Transparency Report #14 – May 2017

As always this report will follow the same structure as the last one.  A reminder though, I write these for me, so I can keep track of where things are up to and what I’ve been working on and plan to work on.

If you benefit from reading these too then great. Glad to have you along for the ride.

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 May?

 

Wow. May. Well the biggest thing I did in May was get married.  🙂 I headed out to Cyprus on the 10th May and didn’t touch any work until the 18th May when I got back.

May was a mixture of continuing to work on Zero BS CRM, and working on my first eBook. This (again) meant that work on Epic Plugins and Epic Themes took a side seat (again). However, I did manage to push out a couple of theme updates to the WPeddit Theme and the Plugin Hunt Theme right at the end of the month.

Recap on my Focus Points for the sites in May

• GET MARRIED.  I actually got married. WooHoo.
• Review and test the first part of the themepax framework (micropayments). – I did test this. ThemePax is a big focus in June.
• (re)launch some more Epic Plugins onto this site and focus on content marketing – this didn’t happen. It’s my next area of focus.
• Continue to review the effectiveness of the conversion funnels on the Epic Themes blog – I’ve moved these to monthly reviews
• Finally start writing my eBook – I spent almost all of my time working on this. It’s now available to purchase here

Financials for May

The usual financials for May I’ve produced by taking the grabs from each of the WooCommerce

Epic Plugins (including Zero BS CRM)

 

Plugins again, a lot of time has been spent working on the Zero BS CRM product. I’m calling this a product rather than a plugin now. It’s now got a really useful Core as well as 9 (and counting) extensions. Each extension in itself is a premium WordPress Plugin and add really useful features to the plugin.

Plugin revenue for May is down though, driven by a combination of slightly lower Zero BS CRM revenue but significantly lower CodeCanyon revenue (I say this a lot, but I went non-exclusive last month) which has impacted the income.

The total Plugin Revenue for May was $1,685 (down from $2,380 in April).

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 yet again this month. The theme revenues are slightly up from April. Something which I’ll be aiming to improve, especially with the upcoming launch of themepax.

The total Themes Revenue for May was $1,089 (up from $1,058 in Apr).

Epic Freelance

I did some Freelance again in May. This was related to helping build out some custom plugins for my customers. Something I’m happy to do.

Overall

Onto the overall picture for April. Slightly lower again but given I was away for a chunk of the month and didn’t pick up many support tickets (sorry everyone)

Growth

Growth is now here. If you’ve not subscribed to the list you may not be aware of this. I’ve been writing an eBook for a couple of years but have never got around to publishing it and releasing it for you all to read. You can read all about Growth here.

Traffic Reports

I like putting these together and will continue to do charts for both Epic Plugins and Epic Themes in these transparency reports.

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 2.3k visits so a slight decrease again.

This compares to 2.7k 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. In last months the rank had dropped from around 400k to 2.4m.

Since the last transparency report, UR was 31 and DR was 48. Backlinks was 4.19K. Referring domains 238 and Organic keywords 829.

Even with everything increasing the Ahrefs Rank has remained lower than previously. You can see the increase in referring domains so it’s surprising to see the drop in the rank. It goes to show that this should only be part of the metrics that you look at when growing a website.

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 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.

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 1.34K. Referring domains 27 and Organic keywords 64 with the rank 4,066,064.

What’s the focus for June?

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. I’ve also removed

• Develop the ThemePax Framework ready for release. Initial tests are positive.
• (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
• Focus on developing more amazing extensions for Zero BS CRM (2 new extensions were added in May)