November 2013 Income At-A-Glance

Gross Income for November: $94,448

Total Expenses for November: $7,822.23

Total Net Profit for November: $86,625.77

Total Net Profit September 1 through today: $220,986.64

A Little Bit About Our Monthly Income Report

You guys have all heard about “transparency”, right? Well, John and I believe there needs to be more of it in the online business world, and we are here to lead the way for Podcasters by sharing it all with you, every month, in detail.

So, here we are!

Our monthly income report is geared towards sharing with you our successes AND failures so that you can replicate our wins and avoid our many mistakes. We hope this will help you navigate your entrepreneurial journey in a more efficient and effective way.

In creating these monthly income reports, we’ve realized the importance of multiple streams of income. We’ve also realized the importance of serving an audience with valuable, consistent, actionable, and FREE content, and we love serving YOU Fire Nation :-)

If you only take one thing away from this income report, then John and I would like you to focus on this: Building an audience is one of the most important actions you can take, and creating your Podcast is an amazing way to do it.

Alright – let’s do a quick recap of some stuff we heard from you in October, and then we’ll dive into the happenings here at the EOFire Headquarters during the month of November!

**We’ll receive a commission on the affiliate links below. If you click on my affiliate link and sign up for the products and services I trust and recommend, then I will earn a commission.

October was a lot of crazy for Entrepreneurs On Fire.

If you don’t believe us, just check out last month’s income report :)

We launched our newest community, Podcasters’ Paradise, and our October monthly income report reached new heights that John and I were both shocked – and very excited – to see.

A ton of work went into our launch, which we talked about in detail in last month’s report. In this month’s report, I wish I had the words to describe to you the incredible inspiration and motivation we see being shared within Paradise every day – and all as a result of something that we’ve created. It really is a feeling unlike any other: To be providing people with resources that they desperately need and want, and to hear back from them how grateful they truly are for it.

One of our members emailed us shortly after joining Paradise and said, “I will be launching my podcast 12.01.13. Thanks for the information and teaching from Podcasters’ Paradise. Best investment I have ever made! Ignited and On Fire!”

Another member emailed me just the other day and shared some exciting news: “Today…because of the support of the Podcasters’ Paradise Community we’ve reached the first screen of New & Noteworthy Kids & Family… What you and John have created is making a real difference. Thank you so much!”

Prefer Video? Check out our fellow Paradiser Tim Paige of TimThePaige.com and what he has to say about Paradise:

All of the hard work that went into our launch is coming back to us tenfold through the engagement in our Forum and the kind words and congrats we’ve received from our community.

Aside from the kind words we’ve received from our community about Podcasters’ Paradise, there’s some other feedback I want to share that we received from  you on last month’s income report:

Many of you left comments on last month’s report wondering what our income report looked like prior to September. What about the first 6 weeks after starting to build Entrepreneurs On Fire? The first 6 months?

I guess John and I never thought to share that stuff with you because, well, we thought it might be kind of boring.

After hearing you ask about it, though, it made complete sense. Why wouldn’t you want to see what our first 6 months looked like? It will stand as living proof that there are tough times at the beginning and that you do go through a period of time when you wonder whether or not you’ll ever make $1 from what you’re creating.

A lot of money is invested with the hopes that you’ll receive a return on your time, energy, and focus. We invested early and often at Entrepreneurs On Fire, and look forward to sharing that part of our journey.

In a few weeks time, we’ll be publishing an entire post on Entrepreneurs On Fire’s beginning: so you can see what our finances looked like all the way from June 2012 through August 2013. It’s our way of continuing our pledge of transparency to you Fire Nation, and we hope you find much value within.

Alright, now let’s check out what November brought us…

Front Line Project For November 2013

Our Brand Film

A few months ago John received an email from a raving fan. His name is Caleb Daniel.

Caleb has been listening to Entrepreneurs On Fire for some time now. He told John in his email about what the podcast has done for him – both personally and professionally. See, Caleb recently graduated from high school. As any “normal” 18-year-old high school graduate would do, Caleb started thinking about college.

Until he realized that there was another path.

With the help of Entrepreneurs On Fire, Caleb decided that instead of going to college, he was going to take the leap into entrepreneurialism and start his own business. Before he had even graduated from high school, he started to take online high school classes, which allowed him to accept a full-time job as a production assistant.

This led to multiple opportunities to create videos for small companies, and before long, Caleb decided to create his own company, Caleb Daniel Productions.

With a portfolio under his belt, Caleb reached out to John and told him that, while he enjoyed our video on Jimmy, he’d really love to create some “Fire Nation style” videos for the Home, About, and Sponsors pages of our website.

