastically recommended we talk to Mark Thompson. He’d been working with Mark on a JV partnership promoting LongTailPro through Mark’s affiliate network and the results had been incredible. He’s done so many sales in recent months that he might have a good shot at competing with Market Samurai…or at least snatching up a decent size of the KW research market! Joe and I had a phone call with Mark and he laid out the gist of what he does.

Effectively, he’s a Joint Venture (JV) affiliate manager. His job consists of finding useful and interesting products, testing them out, and then helping to promote them to his list of hundreds of affiliates through which the products get sold. He gets the product owners to offer discounts, puts together the packages and promotes to his affiliates, and shares in the profits received through that promotion.

Our Joint Venture Agreement And Splits

Product Pricing:

Single License – $17
Unlimited License – $27-$37 (dime sale…goes up after X amount of sales)
One-Time Offer #1 – Developer/Resale license – Buyers can use the theme for clients and can sell the sites with the theme included. (Also included was a PDF and video series from us on how to sell sites for a profit)
One-Time Offer #2 – Niche Packs – Offer from Mark

Revenue Split:

Affiliates: 60% of site licenses, 50% of OTO’s
Mark: 20% of site licenses, 25% of OTO’s
Us: 20% of site licenses, 25% of OTO’s

Before getting on the call I had some reservations about the approach. I was explicit in explaining marketing strategies we thought were acceptable and not acceptable. I thought I’d get some pushback from Mark, but he was in total agreement and told us his job was to sell within our boundaries. We wanted to discuss things privately after the call and Mark told us he’d have a slot he could fit us into in April if we were interested.

Joe and I discussed our play here and it seemed like a no-brainer. Mark was throwing around some awfully large numbers on the call that seemed a bit unbelievable, but we realized that the majority of the “work” would be on his end anyway. If the project crashed and burned, it would be mostly his time, efforts, and energies wasted. In fairness, Mark told us he really couldn’t say definitively how our launch would go, but we did ask him to share some previous launches he’d done and the numbers were pretty astounding.

Pre-Launch Strategy

Other than creating OTO #1, Mark really took care of everything for us. All sales copy, graphics, email swipes, setting up affiliates, building pre-launch interest, etc…that was all him.

Honestly, I didn’t think much of Mark or the launch through March. He was a nice enough guy, but I just didn’t think it likely that there would be much of a payoff. I figured even if he only brought an additional 80-100 sales in at least we’d get the additional exposure and buyers, even if we didn’t make much money out of the deal.

It was a bit of a mess. We’d just re-branded our business from AdSense Flippers to Empire Flippers. Many of the sales materials and information that was going out online was still mentioning the old AdSense Flippers brand and we had to try to adjust the best we could for Mark and the affiliates. (Sorry guys!)

In early April, we had our mastermind here in Davao and they beat us up a bit for not knowing more of the details. I’d asked Mark about it a few times throughout the process, but I wasn’t as clear on some of the details as I probably should have been. This put us at risk in a few areas:

1. Brand Management – We began to notice a TON of crappy content out there about Intellitheme. Some of it was spun, put up on Web 2.0 feeder sites, article directories, etc. Would this have a negative impact? What kinds of promises were being made to new customers?
2. Payments – Up until launch, we weren’t exactly sure how payments were to be processed and who they would go through. We were using JVZoo for affiliates and ForumSpecialOffers for our sales page, but Mark had said something about using his Paypal (with PayPal’s “adaptive payments”) to handle the orders.
3. Refunds – Some of the trusted JV’s are on instant payments/commissions. Doesn’t that leave us ripe for refunds? If we’re paying the affiliates immediately, are we left holding the bag on refunds?

As we got closer to the launch date, I could see the buzz online starting to pick up. I did a few interviews both via email and video right before the launch. Joe and I had to scramble to put together our PDF and video for OTO #1. I collected all of our content around the web regarding selling sites, rewrote and formatted it, and had it made into a nice PDF. We recorded some audio and covered some of our best tips regarding site sales and had our team create the videos around the audio.

