December 2013 Income At-A-Glance

Gross Income for December: $115,663.55

Total Expenses for December: $14,156.70

Total Net Profit for December: $101,506.85

Difference b/t Dec. & Nov: + $14,881.08

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.

**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.

In creating these monthly income reports, we’ve realized a few things:

Multiple income streams are critical, as the entrepreneurial landscape is very unpredictable

John started EntrepreneurOnFire much in the same way any other entrepreneur starts out: with nothing. No online presence and no podcasting experience. As he picked up valuable tips and tactics along the way from others, he started to see income first from affiliates, and he quickly realized that affiliate income could be hundreds, or could be nothing any given month.

Creating multiple income streams in order to ensure you’re not relying on one single one is critical for an entrepreneur. Aside from creating more financial security, we also believe that our multiple income streams are the reason why we’ve been able to generate such consistently high income over the past four months.

Serving your audience with valuable, consistent, actionable, and FREE content is extremely valuable

Aside from including affiliate links on his Resources page and helping promote a couple of great products, courses and services others’ had released, John didn’t sell anything to his audience until the release of his first book, Podcast Launch, which was five months after he had launched.

Because John was consistent, his audience started to trust him; because he published a daily show, his audience started to get to know him; because he was bringing guests on the show like Tim Ferris, Michael Hyatt, Pat Flynn, Guy Kawasaki and other big-time entrepreneurs, his audience started to look at him as an authority figure, giving him credibility in his niche of interviewing inspiring and successful entrepreneurs 7-days a week.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, just a little over one week ago, we published a bonus income report that covered our first 365 days. We go over in detail the expenses and the lack of income John had throughout the first year as he built and grew EntrepreneurOnFire – from the ground up. Serving his audience with valuable, consistent, actionable, and FREE content is what helped him grow such a massive following, and it’s why EntrepreneurOnFire has seen the success we have today.

I also really want to hammer home that you don’t have to have a massive audience, or even an online presence to become a successful entrepreneur. You just have to be very specific about who your avatar is, what their pain points are, and how you’re going to solve them in a way no one else can.

Sounds simple, right? Well, John and I realize that this – starting a business from square one with essentially nothing – is a pain point our own audience is experiencing. That’s why in December, we started The Fire Path Series, which I’m excited to get into a little bit later in this report. So 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 dive into we had going on at the EOFire Headquarters during the month of December!

Live Webinars for Podcasters’ Paradise

John and I have heard from a lot of others in the industry that live Webinars is where it’s at in terms of converting sales, but we hadn’t really tried selling to our audience on Webinars before. Up until recently, we only did Webinars for our Elite Mastermind Tribe, Fire Nation Elite, as a way to provide more value to the community: a new private Webinar with a new entrepreneur every month.

But after we launched Podcasters’ Paradise we realized there were a lot of potential buyers out there who just didn’t know enough about the community to take the leap and purchase their Lifetime Membership. This encouraged us to start scheduling live Webinars where John would talk about his own podcasting journey to give people an idea of what podcasting is all about, and the possibilities that are out there, along with a sneak peek at Paradise itself.

Let’s look at the stats, and then I’ll tell you exactly what we did to bump up our numbers:

Wednesday, November 13 @5pm PST

Signups: 272 Approx.

# of Attendees: 33

Purchased lifetime membership: 9

Conversion: over 27%

Wednesday, November 20 @ 5pm PST

Signups: 171 Approx.

# of Attendees: 27

Purchased lifetime membership: 6

Conversion: 22%

Wednesday, December 4 @ 3pm PST

Signups: 183 Approx.

# of Attendees: 32

Purchased lifetime membership: 6

Conversion: 19%

Tuesday, December 10 @6pm PST

Joint Webinar with Jeff Moore’s Thursday Night Boardroom  Crew

Approx. # of Attendees: 17

Purchased lifetime membership: 6

Conversion: 35%

Tuesday, December 17 @ 12pm PST

Signups: 191

Approx. # of Attendees: 37

Purchased lifetime membership: 13

Conversion: 35%

Saturday, December 28 @ 12pm PST

Signups: 364

Approx. # of Attendees: 68

Purchased lifetime membership: 23

Conversion: 34%

Thursday, January 2 @ 12pm PST

Signups: 280

Approx. # of Attendees: 71

Purchased lifetime membership: 17

Conversion: 24%

As you can see, our signups and our number of attendees have drastically grown just in the past couple of Webinars.

How? Facebook advertising.

We’ve been spending about $100/day on Facebook advertising, driving a very targeted audience to our Webinar signup page to register for the live Webinar. John has also tweaked the Webinar quite significantly since his first couple of go arounds.

Why?