Within 24 hours of his email to John, Caleb started drawing out storyboards to share his vision with us. A week after that, Caleb had multiple storyboards drawn up for our approval. Four days after that, we had booked Caleb’s travel to come out to San Diego for three days to start recording. Massive action? Indeed!

Recording was a ton of fun, and Caleb was an extremely professional – and obviously very talented – videographer to work with. We consider ourselves very lucky that he reached out to us.

If you haven’t seen the videos that Caleb created for Entrepreneurs On Fire yet, you can check them out by clicking here.

Huge thank you to Caleb for his amazing work, and for helping us tell the Entrepreneurs On Fire story, “Fire Nation style”!

Podcasters’ Paradise

Today, we sit at over 300 members and are still growing. On Dec. 1, we upped the price of our lifetime membership to $597. As we continue to add content and value to the community, the price continues to rise.

In celebration of Cyber Monday, we offered $180 off a lifetime membership, bringing the cost down to $417. We had 14 people take advantage, and we couldn’t be more excited about all the great buzz that’s going around about Paradise.

Since our launch, we’ve really been able to concentrate on producing more content for the community. This includes video tutorials and templates, in addition to our presence and engagement in the Private Facebook Group.

We even have a whole section where podcasters can request specific video tutorials, which keeps John and I busy to say the least. :)

In addition to these bigger projects, for the first time in a couple of months we were able to take a step back and really start strategizing and prioritizing some of the projects we’ve had on a the back burner.

We’re constantly asking our communities for feedback: Fire Nation, Fire Nation Elite, and Podcasters’ Paradise. Thankfully, you all continue to answer the call, allowing us to improve the content we’re offering to best fit your needs.

A couple of ongoing projects we dove head first back into in November include:

• Our Facebook strategy

After running a campaign on Facebook in October to drive traffic to our Podcasters’ Paradise Webinar signup page, we realized the true power of Facebook advertising. After targeting multiple pages of other big entrepreneurs and podcasters within our industry, we were able to increase our Facebook “Likes” and get hundreds of sign ups for the Webinar that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. We continued this advertising in November with the same results.

We also tried running a Giveaway for the first time – the grand prize was a lifetime membership to Podcasters’ Paradise. One lucky winner took home a ticket to Paradise, and we took home over 1,306 new Likes on our Fan page! The cost of the ads for this campaign totaled $295.29, making each like amount to $0.22.

Finally, we’ve changed a few things about the way that we post:

1. Our daily podcast episodes: no more images. We actually found that using images was working against us in terms of our reach, despite popular research that images will increase your engagement.
2. We’ve stepped up our game to try and include more “personal stories”. For a long time, we didn’t really think people would care much what we did on a Saturday, but it turns out people do like engaging on images of John and I doing stuff that isn’t necessarily related to Entrepreneurs On Fire.
3. We’ve started asking at least one engaging question each week. Our Fans on Facebook have been loving the questions, to the tune of 40+ comments almost every time!

• Our email newsletter content

This is a test in progress, but what we’re doing is completely reshaping the look and the content in our email newsletters. I wrote a post titled Our Newsletter Diary a couple of weeks ago, and I look forward to following that up with our most recent metrics and some of the amazing feedback we’ve received from Fire Nation on the switch.

• Our guest posting

We’ve really stepped it up in the guest posting arena, and during the month of November alone we submitted four guest posts to some amazing sites. We’re excited to share those with you once they go live!

Since April 2013, when we published one of our first guest posts on Think Traffic, we’ve submitted over 17 full-length posts to some amazing blogs, including Social Media Examiner, Matt McWilliams, Location180, EarlyToRise… just to name a few.

Other EOFire News

Fire Nation Elite continues to dominate

John and I both continue to be very active within our thriving community of motivated entrepreneurs who are building their businesses and reaching towards their goals every single day.

Some big news from our crew: a couple of weeks ago, when I sent out the Fire Nation Elite Weekly Digest, I featured SEVEN launches from that week alone – incredible! Of 100 people, seven of them all launched their website, a new product or service, their blog, their podcast – their business within one week’s time!

In addition, just the other day one of our members posted this image in our private Facebook group. Because we couldn’t be more proud of the amazing work our fellow Elites are producing, we have to share it here with you, too:

This is the New & Noteworthy section in the Business Category of iTunes as it stood a few days ago. Of the 12 podcasts listed here, 10 of them are Fire Nation Elite members! Pretty cool to see them all in the New & Noteworthy together at the same time, further driving home just what a community of supportive, like-minded entrepreneurs can do for you and your business.

