Transparency Report #13 – April 2017

Onto year 2 of these transparency reports. When it’s time to write one of these I still get surprised at just how fast the time is going.

This report will follow the same structure as the last one.  There’s some interesting insight this month.

But first. I write these reports for me. So I can look back at progress and see what works and what doesn’t work.

What happened in April?

Phew. Another month flies by. April was dominated by vacations and business meetings as well as my stag do! so it’s been a crazy crazy month.

• I spent 9 days at the start of April on a family vacation
• Then I headed over to Las Vegas for a business meeting (and stayed the week – it’s a long way from the UK)
• Shortly after returning from LV, I headed out to Amsterdam for my stag do (long weekend)

It means I’ve not spent too long on the sites and the time I have spent has been driving the launch of Zero BS CRM v2.0. I’ve also managed to

• Find, and quickly find out a new VA wasn’t working well
• Find another VA, who is working well and helping me primarily with content marketing

So, finally I’ve expanded the team slightly (again through freelancing VAs) the budget for which I’m spending around $500 a month on.

Recap on my Focus Points for the sites in April

• Launch Zero BS CRM v2.0 – this was launched early April and went well
• Review and test the first part of the themepax framework (micropayments)
• (re)launch some more Epic Plugins onto this site
• Continue to review the effectiveness of the conversion funnels
• Finally start writing my eBook (aimed to help other small businesses /wannabe entrepreneurs grow) – I’ve started planning out the content for this

Financials for April

With the amount of time spent working on the massive update (version 2.0) of Zero BS CRM I managed to forget to keep some of my metrics up to date. With Zero BS CRM v2.0 this will all start to become a lot more automated 🙂 so falling back to the usual reports (from WooCommerce)

Epic Plugins (including Zero BS CRM)

This has been a BIG FOCUS in April with a massive drive for Zero BS CRM re-launch. It’s been way more than just a re-launch. Version 2.0 came with a TON of extra features and a lot of time was spent writing about this and getting featured on a number of different blogs 🙂  aside from being featured on a load of blogs I also put together the API documentation

• API documentation was written using apidocs and is quite nice
• As well as adding recurring invoices to the invoicing pro extension

But what’s the total in plugins revenue for April…  $2,380 (compared to $903 in Mar). A huge increase driven primarily by the Zero BS CRM re-launch.

Epic Themes

Epic Themes is still where I’m putting my focus. Although the (re)launch of Zero BS CRM has meant this has had to take a bit of a side seat again this month. The theme revenues are down again from March. Something which I’ll be aiming to turn around, especially with the upcoming launch of themepax.

The total Themes Revenue for April was $1,058 (down from $1,444 in Mar).

Epic Freelance

Freelance is back on the cards in April. This was on the back of my business meeting in Las Vegas. Even though I’m saying No to Freelance.

Overall

Onto the overall picture for April. This is been lifted back up into the $5k – $6k bracket which is great and a nice place for me to be. I obviously want to scale this up and as always, only time will tell how each months efforts are coming along.

Traffic Reports

I like putting these together and will continue to do charts for both Epic Plugins and Epic Themes in these transparency reports. Although I’m finding the usefulness of ahrefs to be less than it was (and they’re starting to be annoying by hardly giving you any insights unless you pay them each month).

Epic Plugins

First up, it’s similar web again

Similar Web have meddled with the stats now showing a <5000 measure. Hovering over the graph the results are 2.7k visits so a slight increase. But still nothing spectacular (also remembering the results are lagged a month on similar web).

This compares to 2.6k in last months report. I’d still like to grow this more and have been working on adding more content to the blog to help drive more traffic.

Next up is the ahrefs report. Something a bit strange is going on here. In prior reports Epic Plugins has been sitting at around 300k in the ahrefs. But running it this month it’s showing 2.4m..  and every the averages (1 month, 3 month, etc) are lower.

Compared to Epic Themes it’s around 50% higher traffic (2.6k vs 1.0k) so it makes sense to have it’s ahrefs about 50% higher too.

Either way, I’m tracking the UR, DR and referring domains etc.  DR has dropped 5 since the last report. I’m keeping monitoring these metrics but ahrefs have started only allowing very limited site explorers. They seem to be on a monetization push.

What’s your experience here? Have you seen your site drop on ahrefs? Do you use any other (better) free tools?

Since the last transparency report, UR was 31 and DR was 53. Backlinks was 3.85K. Referring domains 218 and Organic keywords 741.

Epic Themes

Onto Epic Themes. This one will be interesting as I’ve not spent as much time as I would have liked in April again. This is primarily due to the launch of Zero BS CRM v2.0. The launch went well as you can see from the increase in plugin revenues.

Compared to last month (1.10K) there’s still plenty that I can be doing here and I’m still committed to growing Epic Themes. There’s more blog content on the way. Hovering over the graph above gives around 1.0K visits that month.

The ahrefs report for Epic Themes continues to be interesting (for me) to include here

Since the last transparency report, UR was 15 and DR was 46. Backlinks was 466. Referring domains 20 and Organic keywords 23.

What’s the focus for May?

This high level to do list, rather than keep adding to it with things I don’t get around to doing, I’ve taken the same list as before and added the key points / kept track of my own actions.

• GET MARRIED. So I expect May to be a month where the sites are more on auto-pilot but I have some time before heading out to Cyprus.
• Review and test the first part of the themepax framework (micropayments). I’m hoping to get to this early this month (May).
• (re)launch some more Epic Plugins onto this site and focus on content marketing
• Continue to review the effectiveness of the conversion funnels on the Epic Themes blog
• Finally start writing my eBook (aimed to help other small businesses /wannabe entrepreneurs grow)