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.

June 2009 earnings report

July 2009 earnings report

Here are the guidelines I established to offer you meaningful numbers without having to bore you with too much accounting:

1. 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!
2. DungeonMastering.com costs me $400 / month in outsourcing, web hosting, advertising, and other fees like aweber, e-junkie, paypal, D&DI – yes, that’s a business expense! – etc. (yep, that’s less expenses than July – I’m keeping that story for next month though)

August 09 earnings:

• Dungeon Mastering Tools memberships revenue: $364.75
• Advertising revenue: $99.17
• Affiliate revenue: 98.87
• Freelancing revenue: $750.00
• Total: $1,212.79

The advertising donut

I was 3 days removed from getting a big fat zero in the advertising category. That’s the problem with the advertising model – ad revenue is unreliable.  Had I been relying on ad money to pay the bills, I would have been screwed.

Alternatives to ad revenue

The freelancing opportunity I got was directly related to my Dungeon Mastering work. I might not be the best writer, but I have the best D&D blog out there (at least I believe so) so WotC offered me to write a few pages of a book that’s coming out soon. I did the writing a few months ago, but only got to cash the check this month – that’s another lesson I learned: never underestimate the red tape a bank can come up with.

I have mentioned before that the DM tools service is a monthly membership website that allows me to make accurate projections of income. I didn’t sell as many yearly memberships this month as I did in the previous months – they make the final number look bigger, but monthly accounts are the foundation for my projections. So all in all, an ok month, even though the revenue is not as impressive as June or July.

New Dungeon Mastering project

Dungeon Mastering also has a new project under way: Dungeon Mastering Press. Work has started on a first ebook product line. No publication date yet, but it’s only a matter of a few weeks before we come out with the first product. I learned a lot from Johnn Four on how to write books in the past 3 months. I’m following the writing and marketing concepts behind the Gamer Lifestyle program so I know Dungeon Mastering Press will be a great success.

By the way, I’m open to name suggestions for the publishing branch of Dungeon Mastering. Any ideas?