May 2018 Monthly Report – Disappeared for One Year!

Hi guys! As most of you might have known, I’ve been away for quite some time.

It’s not because I’ve quit blogging, in a downfall or anything like that (Some people actually asked if I was okay), but rather I was up with one of the biggest projects of my life.

Due to the overwhelming commitment I have to go through, I managed to pull through and started my own shop that I’ve been mentioning about since last year.

It took a whole lot of my time but now that have some time to myself for this new year, it’s storytelling time…

 

My Stats This Entire Time

Now I know a lot of you have waited months for me to unveil how much I earn from my businesses and I apologize for the delay but today, you are going to have not a monthly post but rather a yearly one.

The last time I wrote a Monthly Report was back on March 2017 and from that moment, a lot has happened so instead of sharing the monthly version one by one, I’ll post an overview statistics of the entire year…

47,961 website visitors for the entire year!

To be honest, I’ve never actually looked at my site progress for the year so I’m just as surprised as you are.

Some blogs can get 50k web visitors in a month, some can achieve that in a week, and the big guys get that amount of view per content that they publish which is the dream of all bloggers.

Looking back at when my site was first built and I was still struggling to type fast let alone learn how to use this WordPress dashboard, I only had about 5 web visitors a day.

I remember my energy of writing at that time was phenomenal – I wrote one piece of content worth 1,000 words at least every single day for a month just to get my site up to 20 site visits a day.

It was a slow progress but month after month it grew exponentially and as you can see from the blog statistics, it still remained constant and healthy for 2017 even after I stopped writing since March 2017.

It sustained but not for long though, a blog lives only because of content that it has because without it, it is only a name. An empty husk.

Without content, it will still be there but at the same time it will also drop down in visibility slowly.

Today on average though, I get about 50 – 60 visitors a day and it still remains constant even after so long not writing anything on my blog. This is proof that all we need to push our blogs further is to simply… write content, simple as that.

I was having healthy growth but I had to stop for a while as I just started a new business venture with a physical store too called Kitamen Shah Alam and it took a bit more of my time than I expected.

But now that things have finally picked up, I’m ready to start creating content again starting with this one that you’re reading which is the first one in a year! Yaay!

Okay let’s jump to a more interesting part…

 

Finally, Time to Gauge How Much I Earn Annually!

Unlike the previous month where I share screenshots of each sale I make per day every end of the month, I’ll just do a simplified one here…

April 2017 – $154

May 2017 – $270

June 2017 – $270

July 2017 – $254.50

August 2017 – $277.50

September 2017 – $647.50

October 2017 – $307.50

November 2017 – $541.50

December 2017 – $208

January 2018 – $230.50

February 2018 – $184

March 2018 – $228

April 2018 – $141.50

May 2018 – $129.50

And these sales are only for Wealthy Affiliate, which is my number one recommended program that I promote here on my blog.

If you’ve never heard of WA before, it is an Online Business platform which has everything you need to succeed online from evergreen training, to the technical stuff such as domains and webhosting.

As you can see from the sales above, it increases nicely last year in 2017 and eventually decreases as I have not written anything at all for the entire year.

Besides My Internet Quest, I also have two more businesses that I manage – Kamira Event Management which is a corporate event organizer and Kitamen Shah Alam which is an eSports slash gaming hub.

I would love to share the progression with these brick and mortar businesses of mine but due to Malaysian law, I can’t post how much revenue I earn here yet as the government will definitely find a reason to get more money from me.

Revenues aside, I am starting to experience an increment every month and I pay myself a salary of RM4,000 which is about USD1,000 more or less every month so in case any of you are wondering how I manage my financials, you can get an idea from what I do here.

Still, it’s better if I just show progression for his blog which can mean only one thing… I’ve got to start writing content again. Can’t wait!

 

Things That Happened

The story of me being missing away from my blog has gotten a lot of questions from most people around me so I’ll try to make it short and sweet…

I Finally Opened My Shop!

The last time I actually wrote a blog post was months ago and if some of you actually read through them, you might have remembered the part where I constantly blabber about opening up my own shop.

I finally did go through that and it’s called Kitamen Shah Alam.

It’s a gaming hub where we not only focus on gaming, but also on event rentals, eSport tournaments, and teaching technopreneurs on how to open up their own gaming businesses as well.

If you’ve never heard of the term technopreneur before, it basically refers gamers or just about anyone who creates a living in the gaming business – Through means like creating gaming classes, creating apps, or basically anything related to technology.

Kitamen is also not just a random name, it derives from the Malay word Kita Main which literally translates to “we play” in English and as for Shah Alam, well that’s just the name of the city I live in.

Things are going smooth, we became the number one eSports center in the city until one day, I started having…

Problems With My Shareholder

Shareholders can sometimes be a blessing for a company, or a curse.

I didn’t open Kitamen Shah Alam alone, it was with a partner because I didn’t think I can do everything on my own and plus, the capital was immensely high (A whopping RM100k if you’re curious) so I just had to divide it with someone I trust to lessen the burden.

We were the dynamic duo and things were easy to handle because he always had my back and I covered the shop whenever he wasn’t around.

All the way until he needed money and started pressuring me after the 3^rd month to pay back his full share.

I have my own debts too but it’s not cool to bring personal problems into business.

I was too occupied with my other problems not to mention overlooking the shop’s growth because he was rarely around so when he did that, it pisses me off and I lost all my respect for him.