One of the most fun things we were able to do was create the launch video. We ended up not using it on the launch page for the promotion, but it’s something we can now use on the site:

We originally looked at some of the done-for-you services that provide launch videos, but they were a bit pricey and more than we wanted to spend on marketing materials. We ended up having our newest Intern (Erik) coordinate with our team to get the video completed. Here’s our cost breakdown:

• Script – I spent about 10-12 hours putting together the script for the project – Free
• Voiceover – We used Voice123.com to get a professional voiceover done for the video – $150
• PowToon Video Service – A great service for making cartoon-ish videos and animation – $19
• Custom Graphics And Images – We had one of our guys spend two days creating the custom images and graphics – $30
• Intern Erik – He spent two days putting together the voiceover and images from our team – $200

My time isn’t actually free, but aside from that we were able to put the video together for under $400 in total spend…not bad!

Speaking of costs, Joe was pushing to get Version 2.0 before launch. We were using a great new developer, but he’s expensive…we ended up spending another $3,000 to add the additional features we wanted for IntelliTheme. (We didn’t get this done before launch, unfortunately…we had to push it back so that we had time to test. We should have an automatic update out in the next couple of weeks.!)

Total Cost Through Version 2.0: $10,400 approximately

Launch Day

As soon as the sales page went live, things were NUTS! My worries about payments and whether Mark would come through were (thankfully) unfounded.

Joe and I were both bombarded with PayPal emails…we were selling several copies per minute right after launch.

Thankfully, Joe and I were both on with two support staff to handle all of the emails, questions, support tickets, and comments that were rolling in.

Total Sales 24 Hours:

Unlimited License Sales 24 hours:

“Almost $24K in only 24 hours! We were looking at a 3.19% conversion rate and $0.88 per visitor.” – Click To Tweet!

We asked Mark about these numbers and he said they were a little low. After the first day he mentioned that we’d probably be at around $50K – $60K in total sales when the week’s finished…not too shabby.

By the second day, we realized we were in the top spot for JVZoo sales on both our first and second day:

This led to us being featured by JVZoo in the email out to their list over the weekend. It seemed odd to us that Mark wanted to launch on a Friday (April 12th) but, (again) it turns out he knew what he was doing.! Launching on a Friday with JVZoo put us in a prime position to be the top seller for the day and got us on an email out to all of their subscribers and affiliates.

From the start, we weren’t planning on making much money on the launch. With a discounted product, giving 60% to affiliates, 20% to Mark, etc. that really didn’t leave a ton of cash for us.

Still…we know that if we could increase our exposure and get our product and brand out to a new audience, they would find opportunities later to purchase products, buy and sell websites, etc. This strategy seemed to be working out well, based on our email signups from Day 2:

Challenges

We were extremely happy with how the launch was going after the first day, but there were a few challenges that we were forced to deal with. Some of them were expected, while others were completely foreign to us.

Product Confusion

We were beat up a bit (rightfully so) about our sales process being a little confusing. Potential buyers weren’t sure whether they needed the single site license, multi-site license, etc. One of the worst mistakes we made was not explaining the OTO #1 very well. Buyers weren’t sure exactly what the developer/reseller license was for. We had to explain through support tickets, emails, and comments that it was the ability to sell site(s) with the theme and/or use the theme for clients. I’m sure this cost us some sales. :-(

Surprisingly, we had quite a few support tickets from buyers who thought this was a plugin and not a theme. They tried to add it to their current sites as a plugin and were confused as to why it wasn’t working. This was easy to explain and fix, but probably hurt their expectations when they realized they couldn’t use it on their current theme.

