Show me your expenses...

14 years ago

no ones going to tell you that....geez
why would they?
even if they did, I wouldn't believe them...
you work for the IRS maybe?

what really would be awesome is...if people stopped worrying about how much others make & concentrate on their own business...

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Tyson Faulkner 14 years ago

I think it'd be nice if more marketers did this. Maybe not in detail, but at least on their sales pages instead of saying "Learn how I made $50,000 last month," they would be a little more truthful and explain that was the gross sales, then mention affiliates, ad expenses, etc.

I used to fall for that kinda stuff and I'm sure the newer marketers who haven't been around for awhile do too.
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- jkelley 14 years ago
  
  It seems to me that if an educator or product creator wanted to show genuine proof -- the kind of proof that might trigger somebody to buy -- they would consider letting me know what they are spending.
  
  If they felt inclined to provide something really helpful -- the type of help that would build a relationship with me -- they would consider letting me know what their expenses are going towards and how much is allocated towards different channels.
  
  Just saying...
  
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  sdentrepreneur 14 years ago
  
  I spend about $2K to $3K to Google Adwords and about $500 per month to banner ads. The rest of what I do for marketing is free with Social Media, Video/Article Marketing, Blogging and Forums on course :-)
  
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  Bill Farnham 14 years ago
  
  Not mine, but a good example...
  
  http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...-11-000-a.html
  
  ~Bill
  
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  jkelley 14 years ago
  
  Great example. Thanks Bill!
  
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humbledmarket

Banned 14 years ago

Originally Posted by jkelley

It seems like everybody is willing to show me how much money they are making in IM. But, as we all know, it takes money to make money...

For anybody who's willing, I'd love to see your expense reports. Tell me the type of project (review site, affiliate site, software, etc.) and tell me what expenses were involved in launching it. Then feel free to tell me your gross or net income. This would be AWESOME!

Haha I would but it's a little scary and I personally didn't really keep any track of it except through paypal transactions. It doesn't help when you know the money is going out but not for what reason.

I didn't really keep track of my finances at first so any money that went in ended up going out as well into ebooks and WSO and web design and content.

I guess we all need to keep better view of our expenses. Now I try to make sure to include a note in each payment so I can refer back and see where all the money went.

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seasoned

14 years ago

Yeah, it is EASY to make a lot of money. Maybe one of the highest income times paypal had was when they started! Never mind that they paid people like $20 to do that.

Steve

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tecHead

14 years ago

Although it doesn't sound like it; gross is sexier than net.

John Reese's Million Dollar Day would never been as sexy if it were his $200K Day; (no, I don't know that he only made $200K or not).

Most people don't wanna think about COGS; much less give full disclosure about it. lol

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DeadGuy 14 years ago

What would you truly learn if documented P&L statements were provided?
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- mr2monster 14 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by DeadGuy
  
  What would you truly learn if documented P&L statements were provided?
  
  Newbies would learn what to REALISTICALLY expect.
  
  Granted, it ultimately doesn't determine their bottom line, but it sure makes planning a hell of a lot easier if they realize that there margins are 1.25:1 or vice-versa.
  
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CDarklock

14 years ago

Originally Posted by jkelley

For anybody who's willing, I'd love to see your expense reports.

In general, my expenses come down to five major things.

1. My server, $125 a month.
2. AWeber, $19 a month.
3. E-Junkie, $5 a month.
4. Lance Tamashiro's MRR Club, $14 a month.
5. Dennis Becker's Earn 1K a Day, $40 a month.

That's a little over $200 a month, and between that and the free forums, I get everything I need for whatever project I start. My usual expense for a project looks like this:

- Domain name, $10
- WSO fee, $20

There are, on occasion, stock photo licenses totalling $10 or less. And I've been known to drop another $20 on WSO Pro, although I've been moving away from that.

But in general, my expense to drop a product on the market is between $30 and $60, and lately I've been pre-launching my products outside of the WSO forum - so only the first $10 to $20 comes out of my own pocket.

It's also a front-loaded process with fallbacks, so I've got alternate images if the licensing doesn't go through, and I can put the product in a subfolder of my site if I can't even find the $10 for a domain name. I could literally put a product on sale in a matter of minutes for nothing out of pocket; I've got several hundred MRR products from Lance, a couple hundred more from Dennis, and many of them come with existing pre-built minisites that could be pointed at my PayPal account in about thirty seconds.