Our shop was doing amazingly well but it was stagnant as I can’t carry out all the ideas on the events that we could do.

We then had a talk and discussed that the best way to settle his debt is by selling his share which brought us to the next good thing…

Two New Partners, yaay!

Would you believe that sometimes good things are right under our noses?

The most amazing thing happened when one of our staff Boboi stepped up and decided to buy Azwan’s share just like that.

Everyone was surprised as to how a simple game store manager can afford that kind of cost – I mean we’re talking half of the shop’s share!

It turns out that Boboi have been saving his money for a while and throughout his time managing the store all these while!

He discovered that the potential to bring our business to the top, is right within our grasp and he wanted to make that a reality.

But he didn’t buy all of my previous partner’s share though, just a portion of it.

The next portion was covered by his friend Ali and the remaining extra was covered by me.

Amazing how things turn out when you persevere and that’s not the end, I’m still planning on starting…

My Own Marketing Course!

There comes a time when you need to share your success methods to others.

Except for me, my competitors kept on increasing in number after they’ve seen the events I’ve covered, the crowd I pull in, and the impacts I’ve made.

As we grow, others start to recognize us – Students started interviewing us, companies started calling us up for equipment rentals and a lot of event planners wanted to use our service.

When initially there were 3 Gaming Hubs in my area, now there are eight and plus just the other day, I’ve heard that two more are planning to open up this year.

That means that there is gong to be 10 hubs very nearby to each other!

Esports is slowly rising in Malaysia but the problem remains the same – There are not many players here to accommodate for those hubs.

We’re working on it, but we’re not there yet.

So what happens when there are too many gaming hubs in one location? Each hub had to share the crowd which means that the more the number of hubs that open, the lesser the customers they get if they all clumped together in one area.

For me personally, I’ve expected this which is why compared to normal outlets which have only 3 forms of income, mine has 8 so I don’t really worry much as I focus more on events than waiting for people to come to my shop.

Sometimes, the best way to boost your business is by outreaching – Going outside of your comfort zone and looking for ways to promote your business. For example, organizing tournaments, and providing rental solution.

As the demand keeps on increasing, I began to receive calls from a lot of people asking just how I do it – Hence the idea to start my own Online Marketing class.

I’m so psyched about this!

A lot of people have been asking but the one factor that really pushed me into starting this commitment is that some universities have started contacting me too about the very same thing.

They wanted me to provide a coaching module for their students on a 12-month basis. Talk about Whoa!

I Met Derek Marshall!

If you’re a fellow Wealthy Affiliate member, chances are you might have heard of Derek.

He’s a cheerful Online Marketer from Scotland who I met at WA over 3 years ago and we’ve been sharing tips on how to grow our businesses ever since.

If you’ve never heard of WA, it’s an Online Business platform which has everything you need to succeed online – From website builders and keyword research tool, all the way to the evergreen lessons to teach you how as well as the friendly community it comes with.

It has people from all over the world who share one goal as you – To create a blog and monetize it according to any niche you like.

Although I’ve finished the lessons a long time ago, I still maintain my membership to help other new members grow and to show other people that the lessons work and I am able to build other businesses too using the core methods they teach you there.

Derek is the first WA member who came to KL so I brought him around and showed him around my area so he got to see the Malaysian way of life.

We do have tall buildings in the city (Unlike what many foreigners think) but fancy restaurants on the other hand, are only for extremely special occasions so I couldn’t bring him to one. Which is good though, because I got to show him some of our delicious street food 😀

It was very cool knowing that he likes travelling and trying out food from different cultures.

I tried doing what he did but I can’t eat anything spicy, I can’t eat anything with too much cheese, and I definitely can’t eat when the weather is burning hot and I’m sweating lol.

Stories aside, we shared a lot about how to improve our sites and if it was’t for Derek taunting me with how far his website has gone, I would have never had the initiative to write a post like this again.

Thanks for the motivational words bro, really needed that!

Hey Look, its Roope Kiuttu!

Just like Derek, Roope is also another member of Wealthy Affiliate.

He’s living the internet lifestyle and he travels all over the world while he works on his blog, churning magnificent content wherever he goes.

On one of his stops, I got to meet him here in Malaysia and managed to share a lot on our progresses, though time is something we were lacking of.

He was here for 2 weeks but I guess it was wrong timing for me as I had two events happening on both weeks so I was quite held up.

We both started our entrepreneurship journey at WA and that’s where I met him.

That is, until I went for into the brick and mortar business to test my skills by implementing the awesome Online Marketing tricks I learned whereas Roope pursues the full Online Business to master it fully.

As you can see, at WA whether you want to start a new business or grow an existing one, the lessons you learn there will get you through anything because once you’re done with the classes, you’ll understand how the algorithms work in search engines.

Anyway, it was great to meet a fellow member – I brought him around to try some Malaysian cuisines, see some places and even got him some souvenirs from my shop.

If you guys were to drop by here in Malaysia, do say hi and I’ll be more than happy to show you around too!

 

Final Word

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While I am making something positive sales-wise, I can’t say the same growth-wise.

A lot has changed within a year especially SEO-wise if you leave your site unattended like mine but sometimes it’s a necessary step that we need to take in order to restructure everything again for the better.

Managing a blog knowing that your audience worldwide is exciting but the real challenge, is building a new site for a new business with new grounds you are not familiar with like how I did with Kitamen Shah Alam.

I’m thrilled to see how it goes and I’ll definitely find time to write my progress as I go.