We received some great feedback from a couple of early attendees, who thought we were getting to the sale way too quickly. Also, because I’m manning the chat room on every one of our Webinars and engaging with attendees, I get to hear their praises and complaints alike. Some stuff I was hearing:

• “When do we get to look inside Paradise?”

• “How long is this Webinar going to last?”

• “Why does John always wear a hat?”

Being able to improve whatever it is you’re working on is a must for any entrepreneur, and as soon as we hear repetitive feedback, we take action. As a result, within the past couple of weeks John has tweaked the presentation so that we dive behind the scenes of Podcasters’ Paradise earlier, and the overall Webinar is about 30 minutes shorter. But he still wears his hat :)

Podcasters’ Paradise growth

As we sit today, there are over 375 members in Podcasters’ Paradise, and with the success of our live Webinars, we expect that number to continue to grow at a steady pace.

John and I both continue to listen to the community and make changes on the fly, and to date, we’ve created over 100 video tutorials to help our community Create, Grow and Monetize their podcast.

Here are a few other things we tweaked in December as a direct result of hearing from Paradisers that this is what they wanted:

• Live Q&A

During one of our monthly, private Webinars in Paradise a couple of our members asked us if we planned on ever doing monthly live Q&A sessions, where Paradisers could come together and ask John questions about podcasting or the community in general. They asked, we scheduled!

We had our first live Q&A in December, and will continue to do monthly live Q&A’s moving forward. The first Q&A lasted 90 minutes, and with dozens of questions still in the pipe, we ended the Webinar, posted it in the community for replays, and then John went on to record an audio-only podcast specifically for Paradisers to answer the rest of the questions we didn’t get to.

• Paradise Map

I love this idea; I just wasn’t sure where to turn for the resource. I’ve heard awesome things about the map that Pat Flynn created, but I needed something that could accommodate hundreds of names and locations without a ton of man hours. Luckily, while chatting with a fellow mastermind member, I was introduced to BatchGeo. Oh man, do I LOVE this site. If you’re looking for a location map that’s super easy to create in a little amount of time, check it out!

• Podcasters Page

One of our members had the awesome idea to start promoting “Pay it Forward Friday”, where Paradisers would come together to help each other out with honest ratings & reviews in iTunes. I thought this was a great idea, but wasn’t sure how we were going to link up everyone’s podcast in iTunes.

Then, I thought about our Profiles page that we have on our Fire Nation Elite site, where each member has a picture and a link to their individual bio. Why not create a similar page, only the image will be the podcast and the link will be to iTunes? Bam! We created a page, added a sign up for Podcasters to submit their podcast name, iTunes link and category, and it’s working out GREAT!

• Create Page

After realizing that it was becoming quite difficult for people to navigate the Create page (we have over 50 videos just in that section alone), John overhauled the entire thing, organizing it into smaller sections to make it easier for members to follow in a step-by-step manner. This was no small feat because our two membership sites, Fire Nation Elite and Podcasters’ Paradise, are both run in Customerhub and John and I are the only two that manage those sites. This means we do not have a developer or anyone else helping us with the content – we individually link every video, and create every page ourselves.

The time has come

After reviewing everything we’ve done since launching Podcasters’ Paradise, John and I are really seeing the incredible value we continue providing to our members every single day. We knew from the beginning that our Lifetime Membership price would not be static, and we’ve been very transparent about that fact.

Paradise is established, with over 375 members, more than 100 video tutorials, an extremely engaged Forum and monthly live Webinars AND live Q&A’s. The time has come to raise our lifetime membership price, and just yesterday we upped the price to $997.

In the past we’ve been climbing our membership price $100 at a time. Because this is the first time that we’ve increased the amount by more than $100 (in fact, we went from $597 to $997 – a difference of $400), we’re offering a special $300 discount until this Sunday, January 5, at midnight EST.

If you’re ready to purchase your lifetime membership to Podcasters’ Paradise at a $300 discount, click here and enter promo code ‘2014‘. This offer will expire at midnight on Sunday, January 5th.

If you’d like to learn more about Podcasters’ Paradise and sign up for our next live Webinar, we’d love to have you join us! Just click here to sign up for the next live Webinar.

The Fire Path

Earlier in this post I mentioned a new project we’ve been working on called The Fire Path Series. John and I started this series after much thought about how starting a business from square one with essentially nothing is a huge pain point for a large majority of our audience.

Where do you even start, and what steps are you supposed to take when you’re just thinking about creating your own business?

The Fire Path Series is a weekly email packed with actionable advice and in-depth information for those who have the motivation and drive that it takes to turn their passion into a viable business, but are stuck at square one.

