Are you curious about a 3-month delay? I explained it in my first income report.


income report may 2020May 2020 was the most productive month since January. I put myself together a bit with the help of my friends and mastermind. My church community reactivated and I had the pillar of consistency back in my life. And alleviation of the lockdown didn’t hurt one bit too.

Poland

I took care of my Polish blog. Finally, finally!, I created a sidebar to it and started lining up the content. First, I shamelessly filled the holes in the past schedule. Then, I formatted the posts drafts copied by my sister from Quora, made sure they look OK, and scheduled them for the future. At the end of May, I had posts scheduled till the beginning of July.

I secured a podcast interview on another big Polish podcast. This encouraged me and inspired me to reach out to a few more podcast hosts. To no avail, but at least I took action.

Tiny Habits

After the podcast interview, I got more than a dozen subscribers to my Polish email list. I pondered what to do with them and decided that getting them through the Tiny Habits course would be the best thing I could do to facilitate a transformative experience for them.

I reached out to those new subscribers and asked them for permission. I got more than a dozen yesses. So, I started to prepare for that. My son helped me to translate the Tiny Habits materials from English to Polish. His translation was so funny! It reminded the Google Translate output. I dedicated about a couple of hours to make this material sound like proper Polish.

Then, I translated the Tiny Habits email sequence and started organizing the sequence in my new email management system.

Bird Send

I also finally took action on migrating my email list from Aweber to BirdSend. Even though Bird Send did the migration for me, it took me several hours of work because I needed to make an inventory of my all sign-up forms and pages. During the last 7 years, I created the whole maze of them and never had a need to put them all in one sheet.

In the middle of May, I had all my subscribers in the Bird Send system, but I still used Aweber to notify my list about the book giveaway I participated in. I only managed to start using the system at the end of the month. And it was not without adventures…

Email Blooper

At the end of May, I wanted to send that notification about the Tiny Habits course to my new Polish subscribers. I struggled with the Bird Send interface which was new to me. I had to confirm my sender email address in the middle of the process, since it was the first email sent from that address.

And I didn’t notice that the filtering I did at the beginning of the process was gone. I sent an email in Polish to everyone:
-my Polish subscribers,
-my English subscribers,
-my past prospects for Resurrecting Books service,
-my current Resurrecting Books customers…

Everyone!

Gosh!!

I kind of managed to send another broadcast with an English explanation of my mistake. About half of my list got it before my email account was locked. Too many people marked my Polish message as spam. *facepalm*

However, there is always a grain of good in bad. I got a few dozen emails back from my subscribers, mostly asking WTF. Some of them even painstakingly translated my message and asked to be put into the Tiny Habits training 😀 Those, I referred to the original BJ Fogg’s course.

I also got several inquiries from my bilingual subscribers who were interested in Polish training. So, in the end, I got more interactions and more participants of the Polish Tiny Habits course.

A New Hire

I got two great candidates for the onboarding specialist position for Resurrecting books. In the first week of May, I did interviews with them and picked one person.

Nicole was a romance writer who advertised her own books, so she knew ins and outs of the AMS system. I remember bouncing my ideas off my mastermind buddies when I had been creating the onboarding process. They were all so confused, ranging from “Why do you even need such a person?” to “I look at this and have very little idea what this is all about.”

But when Nicole went through all the materials she said that everything was clear for her. No questions. No confusion.

So, in the second half of May, I was busy sharing training materials and documentation with my new team member. We had the first call with a prospect, where she was an observer. Before the end of the month, I was able to delegate a few tasks to Nicole. I liberated another chunk of my time!

The idea was to dedicate this free time to get new customers.

Resurrecting Books

May was a good month for my business. We got a few new customers, including one “unicorn”- a book that practically sold itself with almost no tweaking on our part. Since day one the number of impressions was incredible and the conversion rates were simply shocking.

The rest of the new customers were far from being such a hit.

I also got a few 1-time customers who wanted advertising diagnosis of their books. I advised them how to optimize their book pages, had run my ads for 30 days for them, and then analyzed their results giving them actionable conclusions.

At the beginning of the month, I created the first such a report and I immediately recognized I need to raise the price for that service. It took me almost two hours to crunch the numbers and put them in writing.

We also did a few 1-time, flat fee deals which came down to creating the ads. All those non-permanent deals provided about 15% of revenue in May.

Day Job & Life

I work remotely for the whole month. I took a few Wednesdays off just to minimize the distraction on that front. Not much was happening on my projects. I just resented the distraction of turning on the laptop in the morning and following emails and messages for a few hours.

The lockdown was loosened some in May. Walking and biking stopped to be an issue. And the weather was really nice most of the time. I managed to shed off three pounds.

Book Sales

Book sales rebounded in May, especially paperback sales. Amazon started shipping them again. Yet, all of my books were shipped with a lead time, so people were less likely to buy them.

I sold 970 copies in May 2020 on Amazon. With my audiobooks and other stores, I crossed the magic number of 1,000 copies. That was nice progress comparing to April’s 875 copies and 845 copies in March.

The May 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,474.77 ($2,695.32)
Coach.me fees: $125.26
Audiobooks royalties: $39.58
D2D royalties: $15.27
PWIW personal coaching: $335.45
AMS service remuneration: $3,965.66

Total: $7,176.54

Costs:
$49, Aweber fee
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,577.72 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$573.97, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$99.26, royalties split with co-author
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,975.86

Net Result: $4,200.68


Previous Income Report: April 2020

Eighty Sixth Income Report – May 2020 ($4,200.68)

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