2007 was my first full year running Bingo Card Creator, and I had impressive growth over last year (about a factor of four on both profits and sales, looking at my last tax return).  I hit my major goal for the year, $10,000 in sales, and see bright things in my future.

 Obligatory disclaimer: Don’t audit these numbers too seriously.  I haven’t given them the full once-over to make sure nothing is double-counted, etc.  (Although I do expect my Schedule C to resemble the following to a major degree.)

Sales: 406, including 116 CDs

Gross Income: $10,375 + ~$200 in various currencies = ~$10,500

Expenses:  $4,280

AdWords: $1,724

Freelancers for Daily Bingo Cards: $570

Hosting & Domains: $600  (Largely because I prepaid about a year at Slicehost, and use one server more than necessary there for putzing about with.  Cheap at twice the price and service is fantastic.)

SwiftCD: $550

The rest: CrazyEgg, e-junkie (best $55 spent for the second year in a row — they gave me a month free to apologize for some issues one week), one-time software purchases, and the like.  I don’t count Internet connection, laptop, or anything as I would be purchasing it anyhow.

Profit: ~$6,200 ****</p>

Rough estimate of wage per hour worked: ~$60  (beats my day job — substantially)

OK, enough about the money.  How about the website stats:

Bingo Card Creator

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Visits : 140,488

Unique Visitors: 123,167

Page Views: 311,184

(Both of the following are from Google Analytics, which typically only counts about 60% of my sales conversions, so don’t trust them as gospel.)

Trial Downloads: 17,831

Confirmed Downloads: 5,846

 Daily Bingo Cards (keep in mind, only open 3 months):

Visits: 6,828

Unique Visitors: 6,022

Pageviews: 17,326

Bingo Card Files Downloaded (a precise count — yay Rails): 2,859

Big Wins for this year:

1)  Continuous improvement at very boring things, like web page design and on-page SEO.

2)  Continuing to provide great customer service

3)  Launching Daily Bingo Cards.  I think it will double my sales, eventually.

4)  Conversion Optimizer, which has made my AdWords campaigns much more effective than my manual tweaking ever did, while decreasing greatly the time I spent fooling with them when I could be doing stuff that mattered.  I was so successful with this that Google decided to write me up.  More on that later.

5)  Blogging.  At least when I manage to do it.  Besides the fact that it opens up great opportunities for me, like the above Google case study and (at last count) eight job offers, it is one of the reasons I’m able to collect legitimate links in a field where most of the customers do not possess the web savvy to link by themselves.

Goals for 2008:

$20,000 in sales (might have to revise that to $25,000 later — I want it to be a challenge)

Seeing Daily Bingo Cards be as successful as I know it can be

Releasing a new product

Restructuring my net-presence so that there is a dedicated Bingo Card Creator blog, at least