To help others, you have to help yourself first
The Gamer Lifestyle program is all about helping others craft a better life for themselves. We hope to help many gamers and entrepreneurs to create a reliable revenue stream from their hobby. Someone pointed out that it’s difficult for anyone to know how seriously they can take our advice on making money from RPGs, since there’s now way to know how well we’re doing ourselves.
So I decided to share my DungeonMastering.com earnings every month, starting in June 2009.
September 2009 earnings report
Here are the guidelines I established to offer you meaningful numbers without having to bore you with too much accounting:
- I only log revenue that is deposited in my Paypal or bank account. If I sell a third party product, the payment is often delayed 15 to 60 days. Until then, it only helps to do projections, not pay the bills!
- DungeonMastering.com costs me $450 / month in outsourcing, web hosting, advertising, and other fees like aweber, e-junkie, paypal, D&DI – yes, that’s a business expense! – etc.
October 09 earnings:
- Dungeon Mastering Tools memberships revenue: $371.00
- Advertising revenue: $0
- Affiliate revenue: $175.60
- Book sales: $372.88
- Total: $919.48
Book sales are #1 revenue stream for the second consecutive month
I’m really happy with this since 100% of my book sales setup is built on the Gamer Lifestyle model – it’s the exact setup we teach in our coaching program. Keep in mind that Johnn was the writing and publishing expert in Gamer Lifestyle. I had marketing, business systems, and web technology expertise. So combining our areas of expertise and being able to phase out the unreliable advertising and creating a more regular, reliable revenue stream in less than 3 months is very rewarding.
Changes to payment processing
I switched all my payment processing to e-junkie. It’s the best I’ve seen. It integrates with Paypal so I get all payments straight into my PayPal account. The only drawback is that they do not support PayPal recurring subscription payments. So I’m temporarily testing the Dungeon Mastering Tools membership as a one-time payment subscription instead of monthly. Since I had issues with retention, a one-time payment of $45 might end up outperforming the $10/month pricing previously in place.