Message Backlash

We knew this was pretty salesy for us, but it was a bit disheartening to read some of the criticism from our supporters. Here’s an example of some of the emails we received:

And support tickets:

Ouch! We were able to resolve most of the complaints or issues, but the sentiment still rang true. For every email or support ticket we received, there were probably another 10+ buyers that thought it and just didn’t say anything.

Ultimately, we felt that the trade-off between having a promotional launch and adding a ton of new buyers and audience was worth it. We were able to help everyone that was struggling to get access relatively quickly and you can always unsubscribe from emails, eh?

Cracked Software Downloads

We made a decision during development that we wouldn’t spend a ton of energy trying to lockdown the software. We thought it was more important to get a working copy out, test the market, and add some of the really cool features and functionality down the road.

While we avoided showing up on any of the free download sites previously, we found our theme available for free from those sites within 24 hours of launch this time around. :-( This is something we definitely expected, but we were a bit surprised when it was the reason for a buyer’s cancellation/refund. Stating something about not being able to “in good conscience” pay for something that was stolen and distributed for free. WTF?

It’s not so bad, though. Future updates and features will effectively lock out unauthorized copies, keeping the theme from working on those particular sites. They can avoid the updates of course…but they’ll eventually find the theme not working very well and probably be forced purchase from us anyway.

Haters And Trolls

This…well…this was a bit different!

A couple of guys were hammering us in the sales thread. We responded to legitimate concerns or complaints but avoided the nastier comments. Most of the trolls and haters tended to comment on the “ugliness” of the theme. They’re right, of course, the theme is a bit ugly. For those of you who’ve been with us a while you’ll know that we tested the design pretty heavily. As much I wish the better looking themes converted well that just isn’t the case.

We also had a few hate emails and one guy in particular that spammed our comment form on IntelliTheme with something like, “Mark Is A Miserable F#@(ING SPAMMER!!!” over and over again. What a sweetheart he was! :-)

As you can see, it wasn’t all sunshine and PayPal payments and there were definitely a few bumps in the road. - Click To Tweet!

I do wish we would have been more clear regarding the product offer, but the rest we can deal with!

Final Results

We were very happy with how everything played out and Mark certainly delivered the affiliates and sales. Here’s a look at all of the products sold by the end of the week:

And here’s a look at our Unlimited License sales:

Here’s a breakdown:

• 1,130 Total Sales/Licenses
• $47,244.80 Gross Sales
• $11,000 Development Costs (approximate)
• $400 Marketing Costs (approximate)
• $1,275 Affiliate Bonus Costs (Split with Mark)

And here’s our revenue from this promotion:

• $11,811.2 – Revenue from affiliates (Approximate – $47,244.80 X 25% for affiliate license sales, OTO’s, and unaffiliated purchases)
• $4,840.54 – Our commission on affiliate sales
• So…$7,000 (previous sales) + $11,811.20 + $4,840.54 =
• Our Total Revenue: $23,651.74
• Our Total Expenses: $12,037.50
• Our Net Profit: $11,614.24 (approximately)

On the surface, it seems like a hell of a lot of work for $11K net…even if was only one week! Still, a few things to consider:

1. This doesn’t account for the additional $$ made on our own sites
2. The brand exposure for Empire Flippers
3. The new audience and email signups we’ve picked up that may purchase our other products/services, buy/sell websites, etc.

Final Thoughts

We’re really happy with the results and appreciative to Mark for taking on this project. We’ve had some great feedback and success stories from some of the new users which is so exciting to hear. We’ve got some pretty major plans for IntelliTheme through the rest of the year and can’t wait to start kicking out the latest versions and updates!

We’re working on a product launch checklist that will include all of our lessons learned during the launch of IntelliTheme. Want a copy? Sign up here!

We’re planning to have Mark Thompson join us on a future podcast episode. He has a really interesting job and he’s done some major launches – We’re excited to have him share with you exactly how he’s done it.

Anything we missed that you would have liked to see included? Do you think this was a worthwhile project based on the final numbers? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!