*Update: Fire Nation Elite closed Dec 31, 2015.

Ready for the bare bones?

November 2013 Breakdown

Income

Fire Nation Elite Mastermind: $13,500

Sponsorship Income: $39,435

Podcast Launch (eBook on Amazon): $602

Podcasters’ Paradise: November: $32,500

1-on-1 Mentoring: $6,000

Affiliate Income 

*Affiliate links below – if you click on my affiliate link and sign up for the products and services I trust and recommend, then I will earn a commission.

• BlueHost: $150 (disclaimer: we will receive a commission if you use our affiliate link)
• Amazon: $74
• Audible CPA: $187
• DU Publishing: $2,000

Total Gross Income in November: $94,448

Expenses

• Taxes & Licenses (for our LLC): $71.46
• Website Fees (includes new domains, ongoing web support): $396.36
• Virtual Assistant Fees (includes outsourced projects): $671.50
• Donations: $147.90
• Education: $123.63
• Advertising: $2,155.77
• Design & Branding: $750
• LibSyn: $100
• Travel: $96.12
• Other Business Expenses: $627.36
• ScheduleOnce*: $42.19
• Insurance*: $172.01
• Mentor*: $2,000
• Quickbooks Online*: $25
• Infusionsoft CRM*: $209
• Cell Phone*: $171
• eVoice*: $9.95
• Skype*: $2.99
• Adobe Creative Cloud*: $49.99

*Indicates a recurring, subscription-based payment

Total Expenses in November: $7,822.23

Total Net Profit for November 2013: $86,625.77

Things We Learned In November

ScreenFlow is amazing (and easy to learn)!

I’ve learned a ton about ScreenFlow over the past month, which is software that allows you to record your screen and your voice on two tracks. As I started to get more into creating video tutorials for Podcasters’ Paradise, I started to learn a ton about the multiple awesome things you can do with ScreenFlow, like add transitions, freeze frames, text boxes and callouts!

It’s a really neat tool not just for recording videos, but for editing them as well (regardless of whether you created them within ScreenFlow itself, you can still drop any mp4 into the player and edit it as you please!).

While I started out pretty rocky with a ton of “uumm’s” and several thoughts that, after recording a 20-minute video I’d have to start all over because it just “didn’t sound right”, I’m slowly but surly feeling more and more comfortable. Practice makes perfect!

Google+ Hangouts + LeadPages = Gold

We’ve been using Google+ Hangouts on Air (HOA) for a few months now, and we love it. Most often, we use it for our Webinars, and when combined with LeadPages, it’s a VERY powerful tool for your business.

Google+ HOA allows you to record a live hangout with up to 10 people on video and automatically streams it to your YouTube page. What’s cool about that, you ask? Well, a few things:

1. If you’re using it to record video interviews, then you’re skipping the step of having to save it and then upload it to YouTube because it’s already there!
2. Because you can only have 10 people on video during a live hangout, the streaming to YouTube feature comes in handy. Have more than 10 people that you want to allow to watch your video? Just invite them to the YouTube page and they can watch it live, too.

What about the + LeadPages part? Well, what’s awesome about the + LeadPages part is that you can embed your Google+ HOA within a LeadPage, and instead of directing people to YouTube to watch live (where they won’t have any capabilities to chat or connect with those on the video), you can direct them to your own website via the LeadPages page to watch it live there. This adds several other capabilities, like being able to embed a chat box under your video to allow those who aren’t on the actual G+ HOA to still be able to communicate with one another. It also allows you to add a Call To Action, like a buy button or a link to your website.

Again, we’ve been using G+ HOA and embedding our Webinars on LeadPages for months now, and we love it.

There are a few things to look out for regarding G+ HOA depending on your situation. If you’re concerned about the privacy level of your video or interview, you don’t have a ton of control over that during the recording. Once you start a G+ HOA, it is being broadcast not only on your YouTube channel, but there is also a post to your G+ page that others can see. We’ve gotten into the habit of going straight to our G+ page once the video recording starts and deleting that post, and then going to YouTube once our videos are complete and making them “private”. Again, just something to be aware of if you’re using G+ HOA.

Whew! Thank you so much for joining us again to hear about what went down in the Entrepreneurs On Fire studio (and beyond) during the month of November. We hope you not only took a few useful tips away from our journey, but that you also had as much fun reading this as we did writing it!

Until next month,

~ Kate & John

Click here for all of Entrepreneurs On Fire’s Income Reports

What information did you find most valuable in this post? What’s something we didn’t include here that you’d like to see in next month’s income report? Let us know in the comments section below!