My most successful product so far has generated roughly $2k in sales. My least successful has generated about $200. Overall, I've made about $4,000 from product sales in the past seven months... and that was completely from scratch. I dumped all my existing business (which wasn't really working for me anyway, although it was pulling about $5k a month), walked away, and started over - selling products instead of services.

If you're doing the math, it's not all that hard to figure out that I'm making a little over $2 an hour ($4,000 - $1,400 in expenses = $2,600 / 40 hours a week = $65 / four weeks in a month = $16.25 / 7 months = $2.32).

Most of the time, the people who respond to these threads are kicking arse and taking names, making a solid living wage and puffing themselves up about how well they're doing. I've got my expenses well low, and my costs well slashed, and I'm not even making half the Federal minimum wage.

This is normal.

I'm not going to wait until I'm doing well to say "hey, once upon a time I was there." I'm here now. This is happening now. There's no romantic rags-to-riches success story here, I'm just sitting down here in the gutter struggling. You might need to do a little of this yourself.

This is the part where you decide whether it's really worth it. Whether you really want it. And in general, none of your friends or family will take your side during this.

And now back to your scheduled success stories.

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mr2monster

14 years ago

Originally Posted by CDarklock

In general, my expenses come down to five major things.

1. My server, $125 a month.
2. AWeber, $19 a month.
3. E-Junkie, $5 a month.
4. Lance Tamashiro's MRR Club, $14 a month.
5. Dennis Becker's Earn 1K a Day, $40 a month.

That's a little over $200 a month, and between that and the free forums, I get everything I need for whatever project I start. My usual expense for a project looks like this:

- Domain name, $10
- WSO fee, $20

There are, on occasion, stock photo licenses totalling $10 or less. And I've been known to drop another $20 on WSO Pro, although I've been moving away from that.

But in general, my expense to drop a product on the market is between $30 and $60, and lately I've been pre-launching my products outside of the WSO forum - so only the first $10 to $20 comes out of my own pocket.

It's also a front-loaded process with fallbacks, so I've got alternate images if the licensing doesn't go through, and I can put the product in a subfolder of my site if I can't even find the $10 for a domain name. I could literally put a product on sale in a matter of minutes for nothing out of pocket; I've got several hundred MRR products from Lance, a couple hundred more from Dennis, and many of them come with existing pre-built minisites that could be pointed at my PayPal account in about thirty seconds.

My most successful product so far has generated roughly $2k in sales. My least successful has generated about $200. Overall, I've made about $4,000 from product sales in the past seven months... and that was completely from scratch. I dumped all my existing business (which wasn't really working for me anyway, although it was pulling about $5k a month), walked away, and started over - selling products instead of services.

If you're doing the math, it's not all that hard to figure out that I'm making a little over $2 an hour ($4,000 - $1,400 in expenses = $2,600 / 40 hours a week = $65 / four weeks in a month = $16.25 / 7 months = $2.32).

Most of the time, the people who respond to these threads are kicking arse and taking names, making a solid living wage and puffing themselves up about how well they're doing. I've got my expenses well low, and my costs well slashed, and I'm not even making half the Federal minimum wage.

This is normal.

I'm not going to wait until I'm doing well to say "hey, once upon a time I was there." I'm here now. This is happening now. There's no romantic rags-to-riches success story here, I'm just sitting down here in the gutter struggling. You might need to do a little of this yourself.

This is the part where you decide whether it's really worth it. Whether you really want it. And in general, none of your friends or family will take your side during this.

And now back to your scheduled success stories.

From my experience, this is a rather accurate statement of how a new person experiences making money online. Furthermore, this is how people that have been doing it for YEARS might still be experiencing their online business.

That's pretty much how my experience was for my first 5 YEARS.

We've all got to pay our tolls. The prize for fighting through it is the success we get in the end. Those that give up and don't want to walk a mile through the **** in the trenches don't deserve the success.

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Lloyd Buchinski

14 years ago

Originally Posted by CDarklock

If you're doing the math, it's not all that hard to figure out that I'm making a little over $2 an hour ($4,000 - $1,400 in expenses = $2,600 / 40 hours a week = $65 / four weeks in a month = $16.25 / 7 months = $2.32).

Most of the time, the people who respond to these threads are kicking arse and taking names, making a solid living wage and puffing themselves up about how well they're doing. I've got my expenses well low, and my costs well slashed, and I'm not even making half the Federal minimum wage.

This is normal.

Thank you for the math. I've mentioned a few times around here that my business and job off line pay a lot more per hour than I get for my time online.

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seasoned

14 years ago

DEADGUY....

$10,000,000-2,000(EXPENSES)=9,998,000 profit! good show!
$100,000,000-$200,000,000(expenses)=$100,000,000 loss! So when are you going bankrupt?

It is like my story about the book I once wrote. It COULD have made me FAMOUS and RICH! But good avertising was EXPENSIVE! I went on the cheap. I didn't make anything, but I didn't spend much either. HECK, there was a time when I could have used the techniques to help people on the internet with fulfillment. I bet I could have gotten 70%+ saturation! ALAS, too time consuming, and having others do it probably would have cost.

Steve

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tecHead

14 years ago

Originally Posted by seasoned

DEADGUY....

$10,000,000-2,000(EXPENSES)=9,998,000 profit! good show!
$100,000,000-$200,000,000(expenses)=$100,000,000 loss! So when are you going bankrupt?

It is like my story about the book I once wrote. It COULD have made me FAMOUS and RICH! But good avertising was EXPENSIVE! I went on the cheap. I didn't make anything, but I didn't spend much either. HECK, there was a time when I could have used the techniques to help people on the internet with fulfillment. I bet I could have gotten 70%+ saturation! ALAS, too time consuming, and having others do it probably would have cost.

Steve

LOL... I so love Steve!

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DeadGuy

14 years ago

Originally Posted by seasoned

DEADGUY....

$10,000,000-2,000(EXPENSES)=9,998,000 profit! good show!
$100,000,000-$200,000,000(expenses)=$100,000,000 loss! So when are you going bankrupt?

It is like my story about the book I once wrote. It COULD have made me FAMOUS and RICH! But good avertising was EXPENSIVE! I went on the cheap. I didn't make anything, but I didn't spend much either. HECK, there was a time when I could have used the techniques to help people on the internet with fulfillment. I bet I could have gotten 70%+ saturation! ALAS, too time consuming, and having others do it probably would have cost.

Steve

I understand the value of a P&L but my point was this. If someone sent you their P&L and it showed $100,000 revenue - $90,000 expenses generated by their product... would the OP walk away from it? Or, if the P&L showed $1,000,000 revenue and $10,000 expenses would you believe it? Just curious. Nothing more.. nothing less.

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CDarklock 14 years ago

Originally Posted by DeadGuy

If someone sent you their P&L and it showed $100,000 revenue - $90,000 expenses generated by their product... would the OP walk away from it?

I think it's more important to know where the revenue and expenses are.

As a project manager, expenses are the first thing I look at when a project is floundering (usually the case, when I come onto an existing project). I can almost always find a bunch of stuff we don't need or could do cheaper. The next place I look is where our profit comes from, and I can often identify new streams of revenue.

Case in point: I looked at one project budget a couple years ago to find $150k a month in office space leased overseas, for people that were cut from the project over a year ago - over $2 million down the tubes, and almost $7 million more ready to follow it. We had a five year lease, and we couldn't break it, but we managed to sublet to a startup in the same area for just over $200k a month... turning a $2 million loss into a $600k profit.

And for this, they gave me a $5,000 bonus. I hated being a PM. :rolleyes:
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- Justin Jordan 14 years ago
  
  Well, I spend about 40 bucks a month bumping my Warrior for Hire thread. In May that brought in just over $1600 in work. I made a fairly trivial amount of recurring income from some experiments in the past that are still live, which is nice.
  
  Plus the 40 or so I spent on my internet connection, I guess.
  
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seasoned

14 years ago

Originally Posted by DeadGuy

I understand the value of a P&L but my point was this. If someone sent you their P&L and it showed $100,000 revenue - $90,000 expenses generated by their product... would the OP walk away from it? Or, if the P&L showed $1,000,000 revenue and $10,000 expenses would you believe it? Just curious. Nothing more.. nothing less.

