Connect with us

2019 year end review – a really great year passed!

miscellaneous

2019 year end review – a really great year passed!

To be honest, I really enjoy writing year-end reviews. It allows me to reflect on what went well during the year that passes, what could have been better, and what great stuff could the future bring. I can say that, as a whole, 2019 was a really great year for me and also for my company. As you might know, if you already read my 2018 year in review post, my main source of revenue is coming from creating WordPress plugins, and selling them on CodeCanyon.

To sum this year up, I expanded my plugin development business by creating more WordPress plugins (hopefully useful ones), I diversified my earnings by creating also an online course which I published on Udemy and SkillShare (and some other platforms), I grown my YouTube channel, started up some niche websites that were created using my plugins (with AdSense enabled), grew my website and my blog (added a member-only section to it, with premium content), boosted my affiliate marketing efforts, and not least to mention, met lots of new and interesting people, which I have befriended.

 

So let’s see what happened in 2019:

2019 review post

 

1. CodeRevolution on CodeCanyon

In 2019, I released 14 WordPress plugins, growing my total portfolio to 103 plugins (most of them are autoblogging plugins and auto publishers to different social media sites). I managed to create only 14 plugins this year (vs 19 from 2018), because in the beginning of 2019, I spent almost 3 months to update all my plugins that I had back then (90+ plugins), to be compliant with the new ‘Envato Quality Requirements’. As a result of this work, I got the ‘WP Requirements Compliant‘ badge to my Envato profile. I resumed creating new plugins only in April 2019.

I also updated older plugins, making them compatible with the latest released WordPress version 5.0. I added Gutenberg support to all of my plugins. I also like to keep my plugins fully functional with the latest WordPress version that is released, because of this, recently I made some updates to my plugins, to work with the recently released WordPress version 5.3. I also added new functionality to my older plugins, and even brought some of them back from death – like in case of Eventomatic or Yummomatic (which had some major API changes).

Also, in January 2019, I became an ‘Elite Author’ on CodeCanyon, thus lowering Envato’s commission for each sale I generate, to the minimum. Since then (in November), I reached also ‘Elite Author Level 2’ (for generating more than 125k$ in sales). Check this cool page, where Envato presents the Elite Author levels and the bonuses they offer for reaching them.

Regarding the number of generated sales, CodeRevolution has grown to over 4.8k customers (up 1.8k from last year), great majority of whom love and appreciate my plugins (and I have to thank them for this). This can be seen by the overwhelming number of 5 star reviews that my plugins got during this year.

CodeCanyon plugin ratings

My goal for 2020 is to create even more new plugins, that will benefit the people that are using them, even more. Also, the second goal is to increase the revenue that my plugins generate and to keep them up to date and maintained.

2. Plugin Support

2019 was though when it comes to plugin support I offered to my customers. For example, to my primary email address I received 24751 emails (where I handle the main part of plugin support + other people can contact me).  To these emails, I replied 8543 times – this is much lower than the number of received emails, because I get a notification email each time somebody makes a comment of any of my plugins on CodeCanyon, and I respond directly in the item’s comment’s section from Envato (not by email) – because of this, when I respond to a comment from any of my plugins, it is not counted as a response email. I estimate that I responded to 10k-11k comments on Envato, so this number can be added to the 8.5k reply emails to get the final support work for this year.

Plugin support can be an exhausting job, but it is the key for the 5 star reviews that my plugins receive.

To make things easier, this year I also created a support forum site and a knowledge base site, that aid my customers in solving issues that they might face during the usage of my plugins.

My goal for 2020 in terms of support, is to hire a new team member, to help me deliver quality support to my customers.

3. Site Stats (coderevolution.ro)

In 2019, this site has seen very steady and satisfying growth since it’s launch from May 2018. I’m very happy with the numbers.

website stats 2019

At the time of writing of this post, 23,789 different people visited the site in 2019, with 30,268 visits total. There were 60,479 page views and an average of 2 page views per visit.

Only 10% of the site visitors were returning visitors (I think that’s good).

The most visited pages on the site were all detail pages for some of my more popular plugins, with Newsomatic being the most popular from them all, and Echo RSS taking the second place.

My primary goal for 2020 will be to pass 100,000 page views on the site in a single year.

4. Blog Posting Stats

In 2019, I published a whopping 180 new posts on my blog (the number amazes me also). Besides these, there were also 49 member only posts (for the membership part of this site).

A goal for 2020, is to keep these numbers up, and to publish at least the same amount of content to this blog, as in 2019.

5. YouTube Channel Videos

In 2019 I started focusing on my YouTube channel, and started growing it. This year alone, I published 224 YouTube videos to my channel. The published content consists mainly of tutorial videos for my plugins and videos where I teach how to handle different aspects of an online business, or how to earn an online income.

In the last quarter of the year, my goal was to publish one video a day, which I did successfully. As a result, my channel gained 560 subscribers (now at 926 subscribers). I am very close to reaching the 1000 subscriber goal, I set in my mind a while ago. After reaching 1000 subscribers, I will enable monetization on my channel.

youtube channel stats 2019 coderevolution

For 2020, my goal is to reach 3500 subscribers on my YouTube channel and to increase my brand awareness using it.

6. Niche Sites

In 2019 I created multiple websites (monetized using AdSense or using affiliate marketing). Check the list here:

And continued to grow also my other older sites, especially https://wpinitiate.com – where I put more effort into growth.

AdSense runs pretty well on these sites, also affiliate marketing works well on them.

As a goal for 2020, I want to grow the above sites even more, and maybe create some new ones (if I will see some new niche opportunities emerge).

If you want to learn more about niche sites and how to create them, join the membership section of this site, where you can learn more on this subject.

7. Online Courses

In 2019, I created my first video course called “The Great Affiliate Program List Course”, and published it on Udemy, SkillShare and some other smaller online course marketplaces. I really enjoyed creating the course, I really had much fun during it’s creating.

For 2020, my goal is to create at least another 2 online courses, and to publish them on the above marketplaces.

8. Other Events from 2019

There were also other stuff that happened this year. I made a campaign against COPPA, fought Article 13 and found bugs in WordPress (and many more lesser stuff that happened, not worth mentioning here).

9. Summing Up the Goals for 2020

Usually, I try to avoid setting major year-long goals and instead, I prefer to focus on smaller, more short-term goals that I can more easily measure and achieve. So, 2020 should come with the following achievements:

  1. Raise overall revenue for plugins from CodeCanyon, by creating new plugins and updating current ones. Support must be maintained as a 5 star service.
  2. Hire a new support team member, to help solve issues that customers encounter.
  3. Grow my websites and continue to monetize them. Build new niche sites and start monetizing them.
  4. Continue growing my YouTube channel and start monetizing it.
  5. Create new online courses, to continue diversifying my online income streams.
  6. Keep delivering a pleasant experience to all my past and future customers. 🙂

10. And The Most Important of All

No matter how much money is made or spent, how many plugins are written, none of it will ever be more important than my daughter, family and friends.

Thank you for your time reading my review of the year 2019. Cheers to years past and those yet to come 🍻!

 

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in miscellaneous

About Me:

Szabi Kisded

Hey there, I'm Szabi. At 30 years old, I quit my IT job and started my own business and became a full time WordPress plugin developer, blogger and stay-at-home dad. Here I'm documenting my journey earning an online (semi)passive income. Read more

Sign up for my newsletter and get the YouTube Caption Scraper WordPress plugin for free
(worth 29$)!

All My Plugins In A Bundle:

My AutoBlogging Plugins:

My Online Courses:

A Theme I Recommend:

Featured Posts:

To Top