Monthly Income Report - February 2018

Let's start with what happened for the second month of this year. On the business side, I mainly worked on improving the visitor & customer experience on my personal website but also on my main niche websites. For example, I redesigned the welcome emails that are sent after someone buys one of my products, to make sure that the person is nicely welcomed on my site and has all the instructions to use the product. I did this because I want my customers to have the best experience possible, and this will also help customer retention on the long term.

I also grew my team by hiring another virtual assistant to help me with my everyday tasks. With quite ambitious business goals this year, but also a lot of personal projects, I am realising more than ever that time is the most precious asset you have, and you have to do everything you can to expand it, for example by hiring to do the tasks you shouldn't do yourself. I am now applying this mindset in everything I do, both business wise and in my personal tasks, and it already helped me out tremendously as I can now focus on higher-level tasks.

The main event in February was of course my visit at the Traffic & Conversion Summit in San Diego. Just like last year, it was awesome and I learned a ton, and also met a lot of interesting entrepreneurs from all around the world. I am currently planning a series of articles & Youtube videos to give you the best of what I learned there, but here is in a nutshell what were the main teachings from this conference, that you can definitely think about if you have an online business or are thinking about starting one:

1. Conversations are the new leads: the goal is not anymore to get an email address and to sell something, but really to have a conversation with people interested in your business
2. Communities are the new brands: a brand is not defined by a website or by what it sells, but by its audience 
3. The customer is the new power broker: brands should be customer-centric rather than product-centric like in the past

I am still thinking every day about those three main points, and how I can implement the right changes in my niche websites, my SaaS applications and also on this site to propose a much better experience for my audience.

On the investing side, I continued to invest on the Housers platform, to diversify my real estate crowdfunding portfolio. I am still looking at possible investments on other platforms (especially in real estate), so I'll for sure report on my website as soon as I invest on a new platform.

A month similar to January - which is good knowing that I spent some time traveling and away from the business.

In March, I will mainly be working on what I learned at the Traffic & Conversion Summit, as it's still fresh on my mind. This will mean a lot of work on my all-in-one business platform SiteEngine, that will need to receive a lot of modifications in order to implement some things that I learned at the conference. I also want to compile what I learned at the conference and give it back to you in the form of blog posts and Youtube videos, to give you the best of what I learned there.

On the investing side, I will mainly re-invest in real estate crowdfunding, as it's a field where my current portfolio is still lacking.