Navigating the entrepreneurial world is tough – John and I know this from firsthand experience. That’s why we’ve came up with this exclusive email series to help. The Fire Path: Your Passion, Our Guidance, United!

If you’re interested in joining The Fire Path Series to learn more about defining your avatar, discovering your niche, building relationships and networking with others in your industry, and much, much more, just click here to join!

A review

Last month we talked about some of the projects we were diving into that had been on the back burner for some time due to the launch of Fire Nation Elite (July, 2013) and Podcasters’ Paradise (October, 2013). Those included our Facebook strategy, our email newsletter content and our guest posting.

While our Facebook strategy is still very much in progress, John has taken a considerable amount of time in December learning all about Facebook ads and the Power Editor. This includes exactly how to set the ads up, the amount of money we need to spend for optimal ROI, and the best ways to run them (i.e. how to target the right groups of people and how long to run them). We’re still deep in the learning process, but will be happy to share our knowledge with you once we’re confident that we know what we’re doing. :)

Our email newsletter content has improved drastically. What before was more like a roundup post of others’ content going out to our list has become more of an actionable advice type of newsletter. We’ve been seeing an increased number of signups daily, our list is now over 8,000 subscribers and growing by close to 100 people daily. I’ve been tracking our newsletter progress on the blog, and you can check out my most recent post right here.

Last month we announced that our guest posting had seriously stepped up its game, with over 17 full-length posts to some of the top blogs in the industry (since April 2013). While we value our guest posting opportunity very, very much, we are not currently seeking any out due to our resources.

Ready for the bare bones?

December 2013 Breakdown

Income

Fire Nation Elite Mastermind: $13,500

Sponsorship Income: $39,400

Podcast Launch (eBook on Amazon): $614

Podcast Launch (audio): $114

Podcasters’ Paradise: $52,763

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: $1,650 Step-by-step guide and 23 WordPress tutorials included! Disclaimer: This is my affiliate link and I will receive a commission if you sign up through my link
• Amazon: $310.50
• WPCurve: $130
• NMX: $538
• LeadPages: $199.45
• Music Radio Creative: $44.60
• Studio 1 Design: $400

Total Gross Income in December: $115,663.55

Expenses

• Taxes & Licenses (for our LLC): $71.46
• Website Fees (includes new domains, ongoing web support): $1,371
• Virtual Assistant Fees (includes outsourced projects): $1,600
• Affiliate Commissions: $1,566
• Donations: $254
• Education: $446
• Entertainment: $125.46
• Advertising: $2,611
• Design & Branding: $299
• LibSyn: $100
• Promotional: $187.50
• Travel: $1,617
• Other Business Expenses: $1,135.05
• Authorize.net*: $91.10
• 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 December: $14,156.70

Total Net Profit for December 2013: $101,506.85

Things We Learned In December

We need help

I hate to admit this, but I’ve had at the top of my to-do list for the entire month of December “hire another VA”, and I still have no VA.

With the rapid growth of EntrepreneurOnFire, and everything we have going on, I’ve realized that there are SO MANY daily tasks I manage that I should not be spending my time on, many of which are administrative tasks.

I want to tell you about my experience earlier this month with posting a job, because I think it might help you if you’re interested in hiring a VA anytime soon:

I posted a listing on Odesk a few weeks ago, but I made two major mistakes:

• I was looking for someone much too specialized, and
• I didn’t clearly state what we were willing to pay.

As a result, I got very few response (due to the specialization I was looking for, which included Infusionsoft, Customerhub and Simple:Press experience), and the responses I did get were oftentimes asking for upwards of $45/hour.

So, I do plan on posting for a VA very soon; however, this time I will be sure to broaden my search for more of a customer service role and specify exactly how much we’re willing to pay!

Live Webinars convert!

As stated before, we’ve been gaining momentum with our Live Webinars for Podcasters’ Paradise. But I wanted to bring it up here in the “What we learned” section because I think this could be a great for anyone offering a product or service: instead of just creating a sales page and then emailing your list and advertising on social media, why not hold a live Webinar so you can actually engage with your potential buyers and literally show them what they’ll get?

Another important note that I didn’t specifically get into before: I mentioned that John had tweaked the Webinar presentation based on feedback from our viewers; however, what I didn’t mention is that our Webinars are not all about Podcasters’ Paradise. John spends a considerable amount of time (about 60%) on providing viewers with valuable, actionable content. So, even if someone decides they don’t want to join Podcasters’ Paradise, our goal is that everyone walks away from the Webinars with some really great content around podcasting.

Again, this goes back to providing your audience with valuable, FREE content!

Whew! Thank you so much for joining us again to hear about what went down in the EntrepreneurOnFire studio (and beyond) during the month of December. 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 EntrepreneurOnFire’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!