WHO KNOWS?I once bit on an ad from an apparently famous person. I found she was basically PAYING for hits. Paying a LOT! Maybe even $100+! It kind of devalued the book. Granted it would have made it clear what she was doing, but it would have been nice to know. And yeah, people lie. 8-( One of these days I will listen to house and the ferengi rules of aquisition. I have them distilled somewhere around here.

Steve

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Zabrina

14 years ago

I've spent about 16% of my income so far in 2010. Not as good as I'd hoped, but I'm hoping for that number to drop drastically by the end of the summer.

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mr2monster

14 years ago

Also, just as a side note, you should be PLANNING to invest a good percentage of your revenue back into your business no matter how much you make.

You need to create a business plan (which includes a marketing plan) and account for expansion unless you want to be plugging away writing articles for 15 hours a day. This means that you should PLAN to spend some % of income on marketing/advertising.

My plan is to spend 40% of revenue on advertising and marketing. Do I always hit that? no... but I try to, because the more I spend, the more I generally make.

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Brad Gosse

14 years ago

Our monthly budget is 5-6 figures.

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LB

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Brad Gosse

Our monthly budget is 5-6 figures.

So...somewhere between $10,000 and $999,999?

Sorry, just made me chuckle the way you worded that.

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CDarklock 14 years ago

Originally Posted by LB

So...somewhere between $10,000 and $999,999?

No, 5-6. He has a -1 figure budget. Every month, he doesn't make any profit, but he loses less than $10.
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- Bill Farnham 14 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by CDarklock
  
  No, 5-6. He has a -1 figure budget. Every month, he doesn't make any profit, but he loses less than $10.
  
  Thanks, I thought he meant the figures in his avatar...:rolleyes:
  
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  CDarklock 14 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Bill Farnham
  
  Thanks, I thought he meant the figures in his avatar...:rolleyes:
  
  Dude, if he's only getting five or six of those a month, he's not trying.
  
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Brad Gosse

14 years ago

Originally Posted by LB

So...somewhere between $10,000 and $999,999?

Sorry, just made me chuckle the way you worded that.

My uncle once played a trick on me. He told me he could drink between 2 and 300 glasses of water in 60 seconds.

Of course you think he says 200-300 but it's 2-300 so he drinks 2 glasses and wins the bet.

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Shaunman

14 years ago

I think it'd be nice if more marketers did this. Maybe not in detail, but at least on their sales pages instead of saying "Learn how I made $50,000 last month," they would be a little more truthful and explain that was the gross sales, then mention affiliates, ad expenses, etc.

I guess saying I made $50,000 last month sounds better then I made $50,000 last month but it cost me $72,000 because I don't know how to use adwords correctly.

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Bill Farnham

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Brad Gosse

My uncle once played a trick on me. He told me he could drink between 2 and 300 glasses of water in 60 seconds.

Of course you think he says 200-300 but it's 2-300 so he drinks 2 glasses and wins the bet.

I had an uncle like that myself. He came for a visit one time and by the end of the second day I noticed all my cigars except for one were gone.

So I asked him, "Hey, what happened to all my cigars?"

He said, "Cigars?...I didn't touch a one!"

I said, "Well, there's only one left!"

He said, "Yea, I know. That's the one I didn't touch."

~Bill

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jkelley 14 years ago

Originally Posted by Brad Gosse

Our monthly budget is 5-6 figures.

Thanks for the great detail.

Anybody else care to share P&L?
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ErnieB

14 years ago

Expenses are simply $25 per month for reseller hosting ( hostgator ) and $20 Aweber autoresponder. If you break down a domain cost of $10 each that is .83 cents per month. Also have expense of $30/mo. for content for my membership site.

So my expenses for the 2 sites that are currently active are about $77 a month.

One site is a membership site earning me about $180 month and the other is a content site in same niche earning me about $100 per month.

Simple math deduces that $280 - $77 = $203 profit each month.

Since im already paying for hosting and aweber, anything else i want to do will just cost me the domain fee.

Nothing to quit my day job over, but its more of a hobby for me right now.

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Show me your expenses...

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