Hello everybody and welcome to my first Income and Activity report within the Passive Income Experiment Blog. I plan to add this kind of report at the beginning of each month to let you know, what I have been doing with my online experiments.

Each report will be divided into three main parts:

1. What I was doing
2. What I intend to do in the next month
3. Financial report showing revenue and costs from the previous month

So, what has been done in the first month of existence  (May, 2015)?

Hosting. The first milestone was definitely the selection of hosting provider. It took me quite a lot of time to do this because I wanted to make a perfect decision. Of course, later on I realized I put too much effort into this task, because I do not have enough experience to make such a decision at this point. It would be time better spent if I did not go into details and guts of many reviews and recommendations. Nevertheless, I think that my decision was entirely appropriate and rational and that it meets all current needs and expectations. I selected shared hosting plan at Arvixe (you can read more about this topic in my post about the tools I use.

Domain name. The next logical step was to select a domain name for the website. Arvixe offers one free domain name for life (as long as you pay your hosting plan). Because my plan is to describe all my passive income experiments in detail here on this blog, I selected this website to be the one that is free of charge. And because I currently do not have any other experiments going on. So, what else to choose from, right?

The whole process went very smoothly and I believe any beginner can make this step. As I mentioned a few times in my other posts, this is my first hosting, my first domain, my first everything. And I did it with ease.

WordPress. This site is build with WordPress. Another new piece of software I meet for the first time. I must confess, it took me around 10 hours to get more familiar with it. More familiar in the sense that I am able to customize the layout and the structure of the pages very similar to the ideas in my head. But I love experimenting and making changes to the site is a complete delight. And when you do something with joy, time flies 🙂

Content. I am aware that unique content is king. Any kind of online experiment practically does not exist without unique and quality content. Without it you are lost somewhere in the 1000th page of the Google search engine where no one will find you for the next 100 years. Which is similar or even worse then non existence.

I am slowly writing posts to this blog which can be found scattered within this site. I wrote seven articles (this one is eighth), which I think is a solid achievement for the first month. Do you agree?

Analytics. I attended a seminar about online bussines few days ago and one of the slides particularly remained in my memory: Everything begins and ends with analytics. I am aware of that so I installed Google Analytics on this blog. I suggest you read the post about installing Google Analytics on WordPress as it is no rocket science. And without knowing what your readers like and dislike, you are somehow wondering in the dark. It is a must have tools for every webmaster and it is completely free of charge. Feel free to use any other similar tool as long as you have something that tracks and analyses your website traffic.

Plugins. One of the best parts of WordPress CMS is its open source format. That means it is available to programers worldwide who creates wonderful stuff for beginner webmasters like me and you. I am still figuring out which plugins are “a must have”. So far I use WordPress SEO for search engine optimization purposes, Fast Secure Contact Form which helped me build Contact me page, Insert Headers and Footers for analytics needs (I put google analytics code in it) and Ultimate Social Media and Share Icons for the social part of this blog (buttons for Facebook and Twitter).

Getting Social. One of the best ways to increase your online presence and attract visitors to your site is to include different social media. I created a facebook page and Twitter account. Will see in a few months time if my foresight is correct.

Plans for June 2015…

Overall I am quite satisfied with the progress I am making in Passive Income Experiment blog. On the other hand, my purpose is to create some sort of passive income strems and this is the part I have to put most of my effort in the month to come. I wrote about the reasons why things are not going forward with the right pace here. Nothing crucial though.

So here is the master plan for June:

1. keyword research tool (I really need one for different experiments and also for all the content I created and will create)
2. niche keyword (the basis for starting new experiment)
3. new domain (based on niche keyword)
4. setting up a new website (I guess I will start with Amazon Affiliate site built around selected niche keyword)
5. filling a website with quality and unique content

As you can see all the above points are oriented away from this blog. I think this is the right thing to do since this blog is not ment to be my main source of passive income. Its purpose is to document everything I do for my future reference and hopefully to help beginner webmasters on their way to success. But don’t worry. I will not leave it as it is now. One article per week is my minimum requirement for it and I am sure I can easily achieve this goal.

Financial report (May 2015)

Nothing going on in this section of “Income and activity report #1 – May 2015”. I expected that so you don’t have to be dissapointed either 🙂 For now I will not bother creating fancy tables because I have almost nothing to fill it in with. The only item is of course on the expenditure side and that is the fee for hosting. I bought two year hosting plan at Arvixe which I had to pay fully in advance. Calculated on mothly basis the cost for hosting is 3,2$. Since I got the domain for this blog free of charge this is it.

Total income: 0,00$

Total expenses: 3,20$

Net profit/loss: -